When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Hood, Clifton

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution. By Devra Lee Davis. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xx 316 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Paper $16.95.

From Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet (Little, Brown, 1948) to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) and Paul R. Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Random House, 1968), the literature of American environmentalism is replete with books that raise warnings about new dangers to human health or environmental quality. In When Smoke Ran Like Water, Devra Lee Davis, a toxicologist who has researched the environmental causes of diseases such as breast cancer and served on scientific advisory boards appointed by the federal government to assess pollution, steps forward as the latest Paul Revere to sound the alarm against toxic chemicals.

The book operates simultaneously on four different levels. On the most fundamental level, Davis provides detailed and contextualized accounts of several major pollution episodes, including the 1948 Donora inversion and London's 1952 "killer fog," and the emergence of smog in Los Angeles and elsewhere. She also explores the chronic health risks posed by toxic chemicals by investigating, for instance, the environmental sources of breast cancer and male infertility.

The second level is an examination of the ways that toxicologists and epidemiologists have created knowledge about pollution's impact on human health and developed standards for measuring it. Acknowledging that environmental epidemiology is "a blunt instrument," Davis nonetheless faults the health system for a preoccupation with the discrete causes of individual deaths that prevents it from coming to terms with the role that environmental contaminants play in mortality (p. xvii). Davis also chronicles how institutional science has produced, filtered, and, at times, impeded the realization that substances such as tobacco, carbon monoxide, and lead are hazardous. This discussion of scientific process leads Davis to the next level of her inquiry, an analysis of the regulatory politics of environmental science. This is the topic that lies at the book's heart: Davis contends that corporate interests and their academic retainers have mounted "industry-financed disinformation campaign[s]" that manipulate scientific procedures such as peer review in order to continue discharging harmful pollutants like the gasoline additive trichloroethylene and the synthetic rubber ingredient butadiene (p. 133). Davis calls for the adoption of a new standard for determining if an agent is toxic, one that would replace the existing regime that requires definitive evidence of danger in order for a chemical to be banned by shifting the burden of proof onto polluters and compelling them to show that their substances are safe.

The fourth level involves the issue of persuasion in environmental science. For all her scientific background, Davis uses science primarily as a credential. More important as sources of her authority are the fact that she was born in Donora and that her family experienced its inversion crisis and that many of her relatives were victims of the Holocaust, as well as her evocative writing style. For Davis, toxic chemicals are ultimately a moral problem that involve human suffering. Although this moral designation is hardly invalid or inappropriate, it raises questions about standards of proof in scientific argument that Davis does not address.

This important and provocative book deserves to be widely read and debated.

Clifton Hood is associate professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is writing a cultural and social history of economic elites in New York City.