Devra Lee Davis was a little girl living in Donora, Pa., in the 1950s. Few people felt there was anything unusual about having to wash black grime off their living room walls every week or drive with their headlights on in the afternoon to see through the gloomy gray air. It was all normal.

During four days in October of 1948, when Devra was a toddler, a massive stationary blanket of cold air settled over the Monongahela Valley. It trapped fumes from the town’s steel mills, coke ovens, foundries and coal stoves. This killing fog descended into the valley bowl of Donora, killing 18 people within 12 hours.

Accustomed to such fogs, the townsfolk carried on their usual activities, though the Halloween parade that year was spookier than usual. The football game was made more challenging by the fact that the players lost sight of the ball when it went into the air.
Despite having lived through the tragedy as a child, Devra never really heard about it until she attended college in Pittsburgh when she happened upon an obscure reference to the incident in one of her textbooks.

In everyday Donora, few folks ever talked about the fact that the sun did not shine for days at a time. And if they did mention what happened in 1948, they usually attributed the disaster to a freak of nature, not to climatic inversions of deadly chemicals induced from the smokestacks of the town’s steel and wire plants, which subsequent research has proven was the real cause. Nobody asked whether what made them ill could have had anything to do with the local conditions.

But that was way back then. Things are certainly better today, right? Well…

In April 2002, Tim Nault, 17, was playing baseball at Sexton High School in Lansing, Mich., when he and his teammates suddenly found themselves sprinting from the diamond to a nearby building. But they were not exercising. “We were running away from the stink from across the street.… [T]he General Motors’ paint fumes. It’s very unnatural.”

GM’s neighbors had complained for decades about the foul solvent-smelling odors, only to be told by GM and city officials that they were imagining them. The media was generally silent about it and MSU — despite housing two medical schools, a nursing school and leading toxicologists, epidemiologists and pulmonologists — never bothered to do a study. This, despite the fact that GM had the legal right to emit 3,359 tons (6,718,000 pounds) of toxic pollutants into the atmosphere at that factory — despite the fact that the highest incidence of asthma in Lansing occurred around the factory. The rate of asthma hospitalizations for 1–14 year olds was 50.3 per 10,000 in the 1990s, much higher than Healthy People 2000 guidelines, which recommends 10 per 10,000.

The environmental health drama came to a head in the weeks before a May 6 deadline during which Michigan’s top two environmental groups were debating whether to appeal the Engler administration’s approval of a GM permit to allow up to 270 additional tons of toxins a year to the thousands that GM already released from its nearby factories. The added toxins — largely VOCs — would result from painting GM’s new Super Sport Roadster, itself a major polluter. Neighborhood residents saw this battle as one of the few legal fronts to gain recognition and relief from decades of air pollution.

Concerned with keeping jobs in the area, Lansing’s mayor argued that “there are no health effects” from those GM factories. The Ingham County Health Department was brought in and concurred with the mayor, arguing that the increased asthma probably came from poor household indoor air or the failure of residents to seek timely medical treatment.

Behind the scenes, the mayor and GM had engaged in extremely strong lobbying tactics to persuade the neighborhood association’s leaders to vote against the appeal, which they did 9-5, according to one participant. This despite that fact that the area’s 4,000 households had suffered from solvent odors and — according to EPA’s generic analyses of ambient toxins like VOCs — had probably been impacted with poorer physical health by decades of pollution. In the end the two environmental groups also decided not to ?appeal. Officially speaking, there was nothing to be concerned about. It was all normal.

In Donora, no final study was ever produced. All the records ever gathered, according to Davis, burned in a mysterious fire. The town was eager to accept the general pronouncement that a freak of weather had accounted for what happened. It was also argued that those who had died or become ill must have been weaker in the first place. Nobody asked whether living in conditions of chronic pollution could have accounted for why so many had developed heart and lung problems.

Despite official denials and suppressions, one reason for increased environmental awareness in the United States is because of the brave work of several environmental heroes documented in a just released book written by that little girl who once played in the polluted dirt piles of Donora, Devra Lee Davis. When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution rivets us with insider detail about “how the game is played.” She provides gripping and well-documented evidence that shows over and over again how some industries manipulated information, discredited, dismissed and debunked those who warned of environmental hazards.

Smoke was nominated for the National Book Award for nonfiction in November, and was heralded in the New York Post as the “sentimental favorite” in nonfiction. The chairman of the reviewing committee told the Associated Press that Davis’ writing was among “the kinds of discoveries you make by reading as much as you can.”

Upset that she had to learn about her hometown’s pollution in a far-off classroom, Davis went forth and became a world renowned epidemiologist, a consultant to presidents and author of more than 170 articles published in Lancet, Science, Scientific American, Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Environmental Health Perspectives.

In a mythical return of the native, Davis applied her critical, epidemiological lens on Donora and unearthed something even more remarkable than the official silences. She found that for nearly a decade the death rate in this small, healthy working class town remained 50 percent higher than normal. That means there were at least 1,000 additional deaths attributable to the 1948 pollution event. Untold thousands of “non-killed” went on to suffer in various poorly understood ways.

I caught up with Davis in mid-November, just days before the National Book Award winner was announced, and again afterwards. We discussed her book, the GM pollution story and environmental journalism.

Brian McKenna: Polls show that many people don’t know where their drinking water comes from (a river or an aquifer), how to recognize a wetland, whether the smoke from the local coal-fired plant is dangerous or not. Tell me, why is there so much environmental illiteracy in the United States?

Devra Lee Davis: The environment is usually taken for granted in peoples’ lives. It’s complex. And there’s kind of a tacit understanding by people in the know — those in charge of the environment — not to rock the boat because it’s difficult and can be expensive to clean up.

Without governmental action and systems to monitor pollution, there is less awareness of environmental problems by citizens. Toxic pollution is not routinely measured and tends to occur across boundaries and borders making it harder for authorities to act upon and for local folks to obtain information. There are few incentives in federal or state government to make things better and many incentives to keep things as they are. Officials have to pick their battles and environmental problems can seem overwhelming.

In my book, I show how some subtle, regular exposures to such agents can have profound effects on our lives and that of our children. I make it clear that pollution does not cause all our health problems, but unlike those contributors to poor health that fall under the control of individuals, those that come from the environment around us can only be addressed by actions taken at the social level.

And even when money is allocated for the environment, it often gets redirected elsewhere. I know of a state health department that took federal revenue for lead screening but instead used it for street repair.

McKenna: In your book, you make the point that it is the acute or pulse event — like a killing fog or terrorist attack — that gets attention, but it is the chronic exposures that can produce the most damage. Because everybody has to breathe, the risks to the entire population can be quite large. While the slow steady rain of toxic pollutants can be difficult to measure and even more difficult to link to health problems, you said that the science is hard to do and often is left undone.

In Lansing, GM and the political establishment fought efforts to reduce its toxic emissions. Concerned with jobs over health, the mayor and GM deny that GM’s toxic pollution has any health effects, and the Ingham County Health Department concurred. What should happen there?

Davis: I must preface my remarks by saying that I know nothing about this particular case. But I find it amazing. We know that VOCs increase cancer and respiratory illnesses and have effects on reproduction. When you mention painting, the evidence is all there of potential harm. The World Health Organization reviews evidence on what it considers to be known human carcinogens. …The international Agency Research on Cancer has declared that painting as a profession is a carcinogen. We know about solvents in painting and we know that emissions need to be reduced from factories substantially.
The Toxic Release Inventory and the National Environmental Hazards Pollution Standards have succeeded in reducing some pollutants substantially, such as trichloroethylene.
As far as the local health department is concerned, this is a big problem. One shouldn’t confuse the absence of evidence with evidence that no harm has or will take place.
Lacking firm proof of human harm does not mean a given activity is safe. Maybe (local researchers) haven’t looked into it sufficiently. Maybe measurements have not been made or cannot readily be made. We need to err on the side of protecting human health.

McKenna: Why is there such a huge disconnect between the policy recommendations of federal programs and actual environmental programs in local communities? Similarly, why is there a huge gulf between the scientific findings in peer-reviewed journals (like Environmental Health Perspectives) and local communities?

Davis: Location, location, location! When there is increased pressure to do something, sometimes it’s easier to just wipe towns off the map, like they did in Reveilletown and Morristown in Louisiana. These two towns were so polluted that companies agreed to move all the residents out. Of course, we lack data on what happened to the health of those who lived in such heavily polluted areas because as part of these settlements that information remains sealed. And there are no follow-up studies done to ascertain health effects. The records are sealed from a lawsuit.

The issues are complex. None of these things change overnight. We need successful businesses and we also need to protect our health. Those who profit from business often are not those whose lives are at risk in the short term. But we now understand that toxic pollutants do not carry passports. This is why polar bears and Beluga whales are showing up with higher levels of residues than ever.

McKenna: In your work you assert that air pollution causes more illness and/or death than car accidents. Other highly respected federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are beginning to make similar points. There was a satellite broadcast from the CDC last January called Urban Sprawl: What’s Health Got To Do With It? The telecast was based on a CDC special report, which said that approximately 36,000 to 129,000 adult deaths in European cities can be attributed to long-term exposure to air pollution generated by traffic. Could you expound on that?

Davis: It’s true. Much of this is based on European studies. For example the Lancet published work by a team of researchers from the European Environment Agency and the European Union who found that air pollution from vehicles produced more deaths each year than traffic crashes in France, Austria and Switzerland. We know the same is true in the U.S. today, based on studies conducted at Harvard and elsewhere. The challenge is how to talk with city planners to better move people around. The Michigan Land Use Institute is doing excellent work in this area.

McKenna: There are some epidemiologists who are critical of your type of approach to environmental health research. I spoke with a professor at MSU about the CDC’s figures and he was highly skeptical air pollution could have that dramatic effect. He had three main complaints about environmental epidemiology. First he said he thinks “the best approach is to start with a population that already presents a given disease — say cancer or asthma — and work backwards to discern the causes.” In other words, do not start with toxic exposures and then look for the health effects. Second, he said “there is not a lot to take to the bank” in environmental epidemiology, save for a few things like the dangers of lead. And third he said “advocacy does not work well with science. Science needs relentless skepticism. You have to beat up hypotheses again and again….” How do you respond to these criticisms?

Davis: I agree with every one of those criticisms, but more needs to be said. Let’s take lead. In 1897 scientists warned of possible brain damage from lead. Ben Franklin said it was dangerous to use hot lead pipes in the printing process because of health effects. During World War I a poison gas research team warned that lead exposure could put millions of kids at risk. These and numerous other warnings and studies — some discussed in my book — were ignored because there was no proof of human harm. But there were concerns. There were some good reasons for taking precautions. Lead has now been proven to harm children and adults. So if we make the criterion of definitive proof the sole criterion, we must say we are following the philosophy, first harm people before enacting measures to prevent future harm. That’s a fundamental violation of a public health principle.

McKenna: Along that line, the MSU epidemiologist was also highly critical of those who tout the danger of pesticides. “Where’s the proof?” he said.

Davis: Really? There is a wealth of literature that leads us to urge precaution and avoidance of industrial pesticides as well as other toxic substances. My book recounts the tragedy of 20,000 men in Costa Rica who have been made sterile from working with a pesticide that was banned in the United States. Dozens of studies conducted by leading epidemiologists throughout the world make clear that workers are at high risk from pesticides, especially as they often lack protective equipment in many rapidly developing countries. But the impacts of pesticides that have been documented in humans are not limited to those of the workforce. In fact this month’s issue of Environmental Health Perspectives has an excellent article by Perara, et. al., that shows pregnant mothers who are exposed to commonly encountered levels of pesticides indoors, as well as diesel exhaust fumes, have children with lower birth weight and reduced head size.

McKenna: You recount the stories of several people like Mary Amdur who was fired from a lab at Harvard for her refusal to withdraw from public presentation her findings on the hazards of acid aerosols and Herbert Needleman who was defamed and vigorously attacked for his pioneering research showing the toxic effects of lead. Tell me, is it getting better or worse for honest environmental researchers who tackle controversial topics?

Davis: I wish I could say it’s getting better, but I’m not sure it is. We have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. I wrote this ?book as a clarion call to help draw attention to these problems. But there are many powerful forces in the country hoping that we will just go away. Recent efforts (have been made) by the Bush administration to install persons who have worked directly for the lead and coal industries as expert reviewers on senior government scientific panel. The Department of Labor’s chief lawyer is a person who argued that evidence of the hazards of heavy lifting and repetitive motion tasks was quackery. He is now charged with enforcing the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations’ laws on the same issue he opposed.

Announcements that New Source Performance Review standards will allow companies to avoid installing pollution control equipment on old coal-fired power plants represent a step backwards on air pollution. The governors of the New England states will be filing suits against the federal EPA for its newly announced effort to rollback protection in this area.

People who become scientists love to argue, to look at things from many perspectives, and to find new ways of thinking about old problems. Unfortunately, as I document in my book, it has proven quite easy to use public relations techniques to obscure science, by finding those who can disagree on some fine points. While there are legitimate issues that require additional scientific research on many fronts, those who raise these issues nowadays often have another agenda altogether. Exploiting legitimate scientific disagreements because of economic interests in maintaining profits and avoiding change is something that the tobacco industry masterminded, but it goes on today in more insidious ways.

McKenna: Not only are you a prolific epidemiological researcher and writer, but you are also very active behind the scenes. You once met conservative columnist George Will at a party and after some heated discussion on political topics, you learned that he had a child who is mentally retarded. You subsequently sent him a lot of information on the dangers of lead and he subsequently broke with conservative tradition and told President Reagan he was going to support tougher standards in his writings. This is just one of numerous examples about how you’ve worked as an educator in unusual venues to make progress on an issue. What was it in your life that spurred you to step outside research scientist role and become more of a public advocate? A border crosser?

Davis: It comes from the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam: We are commanded to heal the world. In my town of Donora you couldn’t just be a bystander. Donora had no fire department. So if there was a fire, the mill workers would send out a signal indicating what street the fire was on, and everyone would go fight the blaze.

I agree with C.P. Snow. We have to talk across disciplines and across the two chief academic cultures: science and humanities. There is a need for writers to be translators to help the culture become more literate.

I myself remain within science and continue to work with colleagues at the World Health Organization and elsewhere. But I also see that our democracy is at stake right now. Democracy rests on informed consent in civil society. How can people give consent to matters without having basic information?

McKenna: An environmental journalism professor I know and admire, and who has won numerous awards, told me that when he was writing for a paper and did an environmental story, he’d fact-checked his articles thoroughly and even wrote them up in as straight-forward way as possible, but he still was often accused of having the wrong “tone” by editors who wished to alter his text. What’s going on here?

Davis: Simply put, people want what is normal to be OK. People have a willing suspension of disbelief to get through the day. Denial is one of the most powerful emotions. It’s why abused children want to go back home to their abusive parents and why people fighting terminal illnesses try to maintain a normal rhythm to their lives.

McKenna: What do you think of the state of journalism in covering the environment? How could it be improved?

Davis: They are plagued with the epidemic of reporting both sides of an issue, even where the other side consists of true minority views that are held only by those with economic stakes in the outcome. It has really hurt us. So that often there is an issue — like climate change — where there has been a consensus of opinion by scientists for years, but then a journalist will go out and find some opposing view, often on the fringe of the field, to give the story some twist. They need to be even handed. But it’s important for a journalist to point out there is a general consensus on the science side but there is disagreement on the policy side.

McKenna: What about those writers who specialize in environmental journalism?

Davis: God Bless environmental journalists! Love Canal, Morristown, Anniston and so many other small towns have been put on the environmental map, only through the hard work of journalists who find ways to tell their stories.