The Killer Fog

When green politics masquerades as environmental science.

Todd Seavey from the April 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

In a way, this shift in Davis' tone is fitting: It reflects a real change in the environmental movement during the last 30 years. The problem of severe air pollution has been diminishing in the industrialized world, and that change has sent environmentalists in pursuit of more nebulous threats. Groups such as Greenpeace, which once addressed problems visible to the naked eye -- smoggy air, garbage-filled rivers -- now warn of minuscule or hypothetical risks from industrial chemicals or biotechnology.

Some parts of the developing world, such as Mexico City and China, face increasing levels of pollution, as Davis documents. Air quality has become measurably worse in some places as industrial activity has increased and population has grown denser -- but it should not be inferred from this trend that our own pollution problems are getting worse.

Why has air pollutionlessened in the developed world? The past few decades have seen a combination of cleaner technologies and regulations that have limited emissions from factories, cars, and other sources. Whether the regulations that helped create those improvements should have been more market-based is open to debate. (Indeed, that debate was reopened in November, when the Bush administration rolled back some parts of the Clean Air Act, allowing companies and local governments greater flexibility in choosing the most efficient means of reaching pollution-reduction goals.) There is little question, though, that when people become wealthy enough to turn their attention to subtle problems like pollution (instead of more immediate ones like starvation), they do so, and the developing world will no doubt follow the same pattern in short order.

Pollution is, among other things, a violation of property rights and bodily integrity; one need not sign on to a radical green agenda to object to it. One ought, however, to avoid extrapolating from the environmental movement's past victories to the conclusion that today's vaguer, more dubious threats are producing a hidden body count as great as the one produced in decades past. Furthermore, one should avoid depicting those who doubt such threats as stubborn, obstructionist tools of industry. But Davis remembers how reluctant Donora's mill owners were to shut down during the "killer fog," and she repeatedly implies that her intellectual opponents in more recent decades are equally obtuse and malevolent.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that one writer she attacks (for his criticism of recent air pollution epidemiology) is Joel Schwartz, who has done work for both the Web site I edit, HealthFactsAndFears.com, and the Reason Public Policy Institute, a think tank operated by the foundation that publishes this magazine. Davis says Schwartz and all such critics of environmentalism are playing "public relations games" and "hindering legitimate science." Again and again, when the work of Davis and her allies is questioned, she simply dismisses her opponents as industry mouthpieces. Any link to industry, no matter how indirect, is sufficient to call into question the objectivity of scientists and commentators who doubt Davis.

Apparently, though, no bias is created by growing up in a town where numerous people reportedly were killed by industrial pollution; believing that several members of your own family have heart disease because of that pollution; grieving for your beloved Uncle Len's death in the L.A. smog; or being on friendly terms with people like the alternative medicine guru Mitchell Gaynor. In the foreword to Davis' book, Gaynor assures readers that her fears about pollution -- and his own -- are based on "abundant evidence" and "voluminous scientific literature." Perhaps, but it is worth noting that Gaynor also believes in using noise-making "Tibetan singing bowls" to combat cancer.

Davis goes to great lengths to describe her more orthodox views on epidemiological methodology with textbook clarity, but when it comes to more controversial matters -- precisely when we most need her to be clear and forceful -- she glides quickly over her opponents' objections, pausing only to describe them as flacks for polluting companies. So you will learn nothing here about whether high-dose animal experiments really are good predictors of human health effects, or whether there are minimum doses of pollution (as with most poisons) below which we need not fear health effects. On such questions, Davis in effect asks us to trust her intuitions, intuitions shaped by her own unusual experiences and strongly held beliefs.

Even Davis' concluding anecdote, metaphorical and inconsequential though it is, calls her accuracy into question. After noting that she is now involved in a group that seeks to combine religious life with environmental concerns, Davis tells us that she heard a traditional Midrash fable in childhood, a fable that she now sees as a metaphor for her struggle against pollution.

In the original story, she says, a female rabbi is rescuing starfish on the beach by throwing them back into the water. A little boy tells her that her efforts cannot make a difference because the beach will be covered with starfish again the next day. The rabbi tosses another starfish out to sea and says, "Made a difference to that one."

Cute, noble, defiant. A great little story. But since the first female rabbi in the United States was not ordained until 1972, how plausible is it that a girl growing up in the 1950s would have heard a Midrash story featuring one? I do not ask out of a desire to defend patriarchal religious traditions. I ask because it is one of those nagging little details that leave the reader wondering whether Devra Lee Davis is as sure of her facts as she is of her mission.

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