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I write from Ithaca, New York, where I live alongside Cornell University, a large university in a small city. The community has been reeling for weeks since detailed information became public about allegations of a horrific 2024 sexual assault on a 20-year-old woman at Cornell, involving multiple fraternity men in their house. Jane Doe’s experience and the apparent failures of Cornell’s response have galvanized national outrage over the past few weeks.
It has been devastating to follow these developments in this secluded, progressive college town where many have worked to prevent such violations, through education, counseling, scholarship, and activism.
Circulating in close proximity to the site of this terrible offense, we wonder: What chance do advocates for safety and bodily autonomy for women and all people have in a culture where so many young men apparently still have an appalling disregard for women’s safety and dignity, with an utter lack of concern for consequences for their actions? An entire gang of “brothers” trespassed on one woman’s body, for hours on end, with many others allegedly knowing and utterly failing to intervene and put a stop to it.
Are there parallels with what we’re up against working in environmental health? The forces operating against us seem so entrenched, so arrogant; they don’t seem to share our basic values, and do not suffer timely or proportionate consequences for harm they cause.
So much change needs to take place before women are safe on (and off) college campuses, and so much change needs to take place before toxic trespass via water, air, and soil stops.
Our newsletter this month highlights several contexts where we and our allies are working to effect such change.
SEHN science director Ted Schettler traces the path of efforts to regulate methylene chloride, the volatile, toxic chemical used as a solvent in industrial processes and historically a component of some consumer products. One of very few of the thousands of chemicals in U.S. commerce with a regulatory trajectory at all, Dr. Schettler shows how we are still not effectively protected from methylene chloride’s serious risks.
Last month we told you about finishing work on our second Update to the 9th edition fracking science Compendium, this one addressing public health effects. We have two related developments. Remarkably, we already have a Spanish-language summary (not a direct translation) of that report, by our colleagues at Territorio de Ideas, appearing here in full. And to further amplify the findings in the Update, hear directly from one of the researchers whose work is featured, and connect those working to put an end to this documented suffering, we’re co-hosting a webinar with Catskill Mountainkeeper on Tuesday, November 17, at 12:00 noon Eastern. Please plan to join us!
Finally, in her column, Sandra Steingraber writes about one data center in Oklahoma that plunged a rural community into a drinking water crisis with consequences for local school kids.
We have a few updates for you about access—and preserving access—to SEHN and SEHN-related writings over the decades. This, from SEHN fellow Peter Montague:
Many Networker readers will remember Rachel’s News, which appeared weekly between 1986 and 2009. Several SEHN staff wrote for Rachel’s, which covered dangerous technologies (e.g., toxic chemicals and pesticides, nuclear power, waste disposal, carbon capture & storage, genetic engineering, corporate power), urgent scientific warnings, attacks on science, regulatory failures, loss of species, the social determinants of health, growing inequalities, precautionary action, other solutions, and more. All 1,000 issues of Rachel’s are now fully searchable using regular English language. If you have a Google account, you can go to http://bit.ly/4yEzkcf and ask anything (it’s free). Most of Rachel's News is still relevant today because so little has changed for the better in the last 20 years.
An additional development preserves the entire SEHN website (as well as that of our program, Concerned Health Professionals of New York) within a professional archive, the New York Climate Change Science web archive. Our sites will be “crawled” at regular interviews, so the archive will remain up to date. This effort not only preserves our work as a backup to the website, but expands its availability to researchers and other users of the archive. Checking through the archived version, some SEHN-before-my-time essays caught my attention, including this, from Peter in February 2019: an essay called “Toward a Simple Common Agenda.” So pertinent right now in advance of U.S. elections, he wrote,
For me, personally, the top priority will be to restore good government, to restore the integrity of our democratic republic because I trust the democracy of ordinary people. Here, as always, SEHN has focused on fundamentals, asking, “What is government for?” and reminding us that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence phrased it).
We hope you find our efforts meaningful during these troubling times. Forging ahead, we are developing SEHN’s plans for our role in the struggle for a just and healthy world in the year ahead.
Wishing you beautiful autumn days,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, editor
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