Clear views of the region's environmental history

Sunday, January 25, 2004

By Devra Lee Davis

The tremendous debt that the Pittsburgh region owes Joel Tarr and Sam Hays is not likely to be repaid. They have not merely written about Pittsburgh's environmental history -- they have helped to forge it.

Nor have they kowtowed to those who, like the rooster claiming credit for the sunrise, embellish their own roles in the enterprise. Instead, they have consistently exposed what Hays calls "the gap between environmental self-congratulation and practice in Pittsburgh."

	"Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region" Edited by Joel A. Tarr University of Pittsburgh Press ($32)

Tarr, professor of environmental history and policy at Carnegie Mellon University, not only edited this collection of essays but also wrote the introduction and closing sections.

Contributor Hays, the eminence grise of the field, spent four decades at the University of Pittsburgh actively engaged in efforts to promote environmental consciousness, starting in the dark days of the 1960s.

In what may be the most candid and revealing essay of the illustrious bunch, Hays explains that the 1970s were the heyday of environmental policy in the nation and in Pittsburgh.

He credits the effective strategic alliances of the steelworkers union and the Group Against Smog and Pollution with overcoming industrial and local bureaucratic resistance to enacting clean-air legislation.

Hays adds that obstacles to a cleaner environment were often fueled then, as now, by a county health department more concerned with the letter than with the spirit of the law.

He does not pull his punches.

	Pollution patrol Devra Davis will speak and will show "OnQ Magazine's" Emmy-winning documentary on Donora's killer 1948 smog, based on her book, at 1 p.m. next Sunday at 5546 Bartlett St., Squirrel Hill. The program is sponsored by NA'AMAT USA, Pittsburgh Council. Cost for her book "When Smoke Ran Like Water" and the brunch, which is being held in memory of her mother, Jean Langer Davis, an ardent activist on behalf of women's issues in the U.S. and Israel, is $36. For reservations, call 412-521-5253. Joel A. Tarr, editor and contributor to "Devastation and Renewal," will discuss the book at 2 p.m. Feb. 8 at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, 1212 Smallman St., the Strip District. The event is free and open to the public. For information, call the History Center at 412-454-6000.

"Rachel Carson is one of the most tragic figures of modern environmental affairs," he writes, noting that the control of toxic chemicals that this Pittsburgher championed remains one of the greatest failures of contemporary environmental policy throughout the nation.

Andrew McElwaine, president of the Pennsylvania Enviromental Council, provides a mournful account of how backroom collusion and municipal indifference allowed a region touted by the distinguished urban planner Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. as one of the region's most promising park sites to end up becoming a massive slag dump at Nine Mile Run.

It is well known that the very word "Pittsburgh" became synonymous with soot-laden skies by the turn of the 20th century, appearing as a symbol of blackness in a number of poems.

One need not have poetic sensibilities to appreciate that some of the phrases used to describe major changes in the physical and economic environment of Pittsburgh seem straight out of George Orwell's prescient novel of doublespeak, "1984," where words mean precisely the opposite of what they imply.

Tarr and Pitt professor Edward Muller explain that under the guise of "urban renewal," the homes and businesses of more than 5,000 mostly African-Americans were demolished in the lower Hill District in the 1950s and replaced with the "Civic Arena," a large impenetrable building ringed by black-top paved parking lots.

Massive, concrete "parkways" having nothing to do with parks and much to do with allowing traffic to ring the city, created high-speed barriers between the railroad tracks along the rivers.

A "crosstown boulevard" on which no human would ever stroll allowed vehicles to avoid the renewal area altogether, and people could speed easily into the sprawling suburbs.

The authors of the essays make clear that many of the grand and obvious problems of Pittsburgh's environment, like its blackened vistas, are indeed part of history.

One chapter portrays past practices that are chillingly relevant today. Tarr and Terry F. Yosie, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official, explain that intense battles over bond issues, disputes between public health physicians and sanitary engineers and strained relations between the city and county in the late 19th and early 20th century turned Pittsburgh's rivers into open sewers and resulted in thousands of avoidable deaths from typhoid.

In the first decade of the past century, Pittsburghers were three times more likely to die of typhoid than residents of comparable cities.

Tarr and Yosie argue that the city continues to pay for the decision to draw drinking water from its rivers, rather than from a protected rural source. In a city that loves its champions, Pittsburgh now can lay claim to more combined overflow outlets for sewage during times of heavy rains than any other city in the nation. In a passage of relevance today, they note:

"By 1945, however, sewage pollution was only one of the several serious issues facing Pittsburgh. Its population was stagnating, its industries were exhausted by the war effort and badly in need of renewal, its physical plant was deteriorating, and its air and land, as well as its water, were badly polluted."

They show that not until regional water authorities were legally forced to work together did the city make any headway on the problem.

Present issues of pollution remain orphaned topics in this volume, although some chapters are more pertinent than anyone would like to admit.

Hays reports that by the end of the 1970s, Duquesne Light agreed to install scrubbers to remove sulfur-dioxide at its plants at Elrama and Phillips, but refused to do so at Cheswick, with the approval of the Allegheny County Health Department.

In the past year, one of the nation's largest electric utilities bought up several dirty, old coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania that would have otherwise been retired, shrewdly anticipating the massive regulatory relief granted to operate such plants under the Bush administration's double-speak-named Clear Skies initiatives.

Some traditions die hard and some do not die at all. As GASP has repeatedly noted, the long-lived Cheswick plant regularly spews levels of microscopically small, invisible pollutants that exceed regulations.

These fine particles can be deeply inhaled into the lungs, where they plague those with asthma and other illnesses. Under the perverse logic that gives polluters a free ride, confirmed but invisible, monitored violations of the plant remain unprosecuted, ostensibly because they have not been seen.

This book makes sober reading for anyone concerned with how to keep the city's officially declared distress status from wiping out concerns over the region's sustainability.

For the Pittsburgh area, environmental degradation has often been the price extracted by special interests and local authorities more concerned with feathering their own nests than with fouling those of others. If ever there was a time to consolidate regulatory authority for southwestern Pennsylvania to fund schools and public safety, to generate fees from the fastest growing economic sectors of health care and universities and to clean up our sewer-like rivers and sometimes toxic soup of air pollution, this is it.

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