Pittsburgh, the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Climate Change

Smoke from industry and steamboats rises over Pittsburgh in an 1849 painting by George Warren Smith. New York Public Library.

Where the expedition began

On August 31, 1803, Captain Meriwether Lewis set out from Pittsburgh with a first crew of eleven. They were bound for the headwaters of the Missouri River, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, a journey that stretched the young nation's idea of itself across the continent. They traveled in a new keelboat, fifty-five feet long, built in Pittsburgh, and followed routes that Indigenous peoples had used for a long time, through the homelands of many Indigenous nations.

A city built on fossil fuels

Pittsburgh began as a string of frontier forts and grew rich on its natural resources, its rivers and its industry. Steam power, first used on boats, moved into factories and ironworks. By the late nineteenth century the city was a center of oil refining, but it was coal and iron that fed its famous steel industry. Coal, oil and steel in turn brought railroads, automobiles and electric power plants. By the mid-twentieth century, black smoke often blanketed the city.

Clearing the air

In the second half of the twentieth century, smoke-control laws and a shrinking steel industry helped clear Pittsburgh's skies. By the early twenty-first century, though, the city had come to see climate change as a still greater threat. Starting in 2008 it produced a series of climate action plans that bring together business, government and schools and universities to cut emissions, build cleaner energy and improve the city's urban ecosystems.

One story in one place

The National Park Service uses Pittsburgh to tell the whole arc of climate change in a single place: the industrial growth, the technology powered by fossil fuels, and a shared response. Other places along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail also tie the expedition to climate change today.

Sources

• National Park Service, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail: "Pittsburgh—A Model of Climate Change History." The article cites the trail's 2022 high-potential historic sites report, the Lewis and Clark journals, William S. Dietrich II in Pittsburgh Quarterly (2008), and the City of Pittsburgh's Climate Action Plan Version 3.0 (2018).