An Interview with Patty DeMarco

By Karen Elias

“It shouldn’t be the case that you have to suffer pollution and hazardous and dangerous working conditions in order to have a good job”: An Interview with Patty DeMarco

Patty DeMarco is a native of Pittsburgh, PA. with a doctorate in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh. She has spent a fifty-year career in energy and environmental policy in both private and public sector positions. She served as Executive Director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association (2006-2011) and as Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University where she holds an appointment as Senior Scholar and Adjunct Faculty (2011-present). She holds the position of Vice President of the Forest Hills Borough Council and sits on the Board of Trustees for Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and for The Allegheny Land Trust.  Her first book, Pathways to Our Sustainable Future (published by the U. of Pittsburgh Press in 2017), explores positive pathways toward sustainability.  Her most recent book, In the Footsteps of Rachel Carson: Harnessing Earth’s Healing Power, was published by Urban Press in December 2022.  Patty is also the winner of multiple awards, including the Penn Future Women and William R. Freudenburg Lifetime Achievement Awards, and the Carnegie Science Award in Environment.  Patty was interviewed by Campfire Dispatch board member, Karen Elias.

Karen Elias: Could you begin by talking a bit about your close-knit family?

Patty DeMarco:  My grandparents came from Italy, where they were farmers. My grandfather was also a skilled stone mason, so he wasn’t in the coal mines but worked for the railroad. The whole family was involved in working the quarter-acre garden, dividing the labor guided by my grandparents.  My earliest memories were focused around taking care of that little plot, which fed all of us with fresh vegetables and fruits. That was true not just for our little strip of land, but for the entire street!  Most families had come from the same neighborhood in Italy, and so all the children were conscripted labor, all the way through the teen years, sharing the work on the gardens, harvesting, canning, and carrying things from house to house as needed. It was a wonderful way to grow up because we saw our place in the world. We knew who we were, we knew where we belonged. 

My grandparents’ stories of where they had come from transferred to Pittsburgh.  We had grapes and the figs that my grandfather brought in his vest pocket from Italy. He planted cherry, pear and peach trees along the borders, and the grapes grew up to the second floor. It was a connection to the old country in the living plants that we had, and in the traditions of their care.  We made wine, and we put up tomato sauce—and we fed everybody. The generosity of a shared community was, I think, something that is a great gift from my heritage.

KE:  I agree. You grew up with all those earthly gifts, right at hand. So do you connect that to your ability to derive such comfort from the earth?

PDM:  Yes. Partly because when I sit in my garden or a park, no matter where I went, I would take comfort from connecting to the creatures that were there. When we were traveling all over the world — the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil — the things that were constant were the plants and animals, the butterflies and insects around us. For me as a child, that was the part that didn’t change. Very few things stay with you when you’re moving every two years. So what became constant for me was: What does the sun look like when it comes up HERE?  And what does the night sky look like HERE? I sang a little song with my Nona: “I see the moon, and the moon sees me,” and I remembered her voice in my mind. Wherever I am, she is seeing the same moon, and we are on the same planet. It was a way to connect across the distance. It’s a source of comfort to notice the little things of nature that, if you see them, and appreciate them, they give you joy.

KE:  So how about your grandmother? She seemed especially important.

PDM:  Well, my Nona Pasqualina was my mentor. I lived upstairs from her until I was five, and she was also my refuge when I was in my rebellious teenage years. She taught me to cook, because I was the one who went to help her when  we were feeding twenty people for Sunday dinner. So I would go and stay the night before, and go to church with her at 6:30 AM Mass. Then we would come home and make food for the whole family who would arrive at noon or so, and stay talking over all the problems of the week till late in the evening. I learned to do all of the things hands-to-hands from her. I wrote her recipes down and have  given them to my children,  siblings and to my nieces, so we’ve all learned her way. My Nona was my touchstone for many years in my life.

KE:  I was really struck by that passage in your book where you talk about how they converted their land to this productive farm that fed you for 50 years!

PDM: When my grandfather sold the house to live with my parents toward the end of his life– he was 97 — the people who bought the property took it back to a suburban backyard, and it just broke my heart. When I talked to the lady who bought his house, she was so proud of it. She said, “Oh, we got rid of all that old dirt.” She said it took them five years to get rid of that fig tree. “It just kept coming up no matter what we did.” I saw the remnant of a little grapevine along the fence in one place, and I just thought, “It isn’t mine anymore.” But I now have a fig tree in my yard, and so do my brother and sister. So that tradition is still with us.  

No matter where we went, we took away from that time the sense of community, the sense of caring , the sense of generosity to everyone else. If you came to my Nona’s house, she would say (in Italian), “Did you eat yet?” And then she would offer food, no matter who you were or where you were from, whether you stopped in to deliver something, or to have your letters read. She would read the letters from the Old Country for people. She could read and write Italian and English so, when a letter came from people in Italy, my Nona would read what had been written and write the response to send back. Her kitchen table was the center of all the gossip from both sides of the ocean. So we had that sense of community that kept us really close for a long time. 

KE:  How about your travels?  Talk a bit about that and your time in Alaska.  

PDM:  Well, I lived many years in Connecticut, and I went to Alaska after I got divorced. It was going to be temporary, but I ended up staying ten years. This is the story of many people who go to Alaska. It draws you in. I think if I hadn’t missed my family so deeply, I would have stayed longer. It happened that I had cancer while I was there, and for many weeks I sat by the edge of my pond trying not to move because it hurt to breathe. I sat so still, the wild  creatures would come to me. I got to know the various families of ducks that came to the pond every year, and I saw the lynx and the moose close-by.

So I wrote my observations — I have a stack of hand-written journals kept over many years. I decided at one point to just start typing them all. But I didn’t want to include everything because, when I had cancer, I would not speak of it to people. If they asked me how I am: “I’m fine, I’m doing really well, I’m going to get better, I’m fine.” But I wrote — and some of these entries I could barely read because the neuropathy in my fingers was such that my writing was very poor. My anger, my fear, my frustration, my sense of betrayal — everything, I would write in my journal, and then I closed it. And that was how I got rid of it: I write about it, I close it, I don’t speak about it. I did not give cancer my words. But at the same time, while I was sitting, just healing, receiving the creatures around me, the messages from the living world, the observations, and the cycles of nature, the cycles of life, just the incidents of things you don’t notice unless you’re sitting very still — those I wrote too. And so that’s the part I lifted up to share in my book. The parts that give healing.  

I think the process of daily meditation and journaling is very helpful, no matter what stage of life you’re in. It documents your time. For example, I note what’s blooming, what’s the condition of the garden at any given time. You can track the changes– like this February is so different than last February and the one before. I know there is definitely a difference in the state of the climate and the state of the growing cycle. And then we get to July and August, and we haven’t had rain for ten weeks. . . . It’s not normal. And these things I document — like Thoreau did, actually. You know, if you look at Faith in a Seed by Henry D. Thoreau, this is classic, old -fashioned botany. Just notice what is there, write it down, and date it. My father told me one time that a document without a date is useless. He had a point because it does frame a time and a context. 

KE:  Talk about Rachel Carson and about how your journey has been similar.

PDM:  Rachel Carson grew up in Springdale along the Allegheny River and spent her early life here until she graduated from the Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham University, in 1929. Her upbringing was very much in the woods where she would flee to escape the tasks of the day. As the youngest child, she was kept close and schooled by her mother. I spent time at the Rachel Carson Homestead, literally in that house, kind of absorbing what her life would have been like, from 1907 to 1929, an industrially intense time in Pittsburgh. 

I was born at the tail end of that industrial period before the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and I read of her outrage at the pollution and the destruction of the environment that was a result of the industrial activity of her time. I also experienced that in my time. In the 1950s and ‘60s I remember the soot coming down on everything. Soap advertisements advised housewives how to deal with “ring around the collar” because your neck gets sooty because it’s in the air. People wore brimmed hats to keep soot from falling on their faces. We hung clothes under the porch instead of out in the sun so you wouldn’t get cinders in them. We washed the curtains every week because they would be black by Wednesday. Imagine what our lungs are like! So I shared Rachel Carson’s outrage at these conditions. I remember complaining to my dad, “Why does it smell so bad over here?” Because we would drive over across the city, through the Clairton Mills and the Homestead Works. And he’d say, “Don’t you complain about that, that’s the smell of money.” And I would say, “If that’s what money smells like, I don’t want any.” 

When I was a graduate student, the Monongahela River was as acid as vinegar and it would fume from the phenol, and there would be periodic “Don’t Drink the Water” signs. It was many years before there was a sufficient impact from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And even when I came back to Springdale, in 2006, people still felt that Rachel Carson was responsible for closing the mills – because of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.  And though those were enacted a decade after she died, they still blamed Rachel Carson.  

I felt like it shouldn’t be the case that you have to suffer pollution and hazardous and dangerous working conditions in order to have a good job. We must have a way to have both. So that’s what I work for. I work for having a future where people don’t have to get sick in order to have a job. And to rethink the framework so we can live in harmony with Nature..  

Rachel Carson was an inspiration to me because, first of all, she was a woman scientist, and I was interested in science from a very young age, when there were very few role models. And second, she was so eloquent. I found her writing something I went back to again and again because I found meaning and inspiration from what she wrote. You look at the writing in The Sea Around Us, and it’s really poetic and prophetic. She talks about the formation of the waves and the formation of islands and how the currents connect different parts of the world . . .  It’s absolutely beautiful writing. 

I found that communicating about science as a foundation for public policy was something we shared – because that was what she did: she brought science into the world of public policy. She was one of the first people to talk about the effects of environmental contaminants on workers. She was one of the first to raise the concern that we think ahead about the fate of the things we’re making. Contaminants don’t stay where you put them, they travel according to the laws of nature into the environment. And if they can’t be absorbed into the biosphere safely, then they do damage. That has been the theme that I’ve tried to lift up in my own work, the sense that you have to be aware of what you’re sending into the biosphere as a by-product of industrial activities. That’s the cost that is not borne by the company but by the society. So we take raw material, turn products into trash as rapidly as possible, the profits go to the corporation – and the damages go to the tax-payers. It’s upside-down. Let’s realign our way of living to be in harmony with the laws of nature. The laws of nature are not negotiable.

KE:  When did you first think of yourself as a writer?

PDM:  I don’t know.  I guess I still wonder if I’m a real writer. But my dad was a writer, and he taught technical writing at Pitt. My earliest experiences in writing were my father putting red marks all over what I thought was a finished paper.  

KE: Oh no!

PDM:  I got hands-on tutorial experience of the most direct sort with my dad! We had a flint-sparking relationship because we were too much alike, so we argued a lot. But when I moved away, we wrote, and in our writing we were closer because we were very much aligned in our souls. He had a poet’s heart. He would open his letters, “Dear Patty, the roses are blooming” – we’d planted roses together – and he would tell me how each of them were doing, and that he’d found a praying mantis, or something of that nature, and then he’d head in to what he was writing the letter about. And I would do the same, write back to him these natural history groundings based on common affection for the things that grew around us. And I think that’s where I really learned how to write. 

I would listen to the end of his classes because we commuted together at Pitt when I was a student, and I would hear the second half of his technical writing class. Now, he was teaching engineers and making them read Thackeray and Shakespeare! He told them: “Language is what makes the difference from everybody else who can do these computations. When you’re putting in your application for a job or for your grant application, everybody is going to check all those boxes. What’s going to make the difference is the one who tells the best story.” He’s absolutely right.  And I’m sure his students didn’t appreciate the value of what he was trying to tell them when he made them read Thackeray and Shakespeare. Then, of course, we’d talk about it on the way home in the car while we were sitting in traffic.

 I think about his perspective on the importance of writing well and clearly, with persuasion – he would always tell me I use too many words. He’d say to me, “Patty, here is a perfect sentence: Christ cried.” That’s the perfect sentence – it has importance, it has meaning, it has emotion. He said, “Read it out loud; if you have to take more than one breath when you’re reading a sentence, then it’s too long.” 

Rachel Carson did that. She read her work aloud, or had someone read it to her, especially when she was writing Silent Spring because she had iritis from the radiation treatments, and her eyes would tire easily. She would have Shirley Briggs read to her what she had written the night before, and she would edit so the words flowed smoothly. Writing for the ear is different than writing for just reading. It’s different than writing for filling out a report or a form. If you want to know what’s in the heads of your readers, you read it out loud. And so I do that, I read my writing out loud, to my cat mostly. Now I do think of myself as a writer, and I have a third book pending a final contract.

KE:  Can you talk about that?

PDM:  I’ve been involved with the Reimagine Appalachia project. And actually before Reimagine Appalachia, I was a keynote speaker for several of the Reimagine projects that the League of Women Voters did in Pennsylvania because I had finished Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, and so I was helping to articulate a vision of what a sustainable future looks like. People will not move to what they cannot visualize, so I wrote twenty-three case studies in this book, describing projects that move in the direction of a sustainable future. The Reimagine process started with Heather Harr in Reimagine Beaver, Reimagine Butler, the Lehigh Valley, in Johnstown, in Meadville, and  we did one in Wheeling, West Virginia, in collaboration with the Ohio League of Women Voters. People from West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania came to that one. 

We were seeking a different fate for the Ohio River Valley than the plastics hub that the industry proposed – of which the Shell Appalachia plant is the only remnant; the other four have withdrawn. We started by saying, “Is this the fate we want for our children, for our valley, for our future?” We held forty-five listening sessions, with 1,500 people across four states, all on Zoom because it was COVID-19 time. We pulled together issue papers out of those listening sessions and engaged researchers and people who were expert in those fields. We also invited the legislative representatives of our area. They would come to our working sessions, so when they started writing the Build Back Better bill into laws, we’re feeding them issue papers because we had these 1,500 people behind us. When a senator would get to a point where he’d say, “Well, I don’t know whether I can support this,” 200 of his constituents would call him. It works! People from their own districts got on the phone, or on e-mail, or in their office saying, “You gotta support this because if we can’t remediate our abandoned mine lands, we can’t live here.” “You need to support this because the companies have gone bankrupt and we have black lung. We have no pensions, and our health benefits have gone.”  “You have to support this because we want to restore the fertility of the land. We don’t want jobs that we don’t like in a place we don’t want to go. We want to live here, and we want to thrive here.”  Much of the Reimagine Appalachia Blueprint has been incorporated into law already.

Reimagine Appalachia is a loose collaboration of about fifty organizations. Most of the issue papers and studies are on a website. If they get unfunded, or decide they’re done, or decide they’re moving on to implementation and they need to update with other material, that whole process will be lost. So I want to write this amazing policy success story into a book. It will be published with Springer Elsevier Press through the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences. So that’s my third book: Reimagine Appalachia: Healing the Land and Empowering the People. 

So this is what I take away from Rachel Carson: she led a purpose-driven life, so that even in her last days, when she was really sick, she struggled to finish Silent Spring, though it cost her dearly. She held a deep conviction that you cannot know and not speak out. She put forward the message of precaution that we cannot continue poisoning the earth if we intend to live on it. And that is what drove her forward and sustained her through all of the tribulations that she faced, and there were many. She was way ahead of her time. Being a woman in that prescient position really was her gift, but also a burden because if she had been a man writing that book, she would not have endured the miseries that were inflicted on her. Nobody would have told some man who wrote a book like Silent Spring that they were hysterical. Having a purpose in what I do, and looking at ways to build a future that’s better, a finer future for our children, and for their great-great grandchildren, that to me is what keeps me driven. I know I’m on borrowed time, I have survived four cancers, so I don’t know how many days I have – none of us do. For me, living is a privilege, and I need to use each day to best advantage. So that’s what I do. 

KE: Before we close, could you say something further about your comment early in the book that you share your “journey in this book out of the conviction that to have healthy people, we need a healthy world.”

PDM:  Well, I would say that you don’t have healthy people in a sick world. To the extent that you can, control your own environment to be free of contaminants, in your indoor environment in particular – not using toxic materials in your personal care products, in your food, in your cleaning materials and your energy sources to minimize the exposure. And then argue for minimizing pollutants in the environment around you – in your town, in your community. 

All of us have a role to play; this is not a single person’s problem – this is a society problem, and we have to work together to find solutions. We need a U-turn in policy in so many ways, and people need to recognize that we are on a pathway that is not sustainable. I have every confidence that there is a way for people to thrive. So helping people see what the options are for a better way forward is what I do. 

KE:  This is been a wonderful discussion with you, Patty. Thank you so much for everything you do. You’re such a great example and inspiration! 

Go to  Patricia DeMarco Ph.D. | “Live in harmony with nature.”  for further information and to order Patty’s books.