Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Shivvers lecturer: Iowa has role in fight against fracking

Back to Leopold Letter Spring 2012

By MELISSA LAMBERTON, Communications research assistant

Iowa’s agricultural community can play an important role in abolishing the nation’s unhealthy dependence on fossil fuels, acclaimed ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber told an Iowa State audience on March 5.

Steingraber was the speaker for the 2012 Shivvers Memorial Lecture at ISU’s Memorial Union. Fred Kirschenmann, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow, introduced her as a scientist, writer and mother who has become “the star in our community much as Rachel Carson was in her time.” Steingraber’s latest book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, is a memoir about the joys and dilemmas of raising a child in a world threatened by climate change and toxic chemicals.

Steingraber targeted fossil fuel dependency as the root of our environmental crisis, driving climate change and serving as the feedstock for toxic wastes and chemicals. She focused her lecture on a process for extracting natural gas from bedrock called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves pumping high-pressure fluid into the ground to shatter the bedrock. Steingraber described how fracking introduces toxic chemicals into groundwater and air, destroys unique microbial communities deep in the earth, clogs rural roadways with trucks and heavy equipment and creates smog.    

 “Fracking literally turns the earth inside out. It’s a shock-and-awe operation,” Steingraber said.

Iowa gets involved at the beginning and end of this process. Energy companies mine a certain type of sand from Iowa to inject into the wellbores and keep the fractures propped open so the natural gas can escape. The gas goes to make petrochemical products that return to Iowa as fertilizers, farm chemicals, PVC pipes and common household items.   

“I’m not asking people to shop differently, but to imagine themselves in a heroic place,” Steingraber said. “Farmers, more than anyone I know, understand the web of direct and indirect interactions. The wisdom of farmers could provide a counter-voice to the shale-and-gas kind of thinking.” 

Steingraber won the Heinz Award in 2011 for her championing of human health and the environment. She donated the $100,000 award to anti-fracking efforts in upstate New York. In February, a precedent-setting court case upheld the right of towns and municipalities in New York to ban drilling. Elsewhere, Bulgaria and France recently passed bans on fracking.

“I feel humbled and honored at this moment to be a mother and a biologist,” Steingraber said. “Each of us holds a particular genius and skill set we can bring to bear on this, and I do believe it is the human rights issue of our time.”

Steingraber is a scholar-in-residence at Ithaca College in upstate New York and has a doctorate in biological sciences from the University of Michigan. Her other books include Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment; Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood; and Post-Diagnosis, a collection of poetry.  

The Shivvers Memorial Lecture series honors L.C. (John) Shivvers, a farmer from Knoxville who pioneered new techniques in sustainable agriculture. Learn more about the Shivvers Memorial Lecture at www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/calendar/shivvers.

Back to Leopold Letter Spring 2012