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Donora native Devra Davis crusades for the environment

Thursday, November 07, 2002

By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

This is about a woman who grew up in a small working-class river town near Pittsburgh, became a scientist and a writer and challenged government and industry for ignoring the health problems caused by environmental pollution.

	Devra Davis, appearing next week at the Post-Gazette's Book & Author Dinner, has made a career of detailing how pollution has contributed to health problems and how the connection has been ignored or hidden by government and corporations.

Despite sexist critiques of her work by corporate sponsored lab-coats, she wrote a scientific book aimed at a wider audience and was nominated for a National Book Award.

Right about now you might be guessing Rachel Carson, who grew up in Springdale on the Allegheny River, and wrote "The Sea Around Us," which was nominated for -- and won -- a National Book Award in 1951.

Good guess, but the above thumbnail biography also describes Devra Davis, an internationally recognized epidemiologist whose new book, "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution" (Basic Books, $24.95), draws on lessons learned growing up in Donora, a blue-collar mill town on the Monongahela River.

The book is one of five nonfiction titles nominated last month for the National Book Award.

After establishing her credentials as a leading, if sometimes controversial, epidemiologist in more than 170 scientific books and articles, Davis aimed her newest book at a popular audience a lot like Carson's other book, "Silent Spring." Both are analytic yet personal and passionate accounts of how environmental pollution has contributed to a wide range of human health problems and how government and corporate interests have ignored or hidden those causes.

Davis, 56, said she has "tremendous respect" for what Carson did and humbly dismissed the comparison, but in a phone interview last month from her home in Washington, D.C., admitted to reaching just as high in her new book.

"After my experiences in government, I saw how little effect I was having, and realized I had to do something a little different," she said, acknowledging her frustration after serving on the National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board during the Clinton administration.

"I was following the Jewish tradition of studying and then trying what you study. I wrote the book to try to change the world."

Davis starts her book in Donora, where she was 2 in 1948 when toxic pollution from zinc and steel plants owned by U.S. Steel Co. blanketed the Monongahela River town 30 miles south of Pittsburgh.

When the poison smog cleared after four days, 22 people had died and more than 6,000 had been hospitalized.

Davis' award-nominated book starts in her native Donora in October 1948, when a deadly smog caused by a temperature inversion and pollution enveloped the Monongahela River town for several days, darkening the skies even at noon. The author, who was 2 at the time, doesn't remember the incident but says it affected the health of many family members.

She doesn't remember the incident, of course, but says many family members were sickened and died of heart disease at least in part due to the polluted air.

"It took a while to understand that the health of my grandmother, aunts and uncles were tied to that pollution," Davis said. "My favorite uncle, Leonard, was a health nut and left Donora for California, where he dropped dead on a squash court at age 50 with a 29-inch waist. It was devastating.

"I later did some research and found that air pollution in Los Angeles was particularly bad that day. Public health statistics were in their early stages, and no one thought then that Leonard's death had anything to do with anything but family history. Well, genes are like a gun but the environment pulls the trigger."

Davis left Donora when her family moved to Pittsburgh and, while still in high school, took college courses at the University of Pittsburgh where her interest in statistics began. During that time she was also active in the civil rights movement, serving as a local organizer for marches in Selma, Ala., and Washington.

After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in physiological psychology and sociology, she won a Danforth fellowship for the University of Chicago, where she completed a doctorate in science studies in 1970.

While working as an assistant professor of sociology and director of interdisciplinary studies at Queens College of the City University of New York in the early 1970s, she met another faculty member, economist Richard Morgenstern. They were married in 1975, had two children and found themselves drawn to environmental policy.

By 1981, both Davis and her husband were working for the Environmental Protection Agency. Davis also was working on a fellowship with Abraham Lilienfeld, a renowned epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, who awakened her interest in epidemiology.

In 1983, after getting a degree in public health from Johns Hopkins and working at the Environmental Law Institute, she was recruited by the National Academy of Sciences to direct the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology.

While there she coordinated the work of experts from around the United States on numerous studies, including one that led to the ban on smoking on domestic airline flights.

"That was the achievement I'm proudest of," Davis said. "We recommended the ban on smoking during the Reagan years. The science was just overwhelming."

The science is also overwhelming on the human health risks from lead, pesticides and coal-fired power plants, she said, but that hasn't stopped industries from trying to stop, delay or relax regulatory controls.

Davis' book -- the title of which was drawn from a newspaper description of London in December 1952 when climatic conditions trapped the coal smoke from more than 1 million chimneys -- presents information covered up for 50 years that shows the actual death toll from the killer smogs was 12,000, not the 4,000 reported by the British government.

"We've got to get beyond the point of saying we don't have proof and can't do anything until we do," Davis said. "The reason we don't know more about the links between pollution and public health is not just because the science is hard. In many situations, industry or government has tried to discourage, discredit and dismiss scientific investigations."

Davis' writing style is far removed from the turgid prose common to scientific papers. She brings mortality statistics to life with apt anecdotes and sprinkles new scientific findings into stories drawn from childhood and family experiences, as well as more recent world travels as a scientist with the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit environmental research group.

"I'm a storyteller," she said, "telling stories about what's behind the science and explaining that science so it has a reality that may not be apparent when you read the scientific literature."

Davis will join four other authors at the Post-Gazette's Book & Author Dinner, cosponsored by the Junior League of Pittsburgh Tuesday at the Westin Convention Center, Downtown.

"It means a great deal to me to be launching this book in Pittsburgh because people there are really nice. When I ask for directions there, people walk me to where I'm going," said Davis, who is a visiting professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School.

"That's why it was such a shock for me to learn anything was wrong in my hometown."

The event starts at 5:30 p.m. with an authors reception followed by dinner at 6:45 p.m. Tickets are $75 for the reception and dinner; $50 for the dinner only. Proceeds benefit the Junior League's literacy program. Order tickets by phone at 412-394-3353 or online at www.proartstickets.org.