If it Bleeds ...

There's a saying in television journalism: if it bleeds, it leads.

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.

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