One of the things that makes “When Smoke Ran Like Water,” her book on the battle against pollution, so powerful is that Davis hasn’t merely studied the data, she’s lived them. She grew up in Donora, a small town nestled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania where everybody relied for their living on the local steel mill. She never wondered why the landscape beyond her one-story cinderblock home was barren and brown, or why so many elderly women were, like her grandma Bubbe, bedridden and tethered to an oxygen tank. To her and her neighbors, it was perfectly natural to play near ditches filled with iridescent, oily water, and to endure smog so thick people sometimes would get lost in the familiar streets. But children played, adults worked: life was good.
Then the lion began to stir. In the 1950s the steel mills began to close down and people started quietly leaving Donora. Just as Davis was entering high school, her family moved to Pittsburgh. While attending classes at the university, Davis heard about a town in western Pennsylvania that was infamous for its pollution–particularly the smog of 1948 (Davis was a toddler) that killed 20 people and made thousands ill. The town was called Donora. That day she came home, dropped her books on the kitchen table and said, “Mom, was there another place called Donora?”
This bit of self-knowledge launched Davis into her career. She came to realize that the pollution her town endured wasn’t some transient event like smog, which wreaks destruction and then vanishes. She learned that toxins in the air and water insinuate themselves into our bodies and stay there, sometimes permanently. Even as her family and friends dispersed, they continued to suffer health effects. Her mother endured heart attacks routinely. Her “dazzling, athletic Uncle Len dropped dead at the age of 50 on a handball court in southern California, years and miles away from the Monongahela River Valley,” she writes. “But he carried Donora with him in his heart and in other body tissues as well.” In time Davis realizes–and so does the reader–that we all live in a Donora of sorts: pollutants at legal levels kill people every day.
Davis’s family history gives her moral capital that scientists seldom dare to draw on. Her scientific credentials are also impeccable–she’s been a scholar at the National Academy of Sciences and adviser to Presidents Reagan and Clinton. She uses this capital chiefly to counter the vested interests that inevitably oppose efforts to reduce pollution. Her history of the scientists who first flagged the dangers of lead additives in gasoline and the pervasive health effects of smokestack emissions–and endured years of personal attacks as a result–is chilling. Does the same fate await those who are now studying the effects of low-level pesticides? Or the role of pollution in breast cancer?
Davis has particular contempt for the scientists who obfuscate on behalf of polluters. By exploiting the public’s misunderstanding of how pollution studies are done, they often create a sense that the perfectly valid studies are fatally flawed. A standard technique is to knock a study on the basis that its data are imperfect. But epidemiology is not the same as laboratory science, where experiments can be controlled, and people are not lab rats. Scientists have plenty of control in animal studies that can be extrapolated to humans, but industry often objects on the ground that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Anyway, animal studies are only part of the story. If epidemiologists are to ask big questions about the effects of pollution on people, they have to rely on data from disparate studies that aren’t always perfectly compatible. In the end, Davis’s argument is partisan: she doesn’t address the ways environmental zealots can resort to obfuscation, too.
Despite the considerable spleen in this book, one gets the impression that Davis is holding back. Perhaps she doesn’t want to risk sounding conspiratorial. Perhaps she is trying to avoid the fate of so many of the scientists she documents who, like Mary Amdur in the 1950s, become marginalized simply for following their research where the facts led them. Amdur’s pioneering work on the toxicity of nonlethal doses of pollutants got her fired from her job at Harvard. In writing this book, Davis is walking the same tightrope. Will she fall? “This is my granddaughter,” her Bubbe once bragged. “She is a little devil, with a big mouth.” That’s no bluff.
