Battle in the Clouds

Abstract

This narrative experiment brings together scenes from my family histories in western Pennsylvania coal country, alongside ongoing visits to learn about rising health issues in the region today. Increasing numbers of residents express concerns about chronic problems such as young cancers, and many people worry about potential exposures coming from past and present energy infrastructures. These growing health concerns, some of them my own, also brought me to revisit Rachel Carson's medical writings from her family home in western Pennsylvania. Looking out from her childhood bedroom with my mother and returning to Carson's archival notes on “transmissible cancers” and her childhood essay, “A Battle in the Clouds,” these descriptions circle long-accumulating debates about chronic diseases and their causes and effects over time. Returning to varieties of changing clouds today, this essay reflects on how chronic exposures—unevenly accumulating in bodies and landscapes and across generations—show “undone sciences” of many kinds in need of collective attention. It traces how families are grappling with the sense of needing to connect their own dots; the ways local communities are coming together to process displaced responsibilities; and the implications for health, public trust, and care when so much is left in clouds.