That's why whenever you switch over to the local news in your placid community, you could be forgiven for feeling as though you live in a level 10 crime zone.
Television news choices are also why, whenever polled, people generally put crime way at the top of the list of things that deeply bother them. Even if they live in a community like mine, where speeding and littering seem by far the biggest "crime" issues around. The environment, by contrast, often barely registers on top concern lists but that's a topic for another blog post (or two or three or more).
But what would happen if crime were firmly linked to environmental quality?
This weekend's New York Times Magazine poses just that question in a column by Jascha Hoffman, who writes about a recent study from Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, linking the elimination of lead in gasoline in the '70s and '80s under the aegis of the Clean Air Act to steady drops in crime.
"Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak," Hoffman writes.
Another researcher that Hoffman cites -- Rick Nevin, a senior adviser to the National Center for Healthy Housing -- published a study in the journal Environmental Research that found confirmed the lead hypothesis. "
“It really does sound like a bad science-fiction plot,” Nevin said. “The idea that a society could have systematically poisoned its youngest children with the same neurotoxins in two different ways over the same century is almost impossible to believe.”
Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I doubt the lack of crime -- and its causes -- will qualify as sensational in anyone's book and therefore won't receive much coverage.
In contrast, the latest incident of isolated crime or terrible fire and accident draws attention far beyond its impact on our lives.
Here's an idea: We hook up NRDC lawyers and scientists sirens and bright flashing lights. Then when they pull up to the scene of a significant-but-not-so telegenic environmental crime just perhaps they'll find TV reporters chronicling the event and raising public concern.
After all, a local crime or accident generally impacts only those directly involved. As Hoffman writes in the Times Magazine, environmental crimes can impact tens if not hundreds of millions.
]]>Here we were in supposedly the world's most powerful industrialized nation, yet getting New Orleans back on its feet was so slow. Federal, state and city officials continue to blame each other for the lethargic progress.
My perception of the United States as a democracy that takes care of its own was shattered.
This wasn't Somalia of the 1990s, where the absence of a central government guaranteed a dearth of public services and shoddy infrastructure; or postwar Angola, where broken bridges, land mines and derelict roads and airstrips could be blamed for hampering the transport of supplies or assistance to a populace in need. It wasn't southern Sudan, where aid groups often had to suspend relief efforts because of security concerns.
This was America.
The lack of faith in the government, common among people in the developing world, gradually began to show itself among New Orleanians as they waited in vain for an outpouring of help from authorities.
"It's like no one cares; like we've been forgotten," Marie Benoit, a schoolteacher pre-Katrina, said one day on the way to her home in a park of 500 campers on the campus of Southern University at New Orleans.
Simmons ends her story on an uplifting note about the resilience of the city and its people, which is delightful to read. But NRDC's two-years-later work unfortunately presents an anything-but-uplifting picture.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the floodwaters that swamped New Orleans swept oil, diesel and toxic chemicals from gas stations, industrial sites and toxic waste dumps into residential neighborhoods. Today, residents are still returning to communities laced with hazardous pollution. The latest round of NRDC environmental testing in New Orleans shows that several areas of the city -- including schools and playgrounds -- contain high levels of arsenic in the soil.
The flooding appears to have spread long-buried arsenic from pesticides or industrial processes, or from the muck at the bottom of the canals and Lake Pontchartrain, throughout the city and onto the surface of the soil, where people -- especially young children -- can easily touch it, breathe it, or get in their mouths. NRDC found six schools and two playgrounds sitting on arsenic hotspots -- areas where the level of arsenic exceeds environmental cleanup guidelines. Arsenic can cause cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and other serious health problems.
A team of NRDC scientists, lawyers and communicators visited New Orleans a few months ago to talk with residents and complete another round of soil samples. You can see their travels in the following video.
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