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Abby, Dan, and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the third Wednesday of Uptown Summer to collect soil samples for analysis. Dan will set the samples to dry and sieve them to remove particles and debris larger than 2 mm before next week. We took samples from the Troy Little League and Collard City Garden, and next week we will screen the samples for lead using the Community Soil Study Toolkit.

While we collecting samples, The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s radio team recorded some of our group discussion that you can listen to here.

Dan and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the second Wednesday of Uptown Summer to think about what it would mean for us to use science to analyze our environment for pollutants. Our discussion prompt was a quote from two science education researchers who wrote that “science is one way of knowing that produces powerful insights and dangerous oversights that emerge from its development as an institution of Western imperialism” (Morales-Doyle and Frausto, 2021). These researchers propose situating science within a particular framework that they call Youth Participatory Science, which they compare and contrast to Youth Participatory Action Research in their work.

We looked at the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that no amount of lead in the body is known to be safe. We then related this health guidance to the various regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on lead in air, water, and soil, and built some physical intuition about the meaning of these regulations to our health.

Figure 1 from Daniel Morales-Doyle & Alejandra Frausto (2021). “Youth participatory science: a grassroots science curriculum framework,” Educational Action Research, 29:1, 60-78.

Saed was interviewed by McKenna Conners of The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 about the Our Soil project. Saed discussed his role with the Our Soil project and the complexities of soil and prevention of exposure to pollutants that soil may contain. You can listen to the radio interview here.

Abby, Sarah, and Hannah posted flyers on the blocks surrounding NATURE Lab to announce a community meeting to introduce the Soil Justice Fellows to the broader group of residents in North Troy, and to collectively set expectations for the workshops. The meeting will be held virtually on July 25th at 7pm. You can register here.

Flyer design by Sarah Bachinger.

The Our Soil team will be working with the Uptown Summer program at The Sanctuary for Independent Media on Wednesdays this month. We will be investigating soil lead in local soils, which will involve grappling with how and why lead is in soil in cities, how much lead do local soils contain, and what we can do about it to protect community health.

Today, on the first Wednesday of Uptown Summer, Dan and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens to introduce the topics of lead pollution and soil. We read and discussed the “Soil in the City” comic book together, relating it to the situation in Troy and thinking about what it would take to keep residents safe from lead.

We then watched a video about the Toxic Soil Busters in Worcester, MA, a group of teens that organized a soil testing program to measure lead in people’s yards in the city and took landscaping measures to prevent exposure where they found lead. This example prompted questions and discussion about what we thought about the role of science in identifying environmental pollutants like lead in soil, as well as its role in contributing to lead being in soil now. You can watch the video on the Toxic Soil Busters here.

We ran out of time before we had a chance to then dive into a map on childhood blood lead levels produced by Reuters, “Looking for Lead.” You can view the map here and read the articles associated with the larger reporting series, “Unsafe at Any Level,” here.

Screenshot of the Reuters “Looking for Lead” map centered on Troy, NY.

Dan was interviewed by McKenna Conners of The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 about the Our Soil project. They discuss the health implications of heavy metals like lead in soil, methods that people can test their own soil, and ways that people can prevent exposure to lead that may be in soil. You can listen to the two-part radio interview here and here.