Here is the full transcript of investigative journalist Yvette Cabrera’s talk titled “The Hidden Danger of Lead in Soil” at TED Talks 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Hidden Threat of Lead Contamination
I bet you’ve heard about our problem with lead contamination. Here in the US, we began phasing out one of the largest sources of lead in gasoline in the mid-1970s. But for decades, our vehicles had spewed this toxic exhaust into the atmosphere. So where did that residual lead go?
I’m an investigative reporter, and almost a decade ago, when I began digging into this issue, I realized there’s a huge misconception about lead. We talk about it like the problem was solved decades ago, but it’s still happening right now. Lead contamination isn’t just a problem in the water of Flint, Michigan. It’s in the soil, too. And not just in Flint, but around the world and almost certainly where you live.
Today, we know that no level of lead is safe in children’s bodies, yet lead is detected in the blood of all children. Most people associate lead with water and paint. What they don’t realize is that this invisible poison could be in the very soil where their children are playing.
The Case of Santa Ana, California
Take Santa Ana, California, a city of more than 300,000 people. In the 1960s, the tiny Mexican-American barrio of Logan was one of the poorest neighborhoods in Santa Ana. Squeezed between two railroad tracks, next to a highway and surrounded by all sorts of industry. It had also been a segregated neighborhood.
It was, as they say, on the wrong side of the tracks. But for the children of Logan, it was home. Kids would race through the neighborhood, collecting barrels, crawl into them, and then get carried away by the Santa Ana winds that would blast them across the school playground. Everywhere the wind blew the children went.
But they didn’t know what that wind carried. Tiny, invisible particles of toxic lead dust that were floating in the air and landing in the soil in Santa Ana and cities across the country. We now know that decades of build-up from leaded gas, paint, industrial emissions and other sources have created invisible mountains of lead in our urban cores.
Because lead contaminants can remain in the soil for decades, even centuries, this poses a threat for areas hit by climate change, for example, drought and flooding, which can remobilize that toxic soil. Soil lead mapping across the country and around the world shows that soil lead contamination is widespread and pervasive. Here you can see how soil tests by scientists have found hotspots in our inner cities.
A Journalist’s Journey of Discovery
But most people don’t read the scientific journals showing this problem. I first encountered the dangers of soil lead contamination in 2014, when I was reporting on young Latino boys who were disproportionately incarcerated and were being turned over to immigration authorities by probation departments across California and then deported.
And as I reported that story, interviewing the mothers of these young boys, I saw some similarities. Their sons had trouble learning in school. They couldn’t focus, they couldn’t sit still, and they had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. Around the same time, I serendipitously came across a magazine article about lead and a hypothesis about the link between lead and crime, how the rise and fall of leaded gas use in cars had likely contributed to the rise and fall of violent crime in America. And, intriguingly, for my work, a connection between ADHD and lead exposure.
And I had an epiphany. I realized I was examining everything in these boys’ environment: the poverty, the violence, the high police presence in their neighborhoods. But I wasn’t considering the actual environment, the soil, as a factor that might be impacting their behavior. The neighborhoods where these young boys were growing up, on the wrong side of the tracks, was determining their destiny.
Once they entered the juvenile justice system, keeping them out was tough. Suspensions led to expulsions, which led to juvenile hall and then worse. César Gaspar was eight years old when I first met him while reporting on incarcerated youth in his neighborhood. He had just been diagnosed with ADHD, and because his parents had pressed the school, he was receiving the services he needed to stay on track.
The Impact of Environment on Children’s Futures
But his mom and dad still worried that he would end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. What was happening to César was happening to other young Latino boys in Orange County and across California. As a journalist and as a Mexican-American, a working-class kid who had gone to college on scholarships, I knew that your zip code, where you grow up, can determine where you end up in life.
My immigrant parents dreamed big for me, but if I hadn’t grown up in Santa Barbara with top teachers and a healthy environment, would I have been able to forge a path to a career in journalism? I wondered, what if we could help children not only succeed in school, but also keep them out of the criminal justice system? What if we could create healthier neighborhoods for everyone by removing the threat that’s right under our feet, and ensuring that neighborhoods are free of one of the most well-known and harmful toxic metals known to humans? Lead.
So I decided to test the soil for lead contamination in Santa Ana. Now, I’m not a soil scientist. I don’t have a PhD in geochemistry. I grew up in California, working alongside my parents, helping my mom clean homes on the weekends, and working after school in the gardens that my dad landscaped.
It was not fun, let me tell you. It’s why, as a kid, I vowed that one day I would have a job where I would never, ever have to toil in the soil.