Dr. Sandra Steingraber 🏳️‍🌈

That’s the catch 22 of it all.

Oh oh oh. I would read that personal essay.

I’m so sorry that happened to you.

Announcement from WHO director: damage to petroleum facilities in Iran is a public health crisis; 9 health workers have been killed in Lebanon and 5 hospitals closed. Urges de-escalation. “Peace is always the best medicine.”

The war in Iran threatens public health via chemical contamination of food, water, and air from petroleum-contaminated rain.

Announcement from the Director-General of the World Health Organization, of which the United States is no longer a member, but MAHA is not gonna be talking about this, so….👇

And, knowing you as I do, of course I feel the same…

if there is anyone whose SHORT PERSONAL RANTS i would never miss, it’s Dr. Steingraber 👇🏻

The Strait of Hormuz.

Whose name and location I’ve know since before I started babysitting in rural Illinois for 75 cents an hour and now my own kids are grown ass adults living in fear of no future. Goddamn it.

And now we have all the tech we need to build out renewables and EVs as fast as we are building out AI data centers. But instead we are doubling down on internal combustion and yoking our destiny ever more tightly to the outcome of events in a channel of water on the other side of the globe.

We could have started turning this shit around in 1974 during the energy crisis when I was in middle school.

We could have turned it around during the Iranian revolution when I was in college and and getting cancer treatment.

…and knowing exactly how cancer is being seeded into the bodies of children and knowing what has already happened to Iranian groundwater and surface water because of the climate crisis.

Tracking it all. Full of knowledge and trauma and rage.

From there I wrote books on the twin crises of petrochemical pollution and climate change and got involved in policy work and activism.

Now, 40 year later, I’m just one more scientist watching the clusterfuck in the Persian Gulf and watching oil fall from skies over Tehran…

…dealing with a cancer (bladder) known to be caused by exposure to petrochemicals. Petro, as in, made from petroleum. Aka fossil fuels.

So I decided not to go to med school but to study ecology. More data about the environment would help move us off this shit. Right?

Because that shit has not changed for 80 years.

Meanwhile, I was diagnosed with cancer at age 20 in 1979 during the middle of the Iranian revolution.

I was reading headlines about Carter sending the Navy to protect oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz while in the hospital as a college student…

If you brought my great-grandfather back to life, he would not know how do banking or make a phone call or use a patient portal to get his lab results or turn on GPS to navigate or apply for a job or check soybean futures or get the weather forecast.

But he would know how to put gas in a car.

I was in middle school during the 1974 energy crisis when we all got to learn about OPEC and oil tankers and the Gulf or Hormuz in social studies class. And now here we are, a half century later.

Live Updates: Oil Price Surge Rattles Markets; Iran’s Choice of Leader Signals Defiance

A SHORT PERSONAL RANT:

I was born in the Eisenhower administration. I grew up in a rural Midwest town with a shitty school system. And yet I’ve been able to locate the Strait of Hormuz on a map since age 14.

Why? Because energy is defined by OIL then and now. 🧵

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

That's so bad. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

I love the idea of mutual aid, etc. but there is a mile between what most people think about a community coming together and the practical reality of caring for a single individual for an indeterminate amount of time.

Now that I’m that potential patient, I do everything I can to strength train, balance train, and maintain cardiovascular health for fall prevention, stroke prevention, frailty prevention, and resilience.

But safety nets still matter. And, even absent health problems, not having one is stressful.

Even with mutual aid, there has to be someone to inventory of all the necessary tasks and coordinate them. It’s high-level events-planning plus bookkeeping and accounting that can go on for years.

Try finding someone to call insurance companies and pay bills for someone who can’t write or speak…

Yes, exactly.

For example: Caregiving for a stroke patient with aphasia just discharged from rehab is something I have done. They can’t express their needs and must be cooked for and driven to innumerable PT, OT, speech therapy appointments for which they may lack executive functioning to schedule

Blocked out of solidarity with you plus life experience with men asking me questions on platforms

A tedious pest with questions gets blocked the fastest

War is peace

I feel like we don't talk about what happens to people without a strong local support network. If you live far from/have no family/no close friends within driving distance you're the "single point of failure" in caregiving (parents, pets, etc.) if something happens to you.

The climate crisis is an accelerant to water mismanagement, water depletion, and resulting crop failures from lack of irrigation.

War is an accelerant to the climate crisis.

Tired: Climate change will lead to water wars
Wired: Western imperialism will kill millions through climate induced water shortages
Inspired: Colonial wars will destroy water infrastructure and beat climate change to the punch

Even questions like “who will drive me home from my colonoscopy” loom large. (Somehow I got “lucky” that mine was scheduled during the big NY blizzard. I skipped the drugs and convinced the nurses to override their policy on required drivers and let me walk home in the snowstorm.)

We do not talk enough about this. Those of us who live alone AND work from home in communities where we have few deep social connections are in the bulls eye here.

I feel like I now get why church pews in rural areas are filled with lots of older women. Many are widowed, kids live far away. Aha…

Our actions constitute a salt the earth violation of human rights.

Exactly right.

A Syrian man and his wife were killed as a result of US-Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon.