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Sandra Steingraber’s “Letters from Chemung County Jail”

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Sandra Steingraber speaking at Seneca Lake yesterday

On March 18, twelve protesters were arrested for peacefully blockading Inergy’s salt cavern natural gas/propane storage facility and compressor station in the tiny town of Reading, NY. Three of the protesters arraigned on April 18 - for charges of trespassing- refused to pay their fines and were sentenced to fifteen days in jail. One of those, Sandra Steingraber, made use of her time to write a series of missives, “Letters from the Chemung County Jail”.

Limited to scraps of paper and a pencil stub, she managed to put into eloquent language her choices for blocking Inergy, and the choices we all must make if we are to hand down a liveable planet to our children and grandchildren.

Yesterday, Thursday, she and her fellow “Seneca three” - organic farmer Michael Dineen and businesswoman Melissa Chipman - gathered with press and citizens at Seneca Lake to talk about Inergy, energy, and life in the local jails. The inmates, they agree, show far more compassion and caring than the guards.

Sandra wrote five letters from the Chemung County Jail:

Letter #1, dated April 18, 2013, begins: “When Henry David Thoreau spend a night in jail for civil disobedience – defining the term in the process – he was served chocolate and brown bread for breakfast.” Sandra’s breakfast was not nearly so fine. She ends this missive noting, “I now inhabit an ugly, miserable, loud and ungraceful world. There are no flowers; no local, delicious food; no tranquil landscapes; and not even coffee or tea.
“If we do not want New York to become a prison of wellheads, pipelines and compressor stations; if we do not want the violence of climate change instability and mass species extinction; if we do not want to leave our children a diminished world bereft of frog song, bees, coral reefs, sea ice; then coming to a place as far removed from the rhythms of the natural world as a jail cell is not an inappropriate place to say so.” You may read the entire letter at http://marcelluseffect.blogspot.com/2013/04/earth-day-letters-from-chemung-county.html
Letter #2, dated April 19, addresses why she is in jail on Earth Day. She writes: “My children need a world with pollinators and plankton stocks and a stable climate. They need lake shores that do not have explosive hydrocarbon gases buried underneath. The fossil fuel party must come to an end. I am shouting at an iron door. Can you hear me now?” Read the whole letter at http://marcelluseffect.blogspot.com/2013/04/letters-from-chemung-county-jail.html
In letter #3, dated April 22, Sandra chides those in the environmental community - especially the large, environmental organizations - for collaborating with the fossil fuels industry. Just as adding filters to cigarettes doesn’t make them any healthier, creating “best practices” doesn’t make fracking (or compressor stations or pipelines) any healthier. The letter is at http://marcelluseffect.blogspot.com/2013/04/letters-from-chemung-county-jail-3.html
Sandra addresses her fourth letter, of April 23, to her fellow cancer survivors. “Here is what I am now convinced of,” she wrote: “the oil, gas, and coal industries – and all the hydrocarbon carcinogens they produce and release – will not be dismantled by good data alone.” You can read the whole thing at http://marcelluseffect.blogspot.com/2013/04/letters-from-chemung-county-jail-4.html
In letter #5, Sandra writes to mothers everywhere. “… my course of political action has taken me away from my own children in an attempt to redress this problem on their behalf, and during the first five days, when I was kept in 24-hour lock-up, I had no access to them. But I am convinced the tears of my children now will be less than their tears later – along with the tears of my grandchildren – if we mothers do nothing and allow the oil, coal, and gas companies to hurdle us all off the climate cliff.” The rest of the letter is over at http://marcelluseffect.blogspot.com/2013/04/letters-from-chemung-county-jail-5.html
You don’t have to go to jail, Sandra told supporters yesterday. But don’t be afraid of it either.

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