Gas Drilling Opponent Devotes Award Money to Fight Fracking

Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist and activist from upstate New York, says she’ll use $100,000 dollars in award money to try to stop gas drilling. Steinberger won the Heinz Award for her work on the public health impacts of the use of chemicals in the environment. There are no restrictions on how she would use the money, but Steingraber says halting fracking in New York is her priority.

Some might look at my small house (with its mismatched furniture) or my small bank accounts (with their absence of a college fund or a retirement plan) and question my priorities.  But the bodies of my children are the rearranged molecules of the air, water, and food streaming through them. As their mother, there is no more important investment that I could make right now than to support the fight for the integrity of the ecological system that makes their lives possible. As legal scholar Joseph Guth reminds us, a functioning biosphere is worth everything we have [2].

The Heinz Awards were established by Teresa Heinz, the wife of the late Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz.

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