Abby was interviewed by Sina Hickey of The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 about the Our Soil project. Abby announced that the Our Soil project and NATURE Lab are looking for Soil Justice Fellows who would like to learn, think, and act collectively about local urban soils through a series of collaborative workshops in August 2021. You can listen to the radio interview here.

The NSF grant will support research of soil lead in the US, Chile, UK, and Australia, four regions with distinctive roles in the lead industry. The main goal is to understand how people in each area create knowledge about soil lead, develop and promote methods to reduce exposures, and change the social and economic circumstances in which lead exposures occur. By “following the chemical” across four areas, from lead mines to the soils of urban neighborhoods, there is potential to affect environmental politics and policy, offering new ways to conceptualize the global problem of lead residues, while illuminating possible solutions that are emerging in particular locales.

Check out the NSF award page for the project and the RPI press release!

“Soil in the City” is a comic about living and gardening safely with city soils that may contain lead residues from past uses of leaded gasoline and lead-based paint. The Our Soil team wrote the script and partnered with Kaitlyn Briscoe, Angela Duras, and Madeline Montero for the illustrations. Kaitlyn and Angela are currently undergraduates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Madeline is an alumni.

The Our Soil team also partnered with Aileen Javier of Troy, NY, to complete a Spanish translation of the comic, “El Suelo en la Ciudad.”

You can download the comic book in English here and in Spanish here.

Abby and Sebastián joined a panel discussion for the film screening of “Arica: A Toxic Waste Scandal” hosted by The Sanctuary for Independent Media. Arica, Chile, is one of the two cities where Our Soil/Nuestros Suelos will hold workshops with residents to test local soils for lead and arsenic this year. The people of Arica have a long history dealing with the health consequences of lead and arsenic contamination of city soils. One substantial contribution of lead and arsenic to soil in Arica is smelter waste exported from Sweden to Chile in 1984. The metallic waste contained extremely high concentrations of lead and arsenic, and local residents continue to face the contamination due to negligence of the Swedish and Chilean companies involved and both governments.

The documentary, created by Lars Edman and William Johansson Kalén, covers this history and the ongoing pursuit of justice by residents in Arica. You can find more information about the documentary here and about film screening at The Sanctuary’s website here.

Colorado State’s Master Gardener program has a guide for estimating soil texture in a variety of ways. One of those ways is a jar method on the last page of the guide. By mixing soil, water, and powdered dish detergent in the jar, then allowing it to sit for two days, and marking the settled level of material at one minute, two hours, and 48 hours, the sand, silt, and clay fractions of the soil can be calculated. Below is an image of the last page describing this jar method.

One of the bulletin boards in the hallway outside of the Ramírez-Andreotta laboratory at the University of Arizona had the following poster that describes how to use red cabbage for measuring pH:

It may be possible to use red cabbage to measure the pH of soils as well. To measure soil pH, soil must first be added to water. To measure soil pH with the red cabbage indicator, soil could simply be added to the indicator solution.

The blog post associated with the poster can be found here. That blog post references an earlier post about using the petals of poinsettia plants in a similar fashion, as they also contain anthocyanin pigments.