Ecologist, biologist, cancer survivor, and author extraordinaire Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized authority on the environmental links to cancer and human health.  When she delivered the keynote address on September 8th in Philadelphia at the Freedom from Fracking conference, 75 of her listeners approached her immediately asking for a link to listen to her vivid, compelling talk again.  Here it is.

The week after she gave this speech, Steingraber won the prestigious Heinz Award for her work as an environmental and public health champion and chose to dedicate the monetary award specifically to work against fracking in her home state of New York.

During this keynote address, Steingraber ranges scientifically from environmentally caused illnesses in general to contaminants from high-volume hydraulic fracturing processes in particular to the “deep life,” biological life-forms living deep in the shale which scientists are just beginning to understand. These forms of deep life are killed by the biocides in fracking fluid. Lyrically, her range is also broad and includes an original poem which held the room spellbound.

Thanks to independent journalist Kirsi Jansa for enabling us to share this brilliant speech with a broader audience.  Sandra Steingraber’s condensed biography is below, for those who’d like to know a little more about her.

Sandra Steingraber wrote this:

“Emancipation from our terrible enslavement to fossil fuels is possible. The best science shows us that the United States could, within two decades, entirely run on green, renewable energy if we chose to dedicate ourselves to that course [1]. But, right now, that is not the trail we are blazing.

Instead, evermore extreme and toxic methods are being deployed to blast fossilized carbon from the earth. We are blowing up mountains to get at coal, felling boreal forests to get at tar, and siphoning oil from the ocean deep. Most ominously, through the process called fracking, we are shattering the very bedrock of our nation to get at the petrified bubbles of methane trapped inside.

Fracking turns fresh water into poison. It fills our air with smog, our roadways with 18-wheelers hauling hazardous materials, and our fields and pastures with pipelines and toxic pits“.