As Besame has pointed out in her excellent WOW column, many women are and need to be on the front lines of the battle against climate change. So 2 weeks ago, I shared some of the stories of women who recently have been fighting for action to save our climate. Such heroines are not only recent, however, so tonight I’d like to share some other women’s stories in their historical battle for the climate. In no particular order, they include:
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) — Author of Silent Spring, one of the major books to launch the modern environmental movement. She showed that pesticides were killing a lot more than pests. Silent Spring was published and became a bestseller in 1962. Despite its popularity and inarguable conclusions, It took another 10 years before DDT was banned in the US in 1972, but we finally got there. DDT is now known to have been responsible for killing birds, almost wiping out the American bald eagle, and it is now a known carcinogen. It is highly persistent, but is finally now being found in much smaller quantities in American citizens. It was still allowed to be exported, so some countries still use it if they have severe problems controlling disease-carrying insects.
Mary Amdur (1921-1998) — Award-winning American toxicologist and public health researcher who worked primarily on the effects of smog.
Mary had become interested in air pollution following the infamous Donora, Pennsylvania, smog of 1948. She accepted the task of initiating investigations into the irritancy of sulfuric acid in human lungs, under the direction of Professor Drinker and supported by funds from the American Smelting and Refining Company (AS&R).
-snip-
Mary produced some very provocative data suggesting potentially adverse effects in human subjects who inhaled either or both sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide—the latter being the main AS&R emission and the one pollutant they did not want studied. In the early 1950s very little work had been done on the cardiopulmonary effects of inhaled pollutants, except in animal studies that typically used lethality as the end point.
-snip-
However, her findings of adverse physiologic effects in humans at relatively low concentrations—not unlike those estimated for Donora at the time of the smog incident—were met with great dismay and disparagement by the lawyers of the western smelter industries, as well as by the executives of AS&R…. Meanwhile, considerable pressure, of the financial type, was brought to bear on HSPH, and Professor Drinker specifically, to convince Mary to withdraw her presentation and delay publication of her work. Mary did not concede.... The result was termination of the project and the loss of her research associate position under Drinker, on the very day she returned from Chicago.
-snip-
In the end, Mary's Pennsylvania Dutch stubbornness and adherence to principle prevailed. She soon gained a reputation as one who could not be crossed more than once.
There is much more of her fascinating story at the link, I hope many will read it all. She eventually was vindicated when her studies became the basis for the first standards in air pollution monitoring, leading to the 1970 Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act gave the EPA some teeth to force industries to clean up their pollution.
I don’t want to overload this section, so will stop there for tonight. It is notable how persistent these women had to be for America to make progress in fighting is pollution. More next time!
In Other News:
sexual assault
From the above-referenced article:
For all the progress made in diversifying its ranks, medicine remains a boys’ club. “We signal to men in power that they can do whatever they want,” says Esther Choo, an emergency-room physician who has helped to launch a #timesuphealthcare for the medical profession. “We promote men early. We reward rock stars, the people who demonstrate virtuosity, whether it’s teaching or research or clinical care. The way we reward it in men, they never experience a check on their behavior or any meaningful feedback....
sexual harassment
'Glacial change': film industry is slow to reform despite #MeToo: “Progress towards equality in the entertainment industry has been patchy,” say campaigners.
they needed a lesson
Esther Duflo just became the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. But since one of the other two winners was her husband, here's how the Economic Times wrote the headline:
"Indian-American MIT Prof Abhijit Banerjee and Wife Wins Nobel in Economics."
https://twitter.com/…
After significant pushback on the Tweety machine, they changed the title:
Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer win 2019 Nobel Economics Prize
It should be noted that Economic Times is Indian news, thus the particular interest in Dr. Banerjee.
There was better coverage at the New Yorker, they posted this link to their 2010 profile of The Poverty Lab: Transforming development economics, one experiment at a time with photos, “A colleague has described her approach to alleviating poverty as 'a new economics being born.' "
women’s empowerment
Many women didn't pick their financial advisers. But they can fire them: If you don’t understand your investments, find someone who can make them clear to you — it’s not you, it’s them.
An Appalachian In Peru: Leah Song of Rising Appalachia rode a horse into the mountains of Peru — and found the common threads between the mountain women there and the mountain women of home.
This is the kind of story we need right now: Woman scares off cougar!
Unfortunately, that is all the time I have to post stories this week! Work calls. But please feel free to add any others in the comments! The blog is now open.
As always, this is a group project. Many thanks to officebss for her historical women’s contributions (including tonight’s), and to the WOW crew for stories, including Angmar, mettle fatigue, Tara (the Antisocial Social Worker) and Besame! I couldn’t do it without you!