SciChronicles

Appalachian Ode

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This episode of SciChronicles, hosted by Risa Aria Schnebly, features a special three-part story from Dalia Maeroff in honor of Earth Day earlier this month.

Dalia Maeroff, a science communicator and Ph.D. student in the Environmental Social Science program at Arizona State University, tells us all about her love for Appalachia and Pittsburgh, her lived experiences with climate change and environmental destruction, and how that motivates her work today. This story was adapted from an essay published on Dalia's Substack. To read the piece or dive deeper into some of the history she talks about, check out the essay here. 

If you have not already, please consider subscribing so you do not miss future episodes. Also, be sure to check out ASU's Ask a Biologist and its companion podcast, as well.

If you are interested in crafting a story to share on SciChronicles, please fill out this interest form to learn more and connect with the hosts, Risa and Kayla.

Risa Aria Schnebly  0:16  
Welcome to SciChronicles. My name is Risa Aria Schnebly, and this is a podcast where scientists share stories about why they do science from the outside. Becoming a scientist might seem straightforward, right? You go to school for a long time, then start to work in a lab or the field, but as you listen to these stories from scientists at different stages of their careers, it becomes clear that pursuing this path is anything but straightforward. Our storytellers reveal pivotal moments in their lives that change the course of their career. So whether you're considering pursuing science yourself or just curious about who scientists are, take a listen. You might be surprised by what you discovered.

Today, we have a special episode to celebrate Earth Day. Dalia Maeroff, a science communicator and PhD student in the environmental social science program here at ASU, will be sharing a three part essay that covers everything from her love for Appalachia and Pittsburgh, her lived experiences with climate change and environmental destruction, and how all of that motivates her to do the work that she does now. If you want to read Dalia's full essay, you can find it on her sub stack, linked in our show notes.

Dalia Maeroff  1:29  
CHAPTER 1: YOUGHLAND 

On my dad's 59th birthday, we walked farther through the woods than we had in at least a year. The three of us, my brother, my dad and I, we padded and identified trees, picked up snake skins, feathers, rocks and sticks off the ground. For a moment. I was a kid again, and we were in West Virginia somewhere, or maybe Central Pennsylvania, holding up paper maps my dad pointing out where the moss on the trees was, and what does that mean about where north is?

my family and I call our entire neck of the woods Westsylvania. Pennsyltucky always felt derogatory. Proposed during the early American Revolution as the name of the 14th colony of the United States, Westsylvania included modern day Southwestern Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia and bits of Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia. The name for the region has long been obsolete, but we like it, because our half of the state isn't like the Philadelphia half. We aren't east coasters. The Youghiogheny, the river just outside of the city that flows into the Monongahela gets its name from the Algonquin contrary stream as it flows uniquely north that tiny part of the state, the area along the river and adjacent to the coal tracks we call Youghland.

I learned to skip stones on the Youghiogheny barefoot in the river with tiny fish nibbling at my toes. I turned over rocks to find flatworms, salamanders and crawdads, and painted with watercolors while my dad stood in basketball shorts, waist deep in the water, waiting for bass to bite. We baked the fish on rocks and fire with spices we brought from home and picked the flesh off the bones while sitting on the sun warmed river bank.

Together, we watched eagles and herons fly over and sat in canoes with fishing rods bags of Doritos and boxes of Strawberry Pop Tarts. It was never about the bass. It was more about the glitter and the bait, the pretty colors we used to pick out at the tackle shop with a giant shark head popping out of the sign above the door. We were so far from the sea.

All rivers lead to the ocean, but instead, sometimes I like to imagine that all rivers lead home to the dirty hollow where the wood ducks nest in the summer, with the trail that heads back to my house without ever leaving the woods until just two blocks away from my front porch. It wasn't until I was accepted to graduate school that I began to read literature on sense of place. My place is in that river.

That river was the closest thing I had to an ocean. Like every 10 year old in a land locked city hundreds of miles from the coast, I briefly entertained the idea of becoming a marine biologist one day.

But then again, becoming an ornithologist, microbiologist, epidemiologist or meteorologists were all in the running for what would eventually be my degree. I was in the third grade when I first came across terms like global warming, climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification. I obsessed over phylogenetic trees, migration patterns, plastic pollution, coral bleaching, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. I brought dead bees into class. Created posters about severe weather and dissected owl pellets on my birthday one year, we combined the song bird migration with the monarch butterfly, migration south for the winter.

CHAPTER TWO: STEEL CITIES

My dad was born in Akron, Ohio, and moved to Cleveland soon after his grandfather took him on early morning drives in Cleveland across the Clark Avenue Bridge to watch the mills and boats at Collision Bend. My great grandfather would smoke a pipe shoot the ship with other fathers and grandfathers that brought their kids to this spot to watch the mills glow red in the dawn and play with other kids.

On June 22, 1969, while on their morning adventures, my great grandfather and my dad stood in front of the burning Cuyahoga River. That was not the first time the river lit on fire. It had ignited 13 times before this point. With no regulations on water pollution, the steel mills dumped most of their waste into the river, creating what resembled an oil slick, rather than a waterway.

The burning of that river, along with the very first Earth Day that occurred that same year, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Cuyahoga National Recreation Area in 1974, which in 2000 the year of my birth, became Cuyahoga National Park.

While the Ohio and Cuyahoga rivers, historically, did not intersect, they now do, joined by the Erie Canal, also made from Pittsburgh steel. The Erie Canal proved that such a project was possible and inspired the US to take over the project of the Panama Canal.

I visited the Panama Canal in the spring of 2024.

Your entrance ticket comes with admission to a 45 minute documentary on the creation of the canal called a land divided a world united, narrated by Morgan Freeman. Freeman tells you that it's one of the greatest engineering feats to have occurred in human history, building a canal through what used to be tropical mountains and forest to connect the Caribbean and the Pacific. This massive effort was worth it because we the United States connected the world by cutting Panama in half.

The film focuses on the impressive scientific achievements of the canal. The story painted with a heavy hand of United States nationalism, the 3D glasses hurt my eyes.

What the film fails to mention is what the Panama Canal museum dives into with text, heavy plaques in both English and Spanish. When the French first attempted to build the canal in the late 1800s It was estimated that 22,000 workers died for mosquito borne illnesses like yellow fever and malaria as well as injuries. When the US took over construction, they displaced 1000s more people to create the Canal Zone in 1903.

Five miles on either side of the canal was designated American territory, housing those involved with the creation and construction of the canal. Americans living in the Canal Zone called themselves zonians. Society within the zone ran on adapted versions of Jim Crow laws, workers on gold and silver tolls. Gold toll meant higher wages, better quality of life within the zone, and meant you were white or Northern European. Silver toll was reserved for Afro Caribbeans and Southern Europeans, and meant doing more labor, intensive work for less pay.

Years after protests and violent riots, the US finally signed a treaty to begin the transfer of control of the canal to Panama in 1979.

The zonians still meet yearly in Tampa.

It was Pittsburgh steel that built that canal, killed those people and turned the land and lungs of the people in my city black. It's what still gives us some of the highest asthma and lung cancer rates in the country, even with the EPA limiting the acceptable amount of pollution in the air and water.

Smokestacks spit out small dots of blue fire at night against a red sky. Mills smell like burning sulfur before the city power washed the buildings in the late 90s and early 2000s the buildings were black with soot on high pollution mornings or evenings. Our sky is hazy orange. Our river beds are covered in old cars and industrial waste. The water will make you sick. Trains full of coal in the valley by the river sound like home.

I guess a factory producing actual edible crackers would also smell somewhat sweet. 

CHAPTER THREE: SEVERE WEATHER

We watched the news as Manhattan began to flood, as Hurricane Sandy moved farther north and more inland than it was ever supposed to.

In our little gray city, in our house with outdated plumbing, our pipes overflowed and our basement filled with water and sewage.

The whole house smelled like shit because it was shit.

We packed everything that was left and put it into a storage locker. We stayed at a hotel first, then I moved to a friend's house, a massive mansion that had not one but two staircases up to the second floor. I went to Cincinnati on a school trip that had been booked months in advance, and I came back and my family moved into my Mom's best friend's attic, carrying our things up the four flights of steps in that house deteriorated. My dad and he walked with a cane after that.

We stopped traveling out of the city to hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, the rolling hills of Ohio and the forests of Central Pennsylvania. We'd visited so often before.

I hated school. My grades declined. I'd always wanted to be a scientist, but for those years, I entertained just about any other idea. Classrooms felt suffocating when I knew just a few hours away I could be sitting in an old growth Hemlock forest listening to elk bugle for the Fall rut.

As a 14 year old, sucked into the world of my own problems at school with friends and my own mental turmoil, I didn't grasp for many years that I lost my childhood home in Hurricane Sandy.

Six months later, my family's move into a new apartment was easier without the stairs, but still exhausting. My mother filled my new bedroom with her plants, and I slowly grew into that space covering the walls with artifacts from our newly resumed travels around Appalachia.

In September of 2024 Appalachia was once again struck by a storm that was never meant to come this far from the sea, Hurricane Helene. 

The scenes of destruction from Asheville, North Carolina and the surrounding area, slowly began to unearth dead bodies, destroyed homes and ruined livelihoods.

My Lyft driver understands he lived in Louisiana during Katrina, born and raised in the bayou.

I was working as a journalist. When Biden was elected, I graduated from college, I published my first scientific paper. I got into graduate school, moved across the country to Arizona, set up my apartment with my mom and my brother in the sweltering 117 degree heat of August in the Sonoran Desert, and I began my career as an environmental social scientist.

2025 began with the burning of Los Angeles. In the last few days of my winter break in Pittsburgh in early January, I spent most of my free time with my dad watching the flames overtake house after house, watching as firefighting crews desperately tried to save the bits of communities they could.

I arrived back in Phoenix just as wind chills in Pittsburgh dipped below negative 10 degrees Fahrenheit in a historic polar vortex. It snowed in New Orleans. Phoenix, the world's wettest desert, hadn't seen rain in over 160 days.

I didn't watch the inauguration in 2025. I spent my day hiking West Fork in Sedona, marveling at the icicles hanging from the red rocks and massive pine trees swaying in the wind.

In the months since Trump has been elected, I have found no comfort in the conversations in classrooms, labs and meetings, the questioning of where did we go wrong, and how did we fail to reach the other side? I feel a bit like the frog boiling in the pot, or maybe Sisyphus, collaboratively making spreadsheets of the words that are now censored in grants and deciding on what other words to substitute in.

So yes, I tell my Lyft driver, I do believe in climate change. I don't need data on carbon emissions, severe weather, melting ice caps and rising temperatures to prove that it exists. I've lived it. I've seen it rip apart people's lives. I've had it rip apart my life, and I've had to keep on living.

The lift ride ends. My driver turns around in his seat and tells me thank you for sharing my story with him. I get out of the car reflecting on our conversation.

The truth is we know exactly where we failed. We tried to remove humanity from our science. When to do science is to be human. Curiosity is human nature, as is wanting to connect with others and share our stories. Connecting with others is the reason we have become so successful as a species. Scientists are told to be objective. It's a large part of our training to learn how to conduct science without emotions, advocacy or personal opinions. I can't remain neutral. I'm not a scientist or a person who will sit quietly while I watch my country burn and flood and its people suffer. I am sharing this story so you know why I'm here, who I am, both within and outside of my science, that will be how we navigate our way forward by being human and connecting with others, as people, not as scientists.

Risa Aria Schnebly  24:18  
Thanks for tuning in to SciChronicles. This podcast is recorded at Arizona State University, which sits on the ancestral homelands of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh peoples, without whose care in keeping we would not be here today. We would like to thank the School of Life Sciences, the Center for Biology and Society, and Ask a Biologist for helping us make these stories into a podcast.

This podcast was developed by me, Risa Aria Schnebly and my co host, Kayla Burgher. We put a lot of effort into making this podcast. The two of us work with every storyteller to create and write each of the stories you hear. By the way, if you might be interested in telling a story for this podcast, please fill out the interest form linked in our show notes. Kayla and I also edit the audio ourselves, and I develop the original music that you hear between the stories. Thank you so much for listening. And if you have not already, please subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes.