Scholars Award: Following the Residues of the Lead Industry

Lead - a toxic heavy metal - is dispersed across yards, playgrounds, parks, and empty lots in cities around the world, the result of decades of leaded automobile emissions and centuries of mining and industrial pollution. Because lead does not break down over time, remediation of urban soils to some previously pure or safe baseline condition may be impossible.

Given this challenge, how do scientists, decision-makers, and affected communities attempt to reduce the harms caused by soil lead? This project answers these questions by tracing soil lead residues in 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, this project has 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. Other broader impacts include communicating with urban gardeners about the hazards associated with lead exposure, developing ties among academic and community-based soil researchers and advocates, and demonstrating how soil science and social science can mutually support and inform each other.

This is the first sustained analysis of soil lead as a ubiquitous residue that continues to accrete around the globe. This project contributes to research conversations in science and technology studies about life in polluted environments, where toxic contamination and its consequences often evade scientific apprehension. Furthermore, it expands the work of historians and social scientists whose research on lead poisoning and the long struggle to regulate the lead industry has generally focused on single locations.

In addition to multiple field sites, multiple methods are used in this study: 1) ethnographic fieldwork in historical and present-day lead mining and processing communities; 2) interviews of scientists and activists who conduct community-based soil testing research; 3) analysis of documents about lead mining, the lead-acid battery industry, and other historical and contemporary sources of lead residues in soils across the planet; and, 4) examination of the scientific literature and risk modeling about soil lead exposures. This study also deploys a novel research method called ethnographic soil testing.

By interviewing urban gardeners while collaboratively testing their soil for traces of lead, insights are produced regarding how people think about their own exposures to lead, their relationships to the environmental histories of their communities, and living safely in contaminated environments.

This project is jointly funded by the Science and Technology Studies program in SBE and Environmental Engineering Program in ENG.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.