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UMBC alumna Mary Slicher founded one of Baltimore’s leading advocacy groups for the homeless forty years ago. Now her organization is finding a new home of its own.

By Elizabeth Heubeck ’91

With a discernible bounce in her loping gait, Mary Slicher ’73, sociology approaches the double doors of a formidable stone building that dates back to the 1950’s.  A stubborn folding metal gate renders the building’s inside areas off-limits to intruders, and as Slicher pushes her weight against the gate and it finally slides to the side, she flashes a ready smile and tosses her long wavy black hair away from her shoulders.

It’s easy to imagine Slicher, 60, flashing that same quick smile on a night some 40 years ago as she stood outside the UMBC library at closing time with some of her fellow students. Back then, Slicher and her classmates talked excitedly about starting an organization that might help end homelessness in Baltimore.

Almost four decades after founding that group, which she and three fellow UMBC students called Project PLASE (People Lacking Ample Shelter and Employment), Slicher has kept both her youthful energy and her long-cherished ideals.

“You’re not whole without a home,” says Slicher.

Since its founding in 1974, Project PLASE has grown from a walk-in center for homeless citizens on the second floor of a St. Paul Street row house in Baltimore’s Charles North neighborhood into a nonprofit organization with 55 employees and an operating budget of around $3.5 million that provides housing and a host of related support services to 450 Baltimore residents annually.

Slicher’s belief in Baltimore’s homeless residents – even when they themselves, or the community at large, seem to have stopped believing – has endured and grown over time. And now Project PLASE is also on the cusp of an expansion into a new space in Southwest Baltimore that will increase the number of homeless residents it serves.

With Project PLASE’s growing waiting list of 338 people and a startling 19 percent increase in homelessness in Baltimore between 2009 and 2012, Slicher recognizes the city’s dire need to provide housing and related services.

“Baltimore is in a unique position,” Slicher says. “We’re on some lists you wouldn’t want to be on: We have the second-highest rate of HIV in the country, and we lead the country in heroin incidents related to ER hospital visits. But all these things can be addressed with the right resources.”

Homelessness in Baltimore is a problem that has grown immensely in both size and complexity since Slicher first started Project PLASE.

Slicher says the seeds of her own pursuit of justice and social equality were planted in childhood. As a young girl, she would take the bus with her mother from their suburban home in West Baltimore to a downtown Baltimore that was still home to legendary high-end department stores like Hutzler’s and Stewart’s. En route, they would pass by public housing projects and her mother would become reflective, telling her daughter: “I would love to know their stories. Everybody’s got a story.”

As an advocate for the homeless, Slicher hasn’t simply yearned to know the stories of people living in challenging situations. She’s listened carefully, and, in many instances, she has made it possible for the homeless to change the arc of their own stories dramatically.

Slicher explains that trust is the key – and gaining the trust of someone who’s been living on the streets typically requires a lot of patience. “You might have to meet someone at McDonald’s for coffee ten times,” she says.

The complexity and interrelation of factors that force people into homelessness make the need for such patience understandable. Addiction, poverty, mental and physical illness, and isolation can all play a role in why someone ends up without permanent shelter. Project PLASE works to address these problems that lead to, or co-mingle with, homelessness.

Up front, the nonprofit provides the basics: transitional housing and food in a setting with around-the-clock support. Project PLASE also offers tailored services (all of which are voluntary) including case management, access to an on-site nurse and a mental health therapist, medication monitoring, HIV education, daily living skills, transportation, and referrals to medical and other services.

Those who know Slicher and her work well remark on her patience and her energy in attacking the problems faced by the homeless head-on.

“She’s one of the most incredible people I have known. The Baltimore community is so absolutely lucky to have someone that diligent, that driven, with the kind of tenacity and ability to understand and work with this group of folks,” says Gregory Hunter, a social worker and co-founder of Project PLASE who served as its first director before handing the reins to Slicher.

Hunter recalls that in its early days, when Project PLASE was located in a little room above the Manna House food pantry on St. Paul Street, which has since become a private home, they had little more to offer than a sympathetic ear.

Slicher, too, says the organization’s earliest days were filled with compassionate conversation to get to the root of a client’s problems. “We would just sit down and talk with people until they started to trust us, and themselves,” she recalls.

Envisioning clients’ potential for growth and change is the foundation of Slicher’s approach. Sometimes that means looking beyond alcohol on the breath, or the acute symptoms of mental illness that a homeless person is battling, or even a general brokenness of spirit, to grasp who a person once was and what he or she can become.

“Part of our job is to see someone broken and to imagine them whole,” she explains.

More importantly, the fact that Slicher and her colleagues at Project PLASE can see the potential in someone grappling with homelessness eventually helps the client see a path forward too – in his or her own time.

“At Project PLASE, I haven’t had no kind of pressure, like you have to have something done by this certain time,” says a client named BoneyBoney. “They meet you where your needs are,” he adds.

When Boney came to Project PLASE, he was fresh out of a months-long drug rehabilitation program. Saddled not only with a drug addiction that he was working hard to control, he also suffers from bipolar disorder, HIV and Hepatitis C.

“I was scared that when I left [rehab], I had nowhere to go,” Boney says. After working hard to get clean, he didn’t want to return to living in abandoned buildings in Baltimore City, where he squatted for five years before entering drug treatment.

Boney has been a client of Project PLASE for 15 months. In that time, he’s stayed clean. He lives in temporary housing provided by Project PLASE, and has immersed himself in the community life the nonprofit offers. (He has even served as chairman for events put on by the consumer advisory board, including holiday gatherings for the residents.)

As Boney waits f
or an opening in permanent housing, he busies himself by working on obtaining his general equivalency diploma, or GED. “I’ve been in and out of drug programs, rehab centers, psych wards. I never been anywhere that helped me like here,” Boney says. “Miss Mary’s always willing to stop, talk, listen to you, ask how things can get even better.”

Jerry Morris echoes Boney’s sentiments. He’s been a client of Project PLASE for almost 13 years, having heard about it from neighboring nonprofit Healthcare for the Homeless. When Morris approached Project PLASE, the words of his mother filled his head.

“I could hear her voice saying that she didn’t raise me to be a drug addict,” recalls Morris, who’s been clean since he’s been with Project PLASE.

Reflecting on why he’s been able to achieve long-term sobriety and stability, and thus make good on his mother’s words, Morris explains: “The people at Project PLASE, they were like a real good doctor. They asked me: How do I feel? What do I want?” He pauses before adding, “They renewed my hunger to satisfy my mother.”

Seeing a happier and healthier future for those served by Project PLASE is important. But over the past few years, Slicher has also been envisioning the possibilities for Project PLASE itself – and making them a reality.

Take, for instance, three empty buildings in Southwest Baltimore – one dating back to the 1890s and all sorely in need of repair and renovation – that will soon provide an expanded base of operations for the organization. Shuttered in 2010, these buildings on Old Frederick Road were owned by St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish, with one of the buildings used as a parochial school.

The prospect of restoring these buildings to their former glory or repurposing them into something entirely different would be daunting to many people. Not Slicher. During a tour of one of the buildings, Slicher points out its copious interior and the large windows that bring in lots of light. She can already see how these run-down and outmoded buildings could make the perfect home for those without one.

Slicher’s identification of the parish’s buildings as a new headquarters for Project PLASE – and the site of more transitional and permanent housing for the homeless – was only the first step. She needed the community surrounding the buildings to envision it as the ideal location, too.

That’s why Slicher led a year-long educational campaign in the residential communities surrounding the property. Without backing from local residents, the re-zoning that was required for Project PLASE to pursue its purchase simply wouldn’t have happened.

It was no small feat. Slicher knocked on doors in the Irvington and St. Joseph’s neighborhoods, working to win over residents who initially opposed welcoming formerly homeless people to their neighborhoods. She also enlisted some of the 80-plus members of St. Joseph’s Parish, which continues its mission in the neighborhood, to help her spread the word, and spoke at area community association meetings.

“Until you really dialogue with individuals, and let them know what your group is and what you can do, sometimes there are a lot of fears – some they can name and some they can’t,” says Slicher. “If you can dialogue with people, it really makes a difference.”

That dialogue eventually met with success.  Once members of the surrounding communities were assured that the acquisition would provide a much-needed service to homeless residents—and also that the new residents would make good neighbors—the community got behind the purchase. With the support of Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen Holton and a host of community and civic leaders, the re-zoning was issued and Project PLASE had a new home.

Harry T. Spikes II backed the project from the start. A special assistant to Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, Spikes had a personal reason to support the expansion of services to Baltimore’s homeless population: His father experienced homelessness as a young boy. Spikes, as chairman of the Shelter Committee, part of the local nonprofit Community Assistance Network Inc., spoke before Irvington community members to ensure them of Project PLASE’s good intentions. “I shared with them my passion for helping people who just need a shot, like my dad did,” he says.

Spikes also stood before that audience because he believes in Slicher. “There’s not a lot of Marys out there. She’s walking the walk,” he says. “I’m so happy she’s doing what she’s doing.”

When renovations at the Old Frederick Road site are complete, Project PLASE will consolidate some of its existing housing units and offer new, improved ones. Forty housing units will remain in the current headquarters, at 1814 Maryland Avenue, but existing buildings on St. Paul Street and North Avenue will be sold to focus on the renovations at the new site, which will boast 62 one-bedroom transitional housing units, 36 permanent one-bedroom apartments, and even space for a health suite, computer lab, commercial kitchen and dining area, plus counseling and meeting rooms.

The relocation of Project PLASE is envisioning writ large. But Slicher also revels in important details, like the private rooms that will enhance clients’ sense of personal dignity. “Clients will have private rooms. That will be so nice for them,” she observes.

Part of Project PLASE’s success can be found in not allowing a failure to permanently damage a future. Unlike many other agencies that aim to help homeless people in need, especially individuals who suffer from problems of addiction (an estimated 64 percent of all homeless people have alcohol or substance abuse problems, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless), Project PLASE gives its clients a second chance.

“If I went into a treatment program for substance abuse, relapsed, and tried to come back, I couldn’t,” Slicher says. Most drug treatment programs operate with a zero-tolerance policy.

Slicher points out that this is not the case at Project PLASE. While it is imperative that clients in its transitional and permanent housing programs stay clean, those who fail to maintain sobriety are not permanently banned from the program. In fact, if clients are asked to leave because they’ve begun using drugs or alcohol again, they actually rise to the top of the waiting list when they return to Project PLASE at a later time.

“It’s 100 percent love in Mary’s heart. All she do is help,” says Carlton Gross, a trim man with a twinkle in his eyes and an irrepressible smile who understands the need for second chances.

In his twenties, Gross, a single father, owned his own house and also a cafe. Then he got hooked on cocaine and heroin and lost it all. He lived on the streets for six years. After completing an in-patient, six-month drug program, he knew he wasn’t ready to stay straight on his own. “I was going to get high if I went back on the street,” Gross says.

Fortunately, a social worker referred Gross to Project PLASE. He’s been a client for the past six years. “They help you with small-time goals so you can move on to big-time goals,” says Gross, who started his ow
n landscaping business last year. “I see where I’m going. I had my own house. I want to get that back.”

Slicher is quick to defend her clients and underscore the incredible obstacles they have overcome to get to where they are. She doesn’t dwell on the low points in her clients’ lives. She’s focused on the whole person.

It’s a quality that shows itself even in small moments, such as a conversation with Mike Coram, a counselor at Project PLASE. When Coram mentions the trajectory of clients such as Carlton, he observes that they are “getting up from a fall” on their way to discovering greatness.

Slicher quickly interjects: “Mike, they’re already great.”

It helps that Slicher has had the opportunity to see clients not only at their most fragile, when they come to Project PLASE, but also when they’ve gotten back on their feet. “I see people all over the place – when I go to the Enoch Pratt, the Giant – who were homeless and no longer are. That’s the untold story of homelessness,” Slicher says.

It’s a story embodied in people like Boney, Gross, Morris, and the countless other clients who have arrived on the doorstep of Project PLASE seeking shelter after confronting the darkness of homelessness.

“Many in the community only see homeless persons in a negative light,” Slicher says. “Here at PLASE we are lucky enough to see the person, and their humanity, in its entirety—strengths and struggles all together—as any of us would want to be seen.”

SIDE BAR: FACTS AND FACTORS

When Mary Slicher co-founded Project PLASE (People Lacking Ample Shelter and Employment) in 1974, she had a good idea at just the right time.

Scholars who study homelessness and poverty note that average wages have fallen 16 percent – after adjusting  for inflation – since 1973. And the mid-1970s also marked the onset of increasing scarcity in affordable housing.

While statistics on homelessness in the 1970s are difficult to come by, it is likely that far fewer people in Baltimore were without homes in that decade. Conservative estimates place 4,088 men, women, and children on the streets of Baltimore on any given night in 2013. Some say that number may be eight to ten times higher, as those who conduct census counts rarely enter the 40,000-plus vacant homes in Baltimore which people without homes are known to occupy.

The following timeline offers a glimpse of the societal factors that have fueled homelessness since Project PLASE opened its doors.

• Late 1970s: A trend to de-institutionalize mentally ill patients formerly residing in psychiatric hospitals without adequate plans for transitional housing leads to a large increase in the homeless, mentally ill population.

• 1980s: Cuts to housing and social service programs push the homeless population upward. Homeless rates in American cities triple between 1981 and 1989, from 5 to 15 people per 10,000 residents. The arrival of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s also contributes to the soaring homeless rates.

• 1990s: Scores of public housing units, having fallen into disrepair and becoming dilapidated, are abandoned, leaving many without affordable housing options.

• Early 2000s: Federal public housing funding drops significantly, putting affordable housing out of reach for even more city residents. And a report on Baltimore’s homeless population, published in 2005, notes that almost 30 percent of the city’s homeless are veterans.

• Late 2000s: In 2008 and beyond, many people report being homeless for the first time, as unemployment due to the recession forces many out of their homes.

Sources: Mayor’s Office of Human Services; Health Care of the Homeless; Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s, by Martha R. Burt (Russell Sage Foundation and Urban Institute Press, 1991); Baltimore Homeless Services, Inc.; James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty: 1900-1994 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

UMBC professor of psychology Robert Provine’s “small science” makes big strides in explaining human behavior.

By Chelsea Haddaway

Twenty five right-handed UMBC students sit cross-legged in their chairs in a classroom, shoes and socks removed, with the ankle of one leg resting on the knee of the other. Slowly, they stroke the soles of each foot with their fingertips, recording what they feel using first one hand, then the other.

The students are testing an idea that professor of psychology Robert Provine stumbled on as he soaped his own foot in the shower one day. It tickled more than he thought it should, especially given the widespread popular belief that one cannot tickle oneself.

The students performing this experiment eventually helped confirm Provine’s hypothesis, getting the strongest urge to giggle when tickling their left foot with their right hand.

Self-tickling might not seem the stuff of serious research. But discovering that one half of our body treats the other half as relatively alien is definitely surprising. And it is exactly the kind of discovery that has propelled Provine to prominence as a scientist and an author.

Provine has also proved that “small science” – or “sidewalk neuroscience,” as he sometimes calls it – is an ideal way to do research at a primarily undergraduate university like UMBC. His investigations are based largely on observations of everyday human behavior – and they can be conceived and executed quickly and with relatively untrained research assistants.  No large grants or pricey equipment required.

“If you insist on more equipment,” Provine quips, “buy a stopwatch.”

Small science doesn’t mean small discoveries, however. In a steady flood of scholarly papers and well-received books for general audiences such as Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond (2012) and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2001), Provine challenges (and sometimes confirms) things we think we know about everyday behavior.

The New York Times observed that Curious Behavior “begs you to continue where curiosity leads you, down both the boulevards and the back alleys of science” and The Wall Street Journal declared it “charmingly written and profoundly informative.” Library Journal even named Curious Behavior one of the best books of 2012.

His successful books have also made Provine – who will become an emeritus professor this month – a sought-after public speaker and public intellectual, turning up in roles ranging from a keynote speaker at the International Brain Bee (a high school neuroscience competition) to a consultant for an exhibit on “What Makes Us Smile?” at the American Visionary Art Museum.

In particular, the publication of Laughter also made Provine a leading authority on what tickles our funny bones. One important thing he’s discovered is that humor has its foundations in our relationships. Stand-up comedy might be hard to master, for instance, because a speaker tends to laugh about 46 percent more than his or her audience does. And gender matters, too. Women laugh more than men in conversation.

“Opportunities [for research] lie in these behaviors that have always been in front of us but have never received the examination that they should. What we’re doing is taking these behaviors seriously,” Provine says.

Provine has also spoken four times at one of America’s bastions of big science – the Goddard Space Flight Center – in the center’s Scientific Colloquium series. Dave Thompson, an astrophysicist at Goddard who chairs the colloquium committee, says that the UMBC professor’s small science approach (and impressive results) have a lot to teach those who work on a grander operational scale.

“There are things you can do with the human brain that are better than what can be done with a machine,” says Thompson. “People like Provine have helped to stimulate this idea that you do not have to be a specialist who has built a multimillion dollar piece of hardware to do good science.”

Robert Provine was a neuroscientist even before various branches of research on the brain and its development coalesced under that name.

As a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1960s, he also took classes in biology, physiology, anatomy, and even electrical engineering to satisfy his growing interest in the field.  He developed a subspecialty of neuroembryology on the way to his doctorate, and several of his advisors were biologists.

When Provine joined UMBC’s faculty in 1974, he was using chick embryos in most of his experiments on the development and evolution of the nervous system. He wanted to give his undergraduate students opportunities to participate in that research, but the work was technologically advanced and it took a year of preparation for them to contribute in a meaningful way.

So Provine began thinking about how to enlist students in research on the brain in other ways. It was a quest that led Provine to the “small science” on which he’s made his name.

“I came to the conclusion that if you looked at the right behavior in the right way, you don’t have to use animal models,” Provine recalls. “You can get the same kind of rigor and insights by looking at the ongoing behavior of normal people.”

Take yawning, for example, an everyday event that Provine tackles in Curious Behavior. We yawn when we’re tired, right?  Yawns are triggered by a lack of oxygen in the air, yes? And everyone knows that yawns are contagious.

Actually our yawns can be a bit more complicated than these common assumptions. “Folklore is a good place to start our research because it’s based on age-old observations about behavior,” Provine observes. “Sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong.”

Some of Provine’s research confirms that folk wisdom. We do yawn when we’re about to fall asleep. But we also yawn immediately upon waking. The bookend nature of yawns makes Provine wonder: Do yawns mark a transition state between waking and sleep in both directions?

That second assumption about yawning is completely false, he continues. Yawns have no relationship to the air around you. But contagious yawning is definitely a reality. Provine’s experiments indicate that if you see someone yawn, or even read about yawning, you’re more likely to yawn as well. (Are you yawning yet?)

“If we look back and examine this closely, something really important is going on,” Provine observes. “This means that we imitate other kinds of things that we see.”

Provine speculates that the development of contagious behavior (we also are likelier to laugh, cough and itch when we see others do so) could be part of what helped us develop one of our most deeply human traits: empathy. He even muses that deficits in these mechanisms may be involved in the social pathologies of autism, pointing to other recent studies showing that autistic children tend to be less likely to “catch” yawns.

The discoveries that Provine has made through observation have not gone unnoticed by prominent colleagues. “We are surrounded by evidence about human behavior, and should put it to use,” says Steven Pinker, who studies and writes about language as a professor of psychology at Harvard University – and like Provine is the author of books for general audiences.  “He is the only scientist I know of who is studying many aspects of human behavior that fascinate most laypeople but which are not standard topics in the field.”

“There’s been an age-old interest in some of these behaviors, but they never prompted serious science,” agrees Provine.  “My undergraduate research students and I have been able to take advantage of this neglect.  Some of the seminal work on yawning, laughing and other behaviors was done right here in Math/Psych Room 507b.”

Indeed, those undergraduate research students are the engine behind Provine’s uncommonly productive lab. The UMBC professor publishes papers in scientific journals nearly as quickly as he can write them, and often these undergraduates are listed as co-authors.

Kurt Krosnowski ’08, psychology, a graduate student in biological sciences at UMBC studying how animal noses sniff out pheromones, was one of those undergraduate researchers. He traces his interest in the nostrils directly back to the first class he took with Provine: “Sensation and Perception.”

Krosnowski says Provine’s lectures were no mere elaborations on the textbook, but were always weaving in anecdotes about his years working in research, consulting for major corporations, and fervent dabbling in music, art, and astrology. Though he had started out as an engineering major, Krosnowski was so inspired by the course that he approached Provine about joining his lab team.

At first, Provine said no.

“Five or ten times more people indicate an interest in joining my team than are invited,” explains Provine.  In order to ensure that his lab is staffed with students who can contribute and work independently, Provine is extremely selective, tapping only students who excel in his class or possess a research skill that is urgently needed in the lab.

Marcello Cabrera ’12, psychology, got his chance by knowing the right software.  “He made an announcement one class and asked if anyone knew how to use Photoshop,” Cabrera says. “I began informally working on one of his projects that involved using Photoshop to add artificial tears to images. At the same time, I was doing very well in his class, and, before the semester was over, he asked me to join his lab team.”

Krosnowski persisted and eventually won a place on Provine’s team, studying reaction times for common behaviors: If you ask someone to cry, can they do it on command? How long does it take? What about sneezing, coughing, laughing, yawning?  He also worked with Provine on a study of how seeing someone’s tears affects our perception of their sadness.

“That was the most fulfilling for me because I had a very direct hand in getting it up and running.  [Provine] wasn’t like ‘here, do this for me.’ We had a very sincere conversation about how we think this should work,” he says.

Now that Krosnowski is working towards a Ph.D., those conversations with Provine are paying off. “He was my first experience having a peer relationship with a professor,” he observes. “Now that I’m in graduate school, they’re training you to have peer relationships with all of your professors,” he says.

Cabrera has also found his time in Provine’s lab a boon, despite the fact that his career has taken him away from psychology and into the nonprofit world. “I took lots of great classes at UMBC,” he recalls, “but I don’t think I learned as much in the classroom as I did in the lab. Working on these projects with the team taught me about how to solve problems that don’t have easy or straightforward solutions.”

Both Krosnowski and Cabrera are also among the select group of student researchers who have co-authored papers with Provine in a range of publications, including Human Nature, Ethology, and Evolutionary Psychology. Krosnowski is a co-author on two of Provine’s publications, and Cabrera’s name is on a series of papers, some still awaiting publication, on the whites of the eyes.

Provine says that students who reach that level of collaboration are intricately involved in not only the execution, but the design and analysis of an experiment.  “Co-authoring a paper is an a-ha moment, because that’s a gold standard for having done something,” Provine says.

Provine takes an effusive, almost fatherly, pride in his undergraduate researchers. Many of them have moved on to careers in psychology and other professions. “I thank a generation of mostly undergraduate students who contributed to this work,” he wrote in the acknowledgements of Curious Behavior. “All are exceptional in their own ways.”

He isn’t surprised that so many of his students achieve success after graduating. Provine believes that UMBC is the ideal place for budding undergraduate scientists to get the experience they’ll need to move to the next level.

“You can get a good undergraduate education a lot of places, but what you can do uniquely well at UMBC is not only learn about science, but actually do science,” he says. “Studying science without doing science is like going to the conservatory and studying the flute from someone who doesn’t play it.  They can talk about the history of the flute and the theory of the flute, but if you want to study the flute, you need to study with someone who actually plays the damn flute.”

And speaking of musical instruments, Provine decided that he’d be devoting a bit more time to the saxophone (and to his other hobby, painting) starting in June, when he will retire from full-time teaching and writing at UMBC.

“I’ll have a work schedule more like that of my Ivy League colleagues,” he quips.

While his own paintings of neurons adorn the walls of his lab, Provine says he hasn’t held a paintbrush in years. And the saxophonist who fondly recalls playing in a jazz quartet has barely had time to practice his instrument as he’s labored over his busy schedule of research and writing.

“It’s a sad business,” Provine says. “I’m a musician that doesn’t play and a painter that doesn’t paint.”

Provine will continue to follow his small science research wherever new discoveries lead him, however. As an emeritus professor, he will teach seminar-style courses at UMBC on neuroanatomy and on the topics tackled in Curious Behavior, and continue to recruit students for research.

Indeed, his next project is a new vein of research based on his discoveries concerning the whites of the eye and emotional tearing. In addition to his undergraduate collaborators, Provine will also recruit engineering students into the lab to help him develop instrumentation to look at the associated physiological changes in the eyes.

Provine believes there are no end of curious human behaviors to observe, and he wants to be part of that process of discovery for as long as he can.

“My mentors set a high standard for longevity in science, working to the end,” he wrote in a letter to his colleagues announcing his retirement. “Viktor Hamburger lived to 100 and Rita Levi-Montalcini, the oldest Nobel Laureate, made it to 103. Jerry Lettvin only made it to 91, but left an admonition that guides my thinking: ‘If your research does not change everything, why bother doing it?’”

America’s urban landscapes have long been a battleground in wars against bedbugs, roaches, rats and flies. In a new book, UMBC professor Dawn Biehler traces that conflict’s history across boundaries of class and race. 

By Richard Byrne ’86

Illustrations by Joanna Barnum

Most city dwellers feel nothing but loathing and fear when they see the rats and roaches that often plague their neighborhoods. And even visitors to the big city can panic when bedbugs infest their hotel beds.

So what sort of researcher likes to dig into the vexed dynamics of our interactions with such pests? Dawn Biehler, an assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC, says it helps to have strong (and early) curiosity about things that might turn a normal person’s stomach.

“I’ve always really liked disgusting things,” says Biehler. “Going back to age eight or so, I was interested in outbreaks of bubonic plague. The Black Death in Europe and Asia.”

After college, Biehler’s participation in Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) led her to take a strong interest in housing issues. “I was interested not just in whether people had housing,” she recalls. “But also what was the quality of the housing that they lived in.”

Those overlapping interests in creatures, health and social justice laid the foundation for her current academic research and a new book, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats, which will be published by the University of Washington Press this autumn.

Using sources that range from old public health records to yellowing housekeeping manuals to episodes of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Pests in the City is a history of 20^th century efforts to eradicate these bugs and rodents in American cities (including Baltimore) that takes in culture, biology and ecology. Biehler not only traces how these campaigns were often hampered or thwarted by societal divisions of class and race, but also how the battle to rid urban landscapes of pests blurs the traditional (and often divisive) boundaries of public and private space.

“Pests are both public and private,” Biehler explains. “They upset this very neat dividing line between our homes and the rest of the world.”

Biehler also demonstrates how the battles to eliminate rats and roaches became focal points for political organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, including tenants in public housing (where neglect and proximity of residences often led to the proliferation of pests) who united behind demands for cleaner and safer environments in which to live.

“Dawn’s research offers compelling insights into the construction of urban ecologies,” observes Sandy Parker, chair of the geography and environmental systems department. “Her use of political ecology, environmental history, and health geography opens up new ways of thinking about urban health and urban environments.”

THE POWER OF PERSISTENCE

Pests in the City deftly sketches a century of America’s urban combat with pests. But one of Biehler’s most interesting gambits in the book is to occasionally step out of human history and view the urban landscape as the pests saw it before and after public campaigns launched to eradicate them.

Biehler begins the chapter on attempts to eliminate German cockroaches, for instance, with a vivid roach’s eye view circa 1946, before powerful pesticides to attempt to control them were in wide use:

On the dry-good shelf at the market, a Blattella germanica left a sticky ootheca, one of eight she would lay in her lifetime, clinging to a sack of rice. The shopper did not see the purse-shaped egg-case, smaller than a pea, as she lifted the sack from the shelf, nor did she see it later while packing her groceries. German cockroaches already infested her New York apartment building so thoroughly that she would never notice the new brood she brought home.

“People don’t do that in history books very much,” Biehler says of these vignettes, which she developed after consultations with editors at University of Washington Press.

Writing the book also forced Biehler to get to grips with the biology of the pests that she was writing about. “I was pretty naïve about all of these pests going in,” she says. But trips to the field with exterminators and delving into current research helped fill in the gaps and understand how German cockroaches not only modify their behavior to adapt to changes in home environments, but also develop biological resistance to certain pesticides.

“Cockroaches’ behavior is very plastic,” Biehler says. “And their genetics are very plastic. These cockroaches are changing themselves in two different ways to adapt.”

Biehler’s adoption of the pests’ eye view underscores the persistence of these creatures despite immense efforts to eradicate them. (Indeed, in the cases of rats and roaches, some efforts have had unintended consequences that enhance their survival.)

Yet public campaigns to eradicate pests did help change perceptions. Flies, for instance, once were thought to be more or less harmless. But more importantly, technology and social engineering were also changing the environment in which pests bred – for better and for worse.

The radical shift in the early 20^th century from horses to the motor engine as a primary means of transportation virtually eliminated the stables in urban centers where flies found their best environment for breeding.

Other pests, however, proved more difficult to control, let alone eradicate. Biehler observes that bedbugs were such a problem in the early 20^th century that those afflicted were willing to eradicate them with deadly prussic acid (HCN), which triggered numerous sudden accidental deaths when applied in homes under less than optimal conditions.

“Part of the strangeness of that risk is the suddenness of it,” Biehler says. “HCN was so quick and so absolute. That’s what makes it distinct from the risks we assume today, which tend to be long term and cumulative.”

Biehler also closely examines the mixed success of large-scale campaigns (centered at The Johns Hopkins University) to help Baltimore better control its rat population in the 1940s.

Curt Richter, a physiologist at the university’s medical school, developed a new chemical (ANTU) that would escape detection by the rats and also kill them. But the attempts to implement its widespread use in the city created health, environmental, and political concerns. A separate effort by ecologists to tackle the rat problem soon after via intensive block-by-block eradication a few years later eventually flagged after an auspicious start – and the ecologists also failed to adequately address rats’ penetration into neighborhood homes and public spaces.

Baltimore’s efforts “didn’t include the community that well,” Biehler observes. “African-American communities in Baltimore had been doing all these cleanup activities for decades. It was really a lost opportunity to take advantage of that sustained community effort for ecological rat control.”

BITES AND RIGHTS

Biehler doesn’t ignore the cultural implications of pestilence. From Richard Wright’s Native Son to public information campaigns by the Black Panther Party, she observes that writers and artists have used images of urban residents battling infestation to express wider political and cultural dissent.

And the persistence of urban infestation became an even more powerful image when contrasted against the progress made elsewhere in society, notes Biehler, who quotes a biting passage from Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 song “Whitey on the Moon”: “Rat done bit my sister Nell/ (with Whitey on the moon)/ Her face and arms began to swell/ (and Whitey’s on the moon).”

“Not many historians have focused on the fact that [Rachel Carson’s ecological classic] Silent Spring and the Civil Rights era overlapped with one another,” she says. “Both point to problems of modernity, and how the promises of modernity have failed… and especially, with the Civil Rights movements, that modernity has not worked for us in particular ways.”

Pests in the City also traces how communities organized not only to rid themselves of pests but also to put pressure on politicians. Biehler traces this struggle through the pages of African-American newspapers, excavating the work of activists such as Jesse Gray, who successfully organized city residents around pest control issues in New York City in the 1970s. The tide was shifting, Biehler finds, and the shame associated with infestation was being transformed into rage and fueling attempts to reclaim both private property held by slumlords and public housing from squalor.

Not that it was easy. At times, efforts to pressure the government for help in resolving these problems ran aground on rural and urban divides. Biehler recalls that rural members of the U.S. Congress not only killed legislation to fund rat control in afflicted areas, but openly mocked it – in essence blaming city residents for their own infestations. One legislator, she writes, stated on the floor of the House of Representatives that “the rat smart thing to do is to vote down this civil rats bill, rat now.”

What brings Biehler’s history into sharp contemporary focus is the realization that infestations can and do cross lines of race and class to unite all citizens in the suffering and shame – as has happened more than once since 2000 when new epidemics of bedbugs spread quickly in urban areas. These outbreaks infested fancy hotels as well as city homes, and served as a reminder of how pests can alter our reality.

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS

Biehler’s research and teaching also track more contemporary ripples from this ongoing conflict between pests and humans. She is also examining an urban nuisance not tackled in her book: mosquitoes.

As part of an ongoing research project started in Washington, D.C., and now working in Baltimore neighborhoods, Biehler is assessing the attitudes and knowledge of city residents about mosquito infestation in Baltimore. (The project is a collaboration with researchers at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Rutgers University, the Parks and People Foundation, and the University of Maryland, College Park and it has received multiyear funding from the National Science Foundation.)

Because effective mosquito prevention requires an understanding of how and where the insects breed, informed and proactive residents can play a key role in efforts to control them. Biehler is also trying to understand how mosquitoes change people’s environments as well. “I’m asking about how mosquitoes are changing people’s use of space,” she says. “Indoor and outdoor space. How can mosquitoes be unifiers or dividers in a neighborhood?”

The same questions of public and private space that Biehler tackles in Pests in the City also crop up in the mosquito research. “On the one hand, people agree that we need to work together to control mosquitoes when there is something in the landscape that supports breeding,” she observes. “On the other hand, sometimes neighbors get mad when they feel that one neighbor isn’t doing enough, which places a stigma or an ongoing grudge. And then [we ask] how that affects mosquito management.”

Sandy Parker says that Biehler’s research “will become even more important in the context of climate change, changing urban ecologies, and the spread of pathogens and insect-borne diseases.” He adds that the outreach to citizens at the heart of the effort “provides a voice to the experiences of those living within these communities,” and that Biehler herself “offers valuable historical information that community-based organizations can use in constructing their own strategic initiatives.”

Indeed, with help from other scholars in science education and environmental justice, Biehler is expanding the study into a “citizen science project” that will encourage residents not only to help eliminate harbors in which mosquitoes can breed, but to become part of the process of discovery.

Biehler also brings her research into the classroom at UMBC, enlisting students in a new class that she has developed on environmental justice as part of the citizen science effort. The students have partnered with a youth group at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore’s Franklin Square neighborhood.

“I want the students to develop an understanding of what it’s like living in an environment where there has been disinvestment for a significant period of time,” she says.

Ultimately, Biehler’s research aims to transform the pests that infest our homes and environments into teachers, casting new light on the world around us. “These animals have learned much from humans, our cities and our homes” she writes in Pests in the City. “The persistence of unjust urban environments raises the question of whether we have learned from them.”

• Team Player – Stephanie Hill ’86, computer science and economics
• Composition as Conversation – James Polchin ’89, political science and English
• A Sense of Play – Kathleen Warnock ’80, interdisciplinary studies
• Giving Back – Greg Cantori ’84, geography