“In service to communities, the Earth and future generations, the Science & Environmental Health Network forges Science, Ethics and Law into tools for Action.”
Our History
SEHN was founded in 1994 by a consortium of North American environmental organizations (including the Environmental Defense Fund, The Environmental Research Foundation, and OMB Watch) concerned about the misuse of science in ways that failed to protect the environment and human health. Granted 501(c)(3) status in 1999, SEHN operates as a virtual organization, currently with five staff and six board members working from locations across the U.S.
Since 1998, SEHN has been the leading proponent in the United States of the Precautionary Principle as a new basis for environmental and public health policy. SEHN has worked with issue driven organizations, national environmental health coalitions, municipal and state governments, and several NGO/government teams to implement precautionary policies at local and state levels.
Mission
In service to communities, the Earth and future generations, the Science and Environmental Health Network forges law, ethics, and science into tools for action.
Vision
Fulfilling our responsibility to govern ourselves and our communities wisely, to create and sustain a just and healthy world now and for future generations.
The Network:
SEHN accomplishes its mission by:
Translating law and science for the public and decision-makers.
Providing the scientific and legal tools needed to protect and restore justice and ecological wholeness.
Serving environmental, public health and environmental justice coalitions and grassroots campaigns with legal and scientific expertise.
Lifting up women’s voices and leadership to address the challenges before us.
Get in touch
Our Team: Staff and Board Members
SEHN operates as an organization without walls; SEHN’s staff works from locations across North America.
Executive Director
Carolyn Raffensperger, M.A., J.D.
Carolyn is executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. She has an M.A. in Archaeology and a J.D.
While working as an archaeologist in the desert Southwest of the U.S., she was enchanted by the beauty of the landscape and horrified at the environmental threats posed by dams, mining and toxic waste disposal. She left archaeology to work for the Sierra Club in Illinois. The desire to protect the rivers, prairie and desert led her to law school. Her graduate school training in archaeology and her law school education provide the tools Carolyn needs to serve her clients—the future generations of all species.
Carolyn co-convened the 1998 Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle and the 2012, 2014 and 2016 Women’s Congresses for Future Generations.
Carolyn is co-editor of Precautionary Tools for Reshaping Environmental Policy published by M.I.T. Press (2006) and Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, published by Island Press (1999).
Science Director
Ted Schettler, M.D., M.P.H
Ted, SEHN’s Science Director, received his MD from Case-Western Reserve University and a masters degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He practiced medicine for many years in New England.
Ted has worked extensively with community groups and non-governmental organizations throughout the US and internationally, addressing many aspects of human health and the environment. He has served on advisory committees of the US EPA and National Academy of Sciences.
Ted is co-author of Generations at Risk: Reproductive Health and the Environment, which examines reproductive and developmental health effects of exposure to a variety of environmental toxicants. He is also co-author of In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, which discusses the impact of environmental exposures on neurological development in children, and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging: With a Closer Look at Alzheimer’ and Parkinson’s Diseases. In 2013, The Ecology of Breast Cancer: The promise of Prevention and the Hope for Healing was released. Ted has published numerous articles in the medical literature, and is frequently quoted in the popular press.
Among many others, Ted’s current projects include serving on the advisory committee of the Collaborative for Health and Environment (CHE) and science advisor to the Health Care Without Harm coalition, contributing to its international campaign to improve the environmental performance of hospitals and other healthcare institutions. Ted works with colleagues from other organizations and maintains an active speaking schedule, giving talks on various aspects of environmental public health.
He lives in Bolinas, CA
Finance Director
Sherri Seidmon
Sherri joined the SEHN Staff in January 2005 as Finance Director. Sherri has a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Illinois. Her background includes working in banking for many years as well as co-owning a family restaurant. Sherri is in charge of SEHN’s bookkeeping and budgets, donor database, development research, as well as managing our websites.
She lives in Eugene Oregon.
CHPNY Program Director
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
Carmi Orenstein joined SEHN in June 2021. She received her Masters of Public Health from UCLA and her bachelors in Environmental Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has cross-disciplinary experience translating and applying science to elucidate and act on health risks, with particular subject expertise in environmental and occupational health. She has led collaborative projects tailored to diverse professional and public audiences and has recognized curatorial and outreach skills in the science, environmental health, and social justice realms. She was health educator with the Cornell University Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors for the decade and a half lifespan of the program, serving as the program’s assistant director for much of that time, and subsequently consulted for a range of breast cancer risk reduction and environmental health projects. Having written her undergraduate thesis on offshore oil development, she came full circle when she began to focus her work on the public health, environmental and climate impacts of the oil and gas industry, particularly fracking. As part of this focus, she co-founded Concerned Health Professionals of New York in 2010, a program she now directs within SEHN. CHPNY played a significant role in the campaign to ban fracking in New York State and continues its work compiling and amplifying the science documenting the risks and harms of fracking and its infrastructure, as well as those arising from the continued use of fossil fuels. CHPNY has provided assistance to frontline communities worldwide. Since June 2022, Carmi serves as editor of SEHN’s monthly newsletter, the Networker.
Senior Scientist
Sandra Steingraber, PhD
Biologist and writer Sandra Steingraber holds a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Michigan. She is the author of a trilogy of award-winning books on environmental health: Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (adapted as a documentary film in 2010); Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood; and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. Throughout, she calls parents and cancer patients alike to political action. Steingraber’s honors for her work as researcher and science writer include the Rachel Carson Leadership Award, the American Ethical Union’s Elliot-Black Award, and, in 2011, the Heinz Award. By donating the Heinz cash prize to the anti-fracking movement, she became, in 2012, a co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking, a statewide coalition of hundreds of grassroots organizations that helped win a statewide ban on fracking in 2015. The 2018 documentary film Unfractured told the story of New York State’s fracking ban, featuring Steingraber as its subject. A contributing essayist and advisor for Orion magazine, Steingraber served, from 2003-2021 as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.
Board Members
Board of Directors, 2024
Benno Friedman, Photographer/ Activist, Sheffield, MA.
Madeleine Scammell, President, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health
Peter Montague, Journalist/Historian, New Brunswick, N.J.
Rebecca Gasior Altman, Treasurer, Writer/Sociologist, Providence, RI.
Charlie Cray, Political & Business Strategist at Greenpeace , Washington, DC.
Jade Woods, Louisiana CCS Campaigner, CIEL, Baton Rouge, LA.
Previous Board Members:
Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director, Indigenous Environmental Network. Bemidji, MN
Angie Carter, Assistant Professor, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI
David Wallinga, Senior Health Officer, NRDC
Elise Miller, MEd, Director, Collaborative on Health and the Environment, Founder and Former Executive Director, Institute for Children’s Environmental Health
Freeland, WA
Frank Peterman, Southeast Regional Director, The Wilderness Society, Atlanta, GA
Lois N. Epstein, P.E. Director, Alaska Transportation Priorities Project
Martha Dina Arguello, Executive Director, Health and Environment Programs, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles, CA
Roxanne Turnage, Executive Director, C.S. Fund, Freestone, CA
Sandra Steingraber, Board Member Emeritus Visiting Distinguished Scholar, Ithaca College, Interdisciplinary Studies, Ithaca, N.Y. Author of Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, and Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood.
Steve Lester, Science Director, Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, Falls Church, VA
Dianne Dumanoski, Author, Newton, MA.
Bhavna Shamasunder, Board Member Emeritus, Associate Professor, Urban & Environmental Policy, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA.