Editor's Note for September 2025 Networker

I open with the news that is on the minds of all SEHN folks—staff and board, past and present: On September 13, 2025, Fred Kirschenmann, 90, died. Long married to our executive director Carolyn Raffensperger, Fred is regularly described as a giant in the many fields he touched. As recalled in one of the first online tributes (there will be many), while presenting Fred with one of the many accolades he received during his extraordinary life, Dan Barber described him “as a great man with incomparable intellect and humility, who has done ‘more to affect farming and good flavor than just about anybody else.’” The Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future writes that Fred was a “national and international leader in the sustainable agriculture movement… a pioneering organic farmer, a North Dakota rancher, a professor, a prolific writer, a philosopher, a champion of agricultural resilience, and an eloquent advocate for soil health.” Marion Nestle says in her own tribute, Fred “described himself as a farmer-philosopher, and so he was.” We will have more to share next month. For now, I know our readers—many of whom had the honor of working with Fred or crossing paths in some way—join us in extending our deepest condolences to Carolyn, and Fred and Carolyn’s family and friends.  

We continue to learn and educate about the environmental and community health impacts of the new generation of industrial sites coming into communities, especially with regard to water. Last month we featured a contributed article by a long-time water protector here in the Finger Lakes region of New York, addressing a cryptocurrency “mining” plant on Seneca Lake, operating with expired permits. Soon thereafter, we got an update on an old coal-fired plant site on neighboring Cayuga Lake that Sandra Steingraber and I worked to prevent from becoming a new, gas-fired power plant, years ago. Now plans are moving forward for it to become “a high-powered data center.”  Like the crypto plant, it would require massive amounts of water withdrawn from the lake. This month we provide a resource that we hope will help guide concerned individuals and communities confronted with proposed data centers or carbon capture and storage projects in their regions: 13 questions through which to approach information gathering on the project’s “water footprint.”

Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence, traveled recently to the area known as the Permian Basin in West Texas on a three-day fact-finding tour. Her column this month is required reading if we want to understand the horrifying extent to which drilling and fracking has dominated and poisoned a vast landscape—a “chaotic industrialization”—and the degree to which the oil industry works to try to control the public’s perception of this industry and this place. 

When we look for depth, insight, and new strategic thinking in these very trying times, we find it! In this edition of our newsletter, each of our staff members has a recommendation of something to read or listen to. Several take a step back for a broad view of the state of democracy and governance at this moment in history, which is, of course, the context for our work in science, public health, and the environment. We also recommend two stories about notable resourcefulness and collaboration in the face of harsh attacks on science, as well as a reminder of “commonplace miracles,” in the form of a poem.

Warmly,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, Editor