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

Pittsburgh no longer is the smoky city that breathless visitors reacted to with amazement in the latter nineteenth century. Nor is it the major source of industrial effluent that fouled the drinking water of countless communities downstream along the Ohio River. It is a city, as the essays in Joel Tarr's fine entry to the University of Pittsburgh Press's series on urban environmental histories inform us, that has witnessed both severe environmental degradation and recent restoration.

Devastation and Renewal has an exceptionally tight focus. Although there are many facets to a city's environmental history, Tarr appropriately chose to focus on pollution. As he states, "all cities possess environmental stories, but there is no city that surpasses Pittsburgh in terms of the scope of the air, land, and water pollution history and the extent to which the landscape has been altered and shaped" (p. 3). The book proceeds through four sections: one sketching a background of the local environment, the others focusing on water, atmospheric, and land pollution in turn. Tarr's hand is evident in three substantive chapters, plus the introduction, afterword, and numerous photographs. Several authors either were students of Tarr's or have enjoyed his guidance and support as they pursued their studies. His influence makes for an unusually cohesive collection.

Tarr opens and closes the volume with a description of a walk through one of the large urban parks in Pittsburgh, the aim being to show that nature persists in the city despite past environmental abuses. In the opening chapters Tarr and Edward Muller chronicle the expanding impact of human society on Pittsburgh's site. Hemmed in by rugged topography and meandering rivers, city builders had to constantly reshape nature to serve the needs of a growing urban and industrial center. Smokestack industries eventually shrouded the city, but in recent years their decline has led to opportunities for renewal.

Public policy and technology are prominent themes throughout. Tarr and Terry Yosie trace a familiar sequence: stream pollution and adjustments in sewage disposal as downstream expectations changed. Nicholas Casner offers a fresh discussion of acid mine drainage and the immense damage caused by the extraction of coal, concluding that an early practice of sealing mines was only a short-lived solution to an ongoing problem. Three essays treat atmospheric pollution. Angela Gugliotta offers a nuanced account of how Pittsburghers came to think about smoke in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lynn Snyder recounts the Donora disaster of 1948 and offers important conclusions about subsequent public policy. Sherie Mershon teams with Tarr to examine incremental changes in public policy between 1940 and 1960; they note that air quality improvement resulted more from a shift in fuel preferences than from policy. Sam Hays agrees that the shift in fuel had more to do with improvement than actions of business and civic leaders, and his observations are borne out by Andrew McElwaine's chapter tracing incessant slag dumping despite efforts to curtail it. In some ways, however, Hays challenges the editor's title, Devastation and Renewal. There has been renewal in the Pittsburgh region; several authors make this point persuasively. Yet Tarr concedes that "there are many obstacles to Pittsburgh reaching a new level of environmental excellence" (p. 217).

Just as Pittsburgh has room for improvement, so this volume is not without shortcomings. Expanded discussions on the uneven social impact of pollution and more detailed cartography would have proven valuable additions. Such minor weaknesses aside, Devastation and Renewal is a considerable contribution to urban environmental history. Unsurpassed among similar edited collections in its thematic focus, it provides a locally based view of urban pollution problems during the last century and a half that has implications for cities nationwide.