Battle in the Clouds

Abstract

This narrative experiment brings together scenes from my family histories in western Pennsylvania coal country, alongsideongoing visits to learn about rising health issues in the region today. Increasing numbers of residents express concerns aboutchronic problems such as young cancers, and many people worry about potential exposures coming from past and present energyinfrastructures. These growing health concerns, some of them my own, also brought me to revisit Rachel Carson’s medical writingsfrom her family home in western Pennsylvania. Looking out from her childhood bedroom with my mother and returning toCarson’s archival notes on “transmissible cancers” and her childhood essay, “A Battle in the Clouds,” these descriptions circlelong-accumulating debates about chronic diseases and their causes and effects over time. Returning to varieties of changing cloudstoday, 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 ofneeding to connect their own dots; the ways local communities are coming together to process displaced responsibilities; and theimplications for health, public trust, and care when so much is left in clouds.