When Smoke Ran Like Water by Devra Davis, HarperCollins, $26, ISBN 0465015212
Deceit and Denial by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, University of California Press, $34.95, ISBN 0520217497
American Heat by Donald A. Brown, Rowman & Littlefield, $25.95, ISBN 0742512967
At a time when the scandals at Enron and WorldCom have been dragging corporate America's reputation for truthfulness through the dirt, it is easy for cynics to write off the richest nation in history as ethically bankrupt. Easy, but wrong. As these three books show, the fightback against deceit is nowhere more fervent and scientifically coherent than in the US itself.
In the tradition of Rachel Carson, who exposed the harm done by DDT 40 years ago, epidemiologist Devra Davis is a hero with a nose for trouble. Her book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, is a testament to 20 years on the trail of environmental hazards, from the incidence of testicular cancer in the "clean rooms" of computer manufacturers to the still unknown causes of the breast cancer epidemic, to everyday hazards of breathing city air.
The beauty of this book is its ability to describe the business of epidemiology while keeping the human stories of the victims of pollution at the forefront. And she can certainly put it over. I was almost on the first train out of the city after reading: "In California, Brazil, England and every other country where scientists have bothered to look carefully, they have found something quite amazing: when folks who live in more highly polluted areas have chest pains or heart attacks, their chances of dying of heart disease are nearly 30 per cent greater than if they live in cleaner regions."
And it's personal. Her story begins with chronicles from her home town of Donora, Pennsylvania, which became famous in 1948 when smog engulfed the valley and its citizens began to die. Soon she moves on to London, which had its own "great smog" in 1952. The official death toll was 4000, but Devra reckons the real figure, which could have been three times that, was covered up. It took an American epidemiologist to reveal the full extent of Britain's worst pollution disaster.
Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner take up a similar theme in Deceit and Denial, but they spend less time investigating the scientific trails pointing to hidden hazards, and more turning up the paper trails of corporate complicity in obscuring from public gaze what their scientists knew only too well. In particular, they follow the troubling stories of how the toxicity of lead (particularly in paint) and of vinyl chloride, the main ingredient in PVC, were kept from our attention.
Some of the tricks were brazen, such as the outright denial of any fallout from the vinyl chloride factories in south Louisiana's "Cancer Alley". Some were subtle, such as the creepy newspaper advertisements that softened up the public to the idea that bright lead-based paints were safe for children's bedrooms.
Some of this is old news. But things are little better now, as environmental lawyer Donald Brown shows in American Heat. This is an essay on the duplicity of successive US administrations over the climatic catastrophe they are visiting on the planet through their indifference to global warming. And not just George Bush. Bill Clinton may have signed the Kyoto Protocol, but he presided over the fastest rise in US greenhouse gas emissions ever.
Brown likens the public's sleepwalking through this moral minefield to its indifference to segregation in the Deep South until pictures of "police dogs ripping the flesh of protesters" appeared on their televisions in the 1960s. Brown sinks his teeth into how energy companies have hijacked and subverted the ground-breaking work of American climate scientists in uncovering global warming. But he searches in vain for that flesh-ripping moment that might cut through the lies for middle America.
The climate debate awaits its Rachel Carson. But the chances are it will be an American.