News

Abby and Dan published an article comparing and contrasting COVID-19 and lead exposure in the online magazine Toxic News. By considering the dimensions of testing, racialized vulnerability, workplace exposures, and individualized protection, the manifestation of the two seemingly disparate health challenges may not be so dissimilar after all:

“The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare many enduring problems in American society. While we hope that the pandemic will come to a rapid conclusion, we will continue to contend with these problems as they manifest in other health threats, such as lead pollution. We hope that the sobering lessons of COVID-19 will improve our efforts to create safer environments for all.”

You can read the full article here, as well as its press release from RPI here.

We selected a header image for the article that was taken by David Brodbeck and shared under a Creative Commons license:

Through our publication in Toxic News, we encountered an earlier article written by Daniel Renfrew on lead contamination in Uruguay that made an impression on us, particularly an image of graffiti shared in the article:

“Today our children are poisoned with factory lead, tomorrow with police lead.”

Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute closed its campus for the foreseeable future in response to COVID-19. The RPI-based project team will begin working remotely and are fortunate that we will be able to continue video interviews with community-engaged soil researchers. We are reevaluating our initial project timelines, and expect to delay our initial visit to Chile (originally scheduled May 2020) and Dan’s visit to Mónica’s laboratory at the University of Arizona for continuing to develop the Community Soil Study Toolkit (originally scheduled July 2020 through December 2020). We hope that our plan to hold collaborative soil workshops in North Troy in Spring 2021 will be feasible, and are thinking through ideas of how to conduct such a workshop with physical distancing. Try to be safe!

Abby and Dan have started conducting video interviews with community-engaged soil researchers and practitioners throughout the U.S. who are focused on studying and addressing heavy metals like lead and arsenic in urban soils. The researchers and practitioners that we plan to interview work at the boundary of academic science, environmental regulation, and affected communities. They are working to make a difference both inside and outside of formal environmental and health policy channels, which will give us insight about the public health challenge of lead and other heavy metals in urban soils and the built environment. We expect to further our understanding of how lead and other heavy metals were dispersed into the environment, the governance and regulation of these contaminants, a variety of means to address lead in urban soils, and the barriers that have obstructed the clean up of lead contamination in soils.

Interview from Abby’s office before campus closure due to COVID-19:

Dan was interviewed by Melissa Bromley of The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 about the Our Soil project. They discussed the prevalence of lead in urban soils from past use of lead-based paints and leaded gasolines that have left lead residues in soils and homes, particularly concentrated in urban areas. They also talked about continuing the development of the Community Soil Study Toolkit for making field measurements of lead, arsenic, and copper in soil. You can listen to the radio interview here.

RPI undergraduate students Tal Margalit, Izania Gonzalez, and Carson Reay have joined the Our Soil team for the semester to assist with researching environmental policy on lead in soil, designing a participatory mapping workshop to locate sites for soil testing, and identifying best practices for gardening when soil contains lead. Welcome!

A belated congratulations to Nuestros Suelos for winning a 2019 Making and Doing Award at the annual conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) held in New Orleans, LA, in September 2019!