(Books)

Illustration by Tavis Coburn

toxic TRUTHS

Tales of poisons and public health.

—By Keith Kloor

Deceit and Denia: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution
By Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner
University of California Press, 408 pages, $34.95

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution
By Devra Davis
Basic Books, 316 pages, $26

Remember those early, heady days of the Bush administration? In quick succession, George W. pulled the United States out of the Kyoto global-warming treaty, reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and suspended strict new standards for arsenic in drinking water. The last action especially cheered the mining industry, whose operations often release arsenic and other toxic-metal runoff into groundwater. President Bill Clinton had instituted the tough new arsenic rules late in his second term, after the National Academy of Sciences determined in a 1999 report that high levels of arsenic in water cause bladder, lung, and skin cancer. Public outrage over President Bush's action forced the administration to quickly relent and keep the existing arsenic rules intact.

Since then the White House has advanced a stealthier attack on environmental regulations (see "Read the Fine Print," in "Field Notes"). Of particular concern to public health experts is the administration's recent stacking of federal advisory committees with scientists and consultants connected to industry. Many of President Bush's recent appointees to two environmental committees that help set guidelines on acceptable levels of exposure to lead, pesticides, and other contaminants have long-standing ties to chemical and petroleum companies.

That such scientists are now in a position to influence federal policy on environmental-health issues will come as no surprise to those who read Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. As the authors lay out in two extensively researched case studies, the lead and plastics industries have long manipulated government regulatory levers and public opinion like master puppeteers.

Consider the disturbing history of lead-based products in America—which Markowitz and Rosner masterfully reconstruct—beginning with the promotion of Ethyl gasoline and Dutch Boy paint during the first half of the 20th century. Despite early and accumulating evidence of the toxicity of lead and lead additives, advertisements relentlessly hyped them as healthy and integral to the country's economic and social well-being. Gasoline ads went so far as to equate lead with vitamins, portraying children in cars eating fruits and vegetables. Another ad for lead touted its variety of uses in the home, including in water pipes and freshly painted walls, and featured the tag line "Lead helps to guard your health."

In the 1920s, when workers in lead factories began dying from lead poisoning (one front-page New York Times headline: "Odd gas kills one, makes four insane"), industry downplayed the incidents and ratcheted up its marketing campaign to assuage public fears.

When pediatricians started reporting incidents of lead poisoning in children (from ingesting peeling, lead-laced paint, for instance) in the 1930s, the industry brushed them off and quashed calls for regulation by coaxing government overseers to sign off on company-sponsored research that demonstrated lead's safety.

Since the 1960s more and more doctors have been documenting lead paint's damaging effects on children—including neurological impairment—only to watch industry-paid scientists challenge their findings. Markowitz and Rosner, historians at New York City's John Jay College and Columbia University, respectively, liken the story of lead to that of a "guerrilla war fought by small groups of doctors and a few public-health officials—against the giant lead corporations."

Of course, such behavior is no longer so shocking or even revelatory. Many environmentalists know that Rachel Carson endured vicious and slanderous attacks after revealing the dangers of pesticides in the early 1960s. And before that the chemical industry ran magazine advertisements with dancing vegetables singing "DDT is good for me-e-e!"

Eventually, after the growing body of evidence became too damning to ignore, lead was phased out of paint, in 1978, and out of gasoline, starting in the mid-1980s. In the years that followed, public health researchers noted a nationwide decrease in lead levels in children's blood. (People had stopped breathing leaded gas fumes.)

The book's other featured case study chronicles an outright cover-up by the chemical industry during the mid-1960s, when companies hid their own research showing that vinyl chloride, a crucial component of plastic, had possible cancer-causing properties and was linked to a degenerative bone disease in workers. Although this sorry episode—and to a lesser extent, lead's snake-oil history—has been previously reported, Deceit and Denial is so muscularly researched that it reads like a scholarly criminal indictment. The authors have marshaled an impressive body of evidence—from archival materials to legal documents—in depicting industry's disregard for worker safety and public health. Their exhaustively detailed account is at times numbing, but in the end it adds up to a tawdry history "strikingly similar to that of the asbestos and tobacco industries."

For Devra Davis, a scientist and public health advocate who has often crossed swords with industry, environmental pollution is a personal matter. She hails from Donora, Pennsylvania, a small factory town that made national headlines during one week in 1948, when 20 residents died and 7,000 people—half the town's population—were hospitalized with breathing ailments. Gases from Donora's zinc smelters and steel mills got trapped in the town's air, forming what was then referred to as a dense and mysterious "killer" fog.

In When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Davis revisits the tragedy and describes the toll it took on her family members, many of whose lives were thereafter plagued with heart disease—even after moving out of Donora. She connects the plight of her family, and other Donora residents, with that of the 60,000 to 120,000 Americans who she asserts are killed every year by air pollution. And this, she is quick to note, is after pollution levels "have dropped dramatically—nearly fiftyfold—from the days when most urban areas could be smelled before they could be seen."

Still, as Davis observes, "environmental contamination is never listed as the cause of death on anyone's death certificate," so pollution remains largely an invisible, unacknowledged killer. "The National Center for Health Statistics can tell us how many mothers have anemia, diabetes, or hypertension," she writes. "It cannot tell us how many of them live within one mile of a hazardous waste dump, drink water whose contaminants exceed recommended limits, or regularly breathe dirty air."

Davis's lifelong mission—as recounted in her book (a 2002 nonfiction National Book Award nominee)—has been to reorder the way society measures pollution and its effects on human health, so that the links are better identified. Her own research as an epidemiologist has helped pave the way. But she is the first to admit that a new public health paradigm will be no easy feat, since science proceeds cautiously, shying away from pronouncements of certainty (which industry, on the other hand, has used to great advantage).

Nonetheless, when it comes to industrial pollution, Davis, like Markowitz and Rosner, calls for proactive regulations that err on the side of caution. Davis, in particular, asks: Why does society wait for dead bodies or sick people to count before banning dangerous chemicals or severely limiting the amount of toxic emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes? After all, she reasons, "we do not wait for buildings or bridges to collapse before reinforcing them or inspecting them for safety."

With industry-friendly scientists now the dominant voice on the federal advisory committees that are charged with examining the links between environmental pollutants and human health, it would seem that Davis and like-minded advocates have a tough challenge ahead. But their work serves as a welcome beacon to those who wish to follow in their tracks.

Editors' Choice

ART OF THE WILD
Trout and Salmon of North America
Chanticleer Press, 355 pages, $40
This lyrical yet scientifically precise book, elegantly illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri, is the culmination of Professor Robert J. Behnke's 50-year crusade for trout and salmon. Evident in his prose is his love for these beautiful fish (three of which he rediscovered after they had been declared extinct), his commitment to their restoration, and his rage at those who would mix, pollute, and waste their genes. Behnke, commonly and accurately referred to as the leading authority on salmonids, is said to have "written the book" on them. But until now this was only figuratively true. His previous major works have been published and edited by scientists who have red-penciled into oblivion his passion and advocacy. This time it all survives.

—Ted Williams

Conservation in the Internet Age: Threats and Opportunities
Edited by James N. Levitt
Island Press, 365 pages, $30
Conservationists who use the Internet to do everything from research to e-mail activism embrace it as an answer to their prayers. "[But] we are only beginning to understand [its] constructive potential and possible disruptive impact on biodiversity, land use, and the environment," writes James N. Levitt, the director of the Internet and Conservation Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the editor of this collection of insightful essays. Almost no one considered the federal Interstate Highway System's environmental consequences when it was launched in the 1950s. Nor has anyone given much thought, until this important work, as to how the growth of the Internet has spurred development throughout the country by "increasing people's ability to travel, live, and work where they like," particularly in sensitive rural areas. Conservation in the Internet Age: Threats and Opportunities provides numerous blueprints for harnessing new technologies to actually improve land-use decisions. Toward that end, an essay coauthored by Audubon science director Frank Gill shows how BirdSource has mobilized 50,000 citizen scientists to track local bird populations, thus providing "an unprecedented opportunity for reading the pulse of the landscape and long-term biological changes."

—David Seideman

The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World
Edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy
Milkweed Editions, 210 pages, $18.95
"The earth speaks in many languages, but only in one voice," writes Enrique Salmon, a Mexican ethnobotanist based in Durango, Colorado. In The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, Salmon and 16 other writers contribute their own voices to expand the reader's understanding of the natural world. The essays are as diverse as their authors, but the pieces all converge through the lens of cultural identity—be it Native American, Chicano, Hawaiian, Japanese, Mestizo, Lebanese, or African-American. From the colonization of the New World and the legacy of slavery to today's environmental racism and ecological degradation, these topics serve as a springboard to reaffirm the writers' connections to the environment and to one another. Variations in style and tone ensure an engaging read, as the essays are often infused with personal anecdotes, native mythology, and language, history, and poetry. Notable essays by Al Young, Joseph Bruchac, and Yusef Komunyakaa are particularly eloquent, but each writer brings an inspiring vision to this important collection.

—Alyssa Worsham

Confronting Consumption
Edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca
The MIT Press, 382 pages, $26.95
Contrary to popular belief, purchasing "ecofriendly" laundry detergent and organic-juice boxes will not lead directly to a healthier planet, argue the editors of Confronting Consumption. At least not by itself. Laying the responsibility for conserving our natural resources at the feet of individuals dangerously encourages them to become consumers first and citizens second, the editors write, spurring ever more product growth while ignoring the institutional forces that shape our choices. Nor is simplifying lifestyles—by shopping less and walking more, for instance—the entire answer. To strive for true sustainability, we must combine these steps with collective action against the interests that erode society's capacity for restraint. This requires following power upstream through the chain of production, challenging suppliers, corporations, marketers, policy makers, and the media to assume responsibility for the ecological consequences at each link. The editors ultimately craft a convincing case "not just to confront consumption but to transform the structures that sustain it."

—Jennifer Bogo

© 2003  NASI

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