With good cause, Pittsburgh loves to brag about how far it has come in environmental improvement from the grim, smoky days of 60 years ago. But are we in danger of celebrating too soon, forgetting that the game is far from over?

		Clarke Thomas is a Post-Gazette senior editor (clt34@pitt.edu).

That unpleasant fact has been brought home to me in two ways recently. One was an essay titled "Beyond Celebration: Pittsburgh and its Region in the Environmental Era -- Notes by a Participant Observer," the participant-observer being Sam Hays, a retired Pitt history professor. It appears in "Devastation and Renewal," a history of Pittsburgh's struggles, defeats and triumphs in the battle against pollution, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

The other reminder was an April seminar obviously named for that essay, titled "Beyond Celebration," sponsored by the Institute of Politics and the Honors College Outdoor Leadership Program, both of Pitt, and Carnegie Mellon University. (Hays, now living in Boulder, Colo., was present but refrained from his usual crusty remarks on such occasions.)

First, three pertinent items from the Hays essays. In the early 1970s, Hays began studying Pittsburgh's environmental affairs. Here's what he said he found: "The city's main activists in shaping its self-images, such as the media and the city's institutional leaders, were eager to define Pittsburgh's accomplishments in 'cleaning up' the city's air to reflect a major change from its smoky past; yet daily around me there was evidence of considerable resistance from the city's industries to air pollution programs and a tendency of its most vocal leaders to backtrack on what the city had purportedly accomplished."

Second, Hays attacks the "myth" of Pittsburgh's early record on reducing air pollution. Not Pittsburgh's own efforts, but the coming of natural gas in 1947 to replace household use of coal and the switch of the railroads to diesels did the most to cut pollution until 1969. At that point, the United Steelworkers held a national conference which, Hays writes, persuaded Gov. Raymond Shafer to adopt more stringent quality standards. That was followed by vigorous citizen action through the Group Against Smoke and Pollution (GASP), headed by Michelle Madoff, and, finally, the unfortunate but air-clearing collapse of the steel industry.

Third, Hays contends that industries and others in the environmental opposition were able to buy off environmental organizations by "providing financial support and by redefining environmental objectives away from public issues that were controversial and toward often superficial 'green' activities, mostly quite trivial and devoted more to image building rather than to concrete results."

While the April seminar had elements of celebration, it was notable for outlining the huge air and water problems still facing the Pittsburgh region, with a special emphasis on the latter. That includes, first, the problem of acid drainage from old mines polluting the very water supply that is a great southwestern Pennsylvania asset compared with, say, Arizona and much of the West.

Quite important, too, is the issue of storm water, highlighted recently by the Sept. 17, 2004, flooding that hit Etna, Millvale and Carnegie the hardest. Here the lack of a regional approach to water management has meant that urban sprawl upcreek in the Pine, Chartiers and Montour Run watersheds -- houses, parking lots, malls -- has upset the balance of nature and created havoc downstream. I was startled to learn that southwestern Pennsylvania has had the second-highest number of presidential disaster declarations in the nation.

Add the fact that in many communities storm water and sewage are dumped into the same combined sewers, and one sees why we have water problems not easily solved by, say, abating air pollution by putting emission controls in smoke stacks. (As little as one-tenth of an inch of rain -- an average Pittsburgh rainfall is one-quarter inch -- can cause raw sewage to overflow somewhere into our rivers and streams.)

As more than one speaker emphasized, no longer will pointing the finger at industries suffice. Today's problems involve "all of us" as taxpayers but particularly developers and suburbanites engaged in sprawl. Watersheds cut across municipal lines, meaning we need a regional approach. Particularly difficult is resolving sensibly the clash between property rights, on the one hand, and land use planning and restrictions on the other.

One recent help: In the 83 municipalities served by Alcosan, state restrictions on tap-ins (new hookups into sewer systems) were lifted in 2004. The previous environmental "remedy" to meet EPA requirements unfortunately had hindered new development in the older communities and thus contributed to suburban sprawl. This change could ease the way to spending $1 billion to upgrade the Alcosan plant in Woods Run and another $2 billion for upgrading its sewer system -- 4,000 miles of pipe, hundreds of thousands of manholes.

What can residents of this region do? Support efforts to control sprawl, including regional approaches. And in Tuesday's primary election, vote Yes for the Growing Greener bond question to authorize the state to borrow up to $625 million "for the maintenance and protection of the environment, open space and farmland preservation, watershed protection, abandoned mine reclamation, acid mine drainage remediation and other environmental initiatives."