Sandra Steingraber was adopted as an infant, Steingraber grew up and spent most of her childhood in Tazewell County, Illinois. Her mother was a Microbiologist and her father was a community college Professor. Her parents inculcated in her an interest in sustainable development and organic agriculture from a young age.

In her 20s, Steingraber developed bladder cancer. She was not alone; in several of her books, she describes an apparent cancer cluster in her hometown and within her family.

After her cancer went into remission, Steingraber completed her undergraduate degree in biology from Illinois Wesleyan University.She worked for several years as a field researcher, eventually earning her doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan. Steingraber also holds a master's degree in English from Illinois State University.

Steingraber was formerly on faculty at Cornell University, she is currently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College, located in Ithaca, New York. Steingraber has held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard, and Northeastern University, and served on President Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer.

Steingraber currently lives in Trumansburg, New York with her husband Jeff de Castro, a sculptor and art restoration specialist, along with their two children, Faith and Elijah.

In Living Downstream, Steingraber blends poetic anecdotes and vivid descriptions of reckless industrial and agricultural pollution with a wealth of data from scientific and medial literature. The result is a compelling analysis of what is known and unknown about the relationship between environmental factors and cancer. Steingraber bemoans the imbalance between funding devoted to studies of genetic predispositions to cancer and the relative paucity of funding devoted to studies of potential environmental contributions to cancer incidence. She argues persuasively that while we can do little to change our genetic inheritance, there is much that can be done to reduce human exposure to environmental carcinogens.

Sandra Steingraber has the same ideals as Rachel Carson. Her text; Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment. Is a text that dives into the ideals of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Steingraber a woman with bladder cancer tries to explain and research how and why has cancer linked to the environment. Steingraber stresses issues such as chemical pesticides being rooted indirectly to our body. For example, just like Carson, Steingraber comes with startling facts. Steingraber states; "in 1996 a study investigated six-fold excess if bladder cancer among workers exposed years before to o-toludine and aniline in rubber chemicals department of a manufacturing plant in upstate New York. Levels of these contaminants are now well within their legal workplace limits and yet blood and urine samples collected from current employees were found to contain substantial numbers of DNA adducts and detectable levels of o-toulidne and aniline."

Sandra Steingraber, brings all three environmental perspectives to bear on the most important health and human rights issue of our time: the growing body of evidence linking cancer to environmental contamination. Her scrupulously researched scientific analysis ranges from the alarming worldwide patterns of cancer incidence to the sabotage wrought by cancer-promoting substances on the intricate workings of human cells. In a gripping personal narrative, she travels from hospital waiting rooms to hazardous waste sites and from farm-house kitchens to incinerator hearings, bringing to life stories of communities in her hometown and around the country as they confront decades of industrial and agricultural recklessness." "Living Downstream is the first book to bring together Toxics Release Inventory - now finally made available under right-to-know laws - and newly released cancer registry data."

"To the 89 percent of Illinois that is farmland, an estimated 54 million pounds of synthetic pesticides are applied each year. Introduced into Illinois at the end of World War II, these chemical poisons quietly familiarized themselves with the landscape. In 1950, less than 10 percent of cornfields were sprayed with pesticides. In 1993, 99 percent were chemically treated," (page 5).

Living Downstream is also the basis for a documentary movie by The People's Picture Company, which chronicles Steingraber's personal struggles as a cancer survivor and her significant contributions as an ecologist and cancer prevention activist.