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Book Review
| Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and its Region. Edited by Joel A. Tarr. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. viii + 281 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, list of contributors, index. $32.00.
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| Following the lead of Andrew Hurley, who edited a collection of essays on St. Louis' environmental history (Missouri Historical Society, 1997), Joel Tarr has gathered the work of a number of fine historians who have studied Pittsburgh's environment. Ostensibly the result of a conference held in Pittsburgh in 2000, this collection is really the result of extensive research on the city's environment conducted over two decades, much of it under the guidance and support of Tarr himself. |
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Urban specialists will find some familiar work here, including a troika of air pollution essays, in which Lynn Page Snyder treats the 1948 Donora disaster, Angela Gugliotta quickly assesses of the fight for clean air in the first half of the twentieth century, and Joel Tarr, with the aid of Sherie Mershon, revisits the successful campaign to control smoke in the 1940s, here adding a comparison between the city and the county. Among the three essays on water are Tarr's and Terry Yosie's accounting of both supply and sewage management in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and Nicholas Casner's summation of his dissertation work on acid mine drainage. In a new piece, Edward Muller offers a fine summary of Pittsburgh's existence as a "River City," noting the role of the region's rivers in sparking industrial growth and providing postindustrial opportunities for natural aesthetics and recreation. |
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Taken altogether, these essays offer good evidence of the devastation wrought on the region's environment by intensive industrialization. In Tarr's estimation, included in the brief introduction, no city surpasses Pittsburgh in "the extent to which its landscape has been altered and shaped" (p. 3). However, the two outstanding essays of this collection speak more specifically to the issue of Pittsburgh's more recent recovery from environmental destruction. One hopes that Andrew S. McElwaine's essay on Nine Mile Run's use as a slag dump and its recent New Urbanist rebirth as the Summerset development is part of a larger forthcoming work on changing urban land use, for it offers glimpses of important themes in twentieth-century cities. The real gem of this book may be Samuel Hays's analysis of Pittsburgh's recent environmental activism. While many of the essays allude to a turning point in Pittsburgh's environmental history—toward the "renewal" announced in the title—Hays warns against a self-congratulatory attitude in the formerly smoky city. According to Hays, active in the environmental movement in Pittsburgh for decades, whatever renewal has occurred, it has not been the result of an effective environmental culture in Pittsburgh. |
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In other places Tarr has encouraged environmental historians to explore more fully the histories of urban places. The quality of the work here provides good evidence that historians no longer need to be called to this important task. Still, at key points this volume also awkwardly maintains a distance between "nature" and the "built environment." It is time to fully absorb the lessons of our field. Just as there is no line on the map over which one might travel from the built environment into the natural world, there can be no boundary that separates our field. People have always lived in environments that contained mixtures of cultural and natural elements. |
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David Stradling is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America (John Hopkins, 1999) and the editor of Conservation in the Progressive Era (University of Washington, 2004). |
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