Filmmaker offering an online preview of his documentary on the region’s longtime air pollution problems

Pittsburgh filmmaker and activist Mark Dixon has been working on his documentary about air quality issues in the region since 2016.

He’s ready now to share a trailer and preview of “Inversion: The Unfinished Business of Pittsburgh’s Air.” It took on additional importance to him with the 2018 U.S. Steel Clairton Coke Works fire and the 2022 startup of Shell Polymers Monaca, a cracker plant in Potter, Beaver County. Dixon is offering an about 20-minute look at the footage to not only educate viewers but also obtain feedback on his work before he enters the final editing stages. 

Already 70 people have registered for the May 27 online sample of “Inversion.”  It will start at 7 p.m. Those interested in seeing it can RSVP online.

This screening follows one held April 30 in partnership with the Pittsburgh Documentary Salon at WQED-TV in Oakland.

The documentary “will focus on a variety of unique ‘inversion’ conditions, including weather inversions contributing to Pittsburgh’s notoriously polluted (and often stinky) air, a citizen power inversion created by advances in technology and crowd-sourced pollution data, and an industrial inversion exhibited by the replacement of old, dirty manufacturing by clean tech (albeit under threat from local natural gas development),” according to Dixon’s Blue Lens website.

The filmmaker left behind a career in industrial engineering in California’s Silicon Valley to focus on global warming and resource depletion issues and advocacy. He moved to Pittsburgh in 2006, following his sister, as he transitioned to a career in environmental filmmaking. The low cost of living here as opposed to California appealed to him, too. 

He took an environmental road trip with a college buddy and his wife during that year and turned it into a feature film, according to his website. The film captured awards from film festivals and continues to be streamed internationally.

Dixon has not wavered from his career transition into advocacy, bringing PennFuture to name him a Citizens Choice Green Power Hero in 2011. His second film, “The Power of One Voice: A 50-Year Perspective on the Life of Rachel Carson,” completed in 2014, featured interviews with Carson’s adopted son Roger Christie, her biographer Linda Lear, and other notable writers, scientists and advocates. He worked on that documentary with co-producer Carl Kurlander, a screenwriter and producer who is the co-founder of the Steeltown Entertainment Project and a Pitt teaching professor; executive director Patricia DeMarco, a former executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association; and director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University, and others.

Amid all this work he married M. Christine Benner, a writer, editor and educator; they bought a house in Squirrel Hill because, he says, “I love this city.” She is an assistant producer and editor on “Inversion.”

After crowdfunding his way to cover the 2015 United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Paris, Dixon’s environmental concerns deepened.

“I thought I really knew a lot about climate. When I re-examined the issue in 2015 leading up to the summit, I was really discouraged about how bad things were,” he said. “When I came back, I thought what could I do to deepen my resolve on climate concerns.  It all came together for me, driven mostly by fossil fuels.”

In his activism work he has given many presentations, attended meetings of public regulatory bodies, and taken photographs of protests and actions centering on air quality and pollution issues. He started attending and recording Allegheny County Health Department public meetings after a lawsuit PennFuture initiated against U.S. Steel for a series of violations was converted into what he considered “a mild consent decree” by the Health Department.

His advocacy also led to him assisting in the deployment of more than 100 low-cost PurpleAir monitors throughout the region for residents to record high air pollutant emission levels. He received recognition from the Group Against Smog and Pollution, which named him a Champion for Healthy Air in 2017 along with Dr. Deborah Gentile, according to his website.

Then came the Christmas Eve coke works fire and emissions violations, which Dixon documented in a timeline on his website, and the cracker plant startup. He interviewed everyone he could.

The pandemic delayed his work on his documentary; his wife has helped him find grants as he continued filming and interviewing.

It also took the Health Department, PennEnvironment and Clean Air Council as co-plaintiffs five years to come to a multimillion-dollar agreement with U.S. Steel over the fire.

The January 2024 agreement resolved the case that alleged thousands of air pollution violations stemming from the fire and the subsequent 102 consecutive days of illegal emissions of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, according to the Allegheny County website. Violations caused by two subsequent breakdowns at the Clairton Coke Works in June 2019 and July 2022 also were included in the suit.

The settlement also mandated millions of dollars in investments by U.S. Steel in pollution control and plant reliability upgrades to prevent future breakdowns of essential pollution control systems, according to the website article. 

With the footage and interviews Dixon has recorded already, the documentary has grown from 90 minutes to a rough cut of 1 hour 45 minutes.  In addition to editing, and possibly incorporating more material, the filmmaker has legal and fact checking to finish. That latter work has been done on the segments he will show in next week’s screening.

His wife and composer Michael Dodin have been working with him on it.

Dixon said he “exists in an ecosystem of individuals in the air quality community – the Breathe Project, GASP, Clean Air Council and more.” As he works on his film and continues attending meetings and film events, he considers himself “an inside advocate trying to tell the story of advocates I see there.”

Will Zavala, founder of Pittsburgh’s Documentary Salon and a University of Pittsburgh film instructor, said he invited Dixon, who had screened his YERT film for his group previously, because “I was discouraged, like a lot of people, about the direction the country had taken since Trump took office.”

He wrote in an email, “I wondered, “What can we as filmmakers and citizens do to resist, to defend, to push back on these destructive forces?  Mark Dixon came to mind as someone who hadn’t just recently take up the fight but has been in it for the long haul.  That’s why I called him to present at a Salon — really just to remind people that some people are not taking it lying down.”

Dixon does not have a firm timetable for its completion but said he is getting closer, and feedback from viewers at this screening will help. Once creative work is finished, he said he will pursue community screenings throughout the region and showing “Inversion” at film festivals.

“Powerful documentation plays an important role,” he said.

To register for the online screening, visit https://inversiondoc.com/2025/05/14/upcoming-preview-screening-zoom-event-may-27/.