February 2026 Networker: Practicing Democracy - A Thaw Is Coming |
Volume 31 (2), February 2026 |
In addition to our in-house contributions this month, we’re happy to feature an essay by a dear friend to SEHN, Kamyar Enshayan, PhD. Originally trained as an engineer, Kamyar recently retired after spending the past 16 years directing the University of Northern Iowa’s Center for Energy & Environmental Education (CEEE). Like many of my colleagues, I’m privileged to also count Kamyar as a personal friend. After a professional invitation to me in early 2020—to speak to and network with others in Cedar Falls—ended up being my first Covid-related cancellation (enter Zoom), we became ongoing supporters of each other’s work and fast friends. I was also fortunate to befriend from afar Audrey Tran Lam, Environmental Health Program Director at CEEE, who does remarkable work that is close to my heart.
We thought of inviting Kamyar to contribute to the Networker this month because his approach and his work (which very much continues in so-called retirement) responds to the central question on our minds. What are the impactful actions we can carry out in our spheres as we struggle with the federal government’s daily affronts to democracy and all the ways those affronts impact the interconnected crises of human rights, climate chaos, and public health? Kamyar’s work exemplifies the possibilities, as noted in this article about the leadership transition at CEEE: |
At UNI, Enshayan pursued environmental education and change at the local and state level with what his colleagues described as a ‘relentless’ and ‘infectious’ optimism. |
Whether it’s combatting nitrates in Iowa water or developing immigrant-focused community gardens, Kamyar continues to act strategically and with compassion. Incidentally, he knows a thing or two about immigration, having come to the United States from Iran as a young adult. Listen here (starting at 32:00) to an Iowa Public Radio interview for his recent reflections on his own migration and what he is currently observing in his adopted country. Along with Kamyar’s piece—urging the practice of democracy to make an impact on Iowa’s crisis of nitrate contamination—SEHN’s Peter Montague and Sandra Steingraber each explore dimensions of water-related crises and challenges globally. Peter lays out the extent to which water cycles have been altered by climate change and our economic system, and interrelationships of those forces with the current “slide toward fascism.” Solutions, he says, must match the scale and scope of the problem. Sandra takes us on a water-safety related journey with a look at Typhoid fever, a waterborne disease. In it we meet two nineteenth-century New York City women: a cross-dressing physician who cared about and for immigrants, and an immigrant scapegoat who suffered unduly for being identified as the first asymptomatic carrier of the disease. Whether you’re thinking about what more you can do about the erosion of our rights, the revoking of bedrock environmental regulations, the worsening climate crisis, the state of water quality and supply, or the protection of immigrant neighbors, I hope you’ll find something informative or inspiring in these pages. There have been some beautiful, spot-on writings lately about finding one’s place and keeping steady in the darkness. Minneapolis-based writer Will McGrath recently wrote a wonderful essay documenting his part in an organically-formed network of parents driving a new kind of high school car pool, transporting kids whose parents are afraid to leave the house: “that holy responsibility, the ferrying of innocents among the wolves.” He went on to say (and you can take the “cold” literally and/or metaphorically), |
It’s been so cold for so long… But today the sun is out and the sky is a brilliant blue. The days are getting longer. A thaw is coming. |
With my and all of SEHN’s very best regards,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH |
Nitrates in our Iowa Water: Practicing Democracy is the Path to Change |
The local community—the city, county, and schools—are the fundamental units of decision making and democracy. Sure, state and federal levels of governance are very important as well, but they are often out of reach of ordinary citizens, while local elected officials live in their communities and can be far more accountable. And as it turns out, there are a whole host of decisions affecting every aspect of community life and resilience that are made by local governments. Local citizen involvement can shape those local policies. Adopting stronger energy conserving building codes, walkable neighborhoods, managing parks and school grounds without pesticides, better public transportation systems, investing in renewable energy, floodplain policies that give more room to the river, improving school meals, access and availability of fresh local foods, fair wage policies, better housing... These are all examples of what some local governments have championed because local residents pushed for them. Neither the federal government or state government are forcing a school district to use pesticides on their lawn, neither state nor federal government are forcing a city to allow builders to build in the floodplain. These are entirely our own doing. A local problem, such as high nitrate in our local municipal wells, can draw people to better understand a problem they had not previously paid attention to, but also can help them see a much bigger picture of agriculture that keeps bringing them these problems in a state like Iowa. On Aug 11, 2025 I went to the Cedar River at downtown Cedar Falls, and tested the water for nitrate level. It was between 10-20 milligrams per liter (mg/L), say 15. I looked up the flow of the Cedar at that location on that day: it was 6950 cubic feet per second. So, how much nitrate was going by downtown every hour? 23,383 pounds of fertilizer every hour. That's more than a half million pounds flowing by on that one day.
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Water Scarcity, Human Migration, and a Turn Toward Fascism |
by Peter Montague, SEHN fellow |
Since 1750, the temperature over land, worldwide, has risen at least 2.3 degrees Celsius (°C), which equals a rise of 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (°F). With a 2.3°C rise, the air over land can hold about 16 percent more moisture, making some rainstorms more intense, causing more floods, more runoff, more soil erosion. As the average temperature rises, heat waves grow more extreme—hotter, longer-lasting, and more dangerous compared to two or three decades ago. For example, in the summer of 2025, heat waves killed an estimated 24,200 people in Europe. During heat waves, the soil grows warmer and therefore drier than it used to be; at the same time, plants draw more water out of the soil—a double whammy causing more intense and longer droughts covering larger areas. As the air warms, more mountain snowfall turns into rain and runs off quickly, depriving crops, livestock, rivers, fish and other wildlife of the traditional slow, steady snowmelt of spring and early summer. Now glaciers are melting and disappearing worldwide, depriving many human communities of their historic supply of fresh water for drinking, domestic use, and farming. Rivers fed by snow-melt and/or glacier-melt shrink, fish disappear, animals suffer, and the land is parched. Water is life Water is essential for all life, and it sustains the global economy, enabling mining and manufacturing, turning energy turbines, nourishing crops and livestock. Water scarcity affects farms, firms, families, communities, and nations.
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Repercussion Section: A Brief History of Typhoid Fever |
by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
At a recent dinner party hosted by an architect, I was seated next to a woman who was holding forth in lively conversation. Just as the salad bowl was making its way around the table, she abruptly turned to me and asked what I did for a living. Since I’m never sure where these kinds of conversations are headed, I typically give a short, generic description of my work to people whom I’m meeting at parties, leaving out the part about providing science to environmental justice communities fighting oil and gas extraction operations. I don’t use words like “climate change,” “carcinogens,” or “right now I’m studying the health harms of gas stoves.” “Environmental health” was my answer over the music. My dinner companion’s eyes lit up. “So, we do the same thing!” she said. “I’m a civil engineer. We make infrastructure. We keep human shit out of the drinking water. We stop more diseases than all the doctors.” She leaned back and folded her arms. Well. Challenge accepted, sister friend. And she and I then spent the next hour—all the way through the cheese plate and chocolate—conversing about waterborne diseases from the 19th century. Many of these, we noted, are now poised for a comeback as infrastructure crumbles, vaccination rates fall, and disruptions to the global water cycle accelerate under climate change. (See Peter Montague’s essay in this same newsletter.) It seems like the right moment for a brief history of one of them. Typhoid fever.
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“Plastics are of the category of things both deeply familiar and also deeply misunderstood, according to Altman. She likes to ask this question: How can we begin to alter our future in relationship to plastics without a deeper sense of knowing where they came from?” SEHN Board member Rebecca Altman’s work is profiled in Rhode Island publication, ecoRI. |
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