These historical incidents have undermined public faith in technology and in industry’s ability to regulate itself and tell the public the truth.

Test–or re-test–the soil (a county or university extension service does this for nominal fee) at the end of each growing season until the contamination levels are within “acceptable” ranges, then plant food crops.

I realize the trash-bag approach is not an ideal procedure, because among other things, it relies on landfills for “final” sequestration of heavy metals (bound up in plant material). But growing plants is cheap, and it’s more workable and cheaper than removing all the contaminated soil and replacing it with safe soil. Growing mustard, sunflowers or other plant “hyperaccumulators” can be a very effective low-tech solution in a place that may not have other options at hand. More, briefly, here: http://www.starhawk.org/permaculture/NOLA_bio_basics.html

Wrt getting the lead out in particular: http://isebindia.com/01_04/04-04-4.html

There are plenty of lists if you’re serious about using bioremediation, which includes both plants and fungi, to clean the soil. Thank goodness the science on this has been cooking for many years now, and the solid data is in. It works.

One word : phytoremediation.

“Lead: using Indian Mustard (Brassica juncea), Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), Hemp Dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum), or Poplar trees, which sequester lead in their biomass.”

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoremediation

Just give us some time, it can get better!

I can see it now: every kindergartner in the country is given the marshmallow test as a predictor of their ability to achieve as an adult. Oog.

Correlation is not causation.

Of course, proving a definite causal link between human murder and lead exposure sounds like it won’t pass through any IRB I know.

The whole Correlation =/= Causation thing gets trotted out way too often. Yes, random facts that happen to share some vague mathematical relationship are probably meaningless. But this is an example where they have a proposed connection between the two variables and the whole thing is built on relatively settled science.

Interesting follow-ups would be doing marshmallow tests in different areas of lead exposure and doing follow ups to track changes over time.

Right now, there is very, very, very little known definitively about what is the relationship between pollution and criminality. And what we do know for sure cannot (at this point) be tied to lead exposure.

I’m all for calling out correlations when they happen. But I also happen to think it’s pretty unnecessary (and, in fact, somewhat discrediting of situations where the evidence is strong) to take largely undocumented phenomenon of unknown origin and call them correlation.

Seriously, we get it. Move on to a new trick now. Kthxbye!

@Ugly Canuck: So what do you do with the Indian Mustard or whatever once you’ve grown it? Do you just grow it and throw it away? I assume you can’t eat or compost it. Hmmm….. do I spend ten years growing inedible mustard greens and throwing them away, in the hopes that it mitigates the lead in my soil, or do I simply replace large swarths of my soil with fresh organic matter as need be?

I believe it’s actually a production of the Watermark Community Church (http://www.Watermark.org) and the theme is the deferred reward of heaven.

I think it’s interesting the video linked here is entirely sourceless – no one investigated where it’s from, why it was made. This link is to a copy. Journalism is hard!

Behold! http://vimeo.com/13390367?ab

One of the most impressive correlations in environmental health is the chart that shows blood lead levels next to total lead used in gasoline. Sometimes regulations really work. See the pretty lines: http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/bnsdocs/98summ/alead/Figure1.gif (USA 1974-1992)

It would be interesting to compare blood lead levels and crime rates in various countries.

Unfortunately we do have opportunities for ongoing field testing of lead-exposed populations, as many places in the world still use leaded gasoline.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANTRANSPORT/Resources/b09phasing.pdf

Even better than more research would be an immediate global ban on leaded gasoline.

Declining lead exposure due to non-lead based paint and unleaded gas regulations are brought up in this WSJ piece. Declining lead exposure is real.

But as a whole, we are exposed to a wider variety of contaminants (some at ppm, ppb, and ppt) than people in the past. And it’s not just one contaminant, but a whole cocktail of a mess. All that peed out prozac, hormones, and caffeine that our waste water treatment plants don’t filter out ends up someplace. Who knows what those affect will be.