Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (review)

Few cities exemplified the ugly majesty of northern industrial cities in their heyday to the degree of Pittsburgh, an urban center in which much was sacrificed to maximize industrial output, not least the natural environment. The city is thus an excellent choice to examine in detail the environmental changes wrought by rapid and relatively unchecked economic development, as well as the ways in which the leadership of the region sought to cope with the resulting problems. This book is the latest in a number of edited collections that have told the environmental history of particular cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans. Environmental history is a field that emphasizes the importance of taking into account the distinctiveness of local environments when doing history, and these urban case studies are a valuable contribution to our understanding of how geographical factors have shaped the development of metropolitan areas and the ways that urban economic development has in turn reshaped the surrounding environment.

Devastation and Renewal is a fitting capstone to the career of Joel Tarr, the dean of urban environmental historians, who has published many path-breaking articles over the years addressing urban pollution issues. In addition to the introduction and a brief afterward, Tarr is co-author of three of the volume's nine chapters, and a number of the other contributing authors apparently studied under him in the Carnegie-Mellon graduate history program. As one would expect, the book's focus is on air and water pollution, with some attention to land waste disposal, park systems, and Pittsburgh's history as a river city at the confluence of three major waterways. In addition, prominent environmental historian Samuel P. Hays—an environmental activist during his long career at the University of Pittsburgh—addresses developments in recent decades and finds a city that often falls short of its cultivated image as a progressive environmental community.

As in other cities, working-class neighborhoods often suffered the worst from pollution and lacked access to amenities available in more privileged areas. Industrial operations also were hampered by pollution. Acid mine drainage that decimated the region's waterways, for example, posed a serious challenge for steel mills and other plants that required large volumes of process water. Such problems led industry leaders in some cases to press for more stringent control of certain economic activities. More often than not, however, the prominent businessmen who enlisted in the cause of pollution control represented the financial, retail, and light industry sectors of the local economy, not the smokestack industries responsible for much of the pollution, especially in the heavily industrialized suburbs just outside the central city. This fact, along with the inability of elite reformers to cooperate effectively with Pittsburgh's ethnic working-class communities, led to the failure of many environmental initiatives prior to World War II.

By the mid-twentieth century, broader political coalitions helped bring about more effective pollution abatement, especially in the areas of smoke control and sewage treatment. Changes in technology often were key. Smoke abatement, for example, was aided greatly by households' shift from coal to natural gas for heating and railroads' switch from steam to diesel-electric locomotives. These transitions would doubtless have occurred regardless of local regulation, but the authors who examine this issue conclude that local smoke control ordinances did accelerate the adoption of these cleaner technologies.

Histories of environmental policy have tended to concentrate on developments in the Progressive Era and the period since the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the mid-1960s. Part of Devastation and Renewal's value is the focus of many of its chapters on developments during the mid-twentieth century. In an era with little federal involvement in pollution control, state and local governments relied on industrial cooperation and voluntarism to effectively positive environmental change. In Pittsburgh, this approach brought some benefits, especially when pollution reduction...