Conclusion
Although this project encompasses the perspectives of community members, leaders, healthcare workers, activists, and journalists, there are some common themes surrounding lead remediation that shine through.
Lead is everywhere and can affect people in multiple ways, including water contamination, paint chips, or soil. Watie White's Lead Stories reflects these pathways, as well as the variety of people who are impacted by lead where they live, work, and play. His subjects included mothers, a pastor, politicians, and children. This diversity was reflected in our interview subjects as well.
Lead affects communities from all angles and is powerful enough to change the course of a person’s life. Alicia Whitehill, Dr. Erin Loucks, and Dr. Maya Khanna emphasized the medical dimensions of this phenomenon, especially how lead poisoning at a young age will result in cognitive deficits that set back their educational and vocational opportunities immensely relative to their peers.
Lead affects people on personal level too. Some interviewees witnessed loved ones exposed to the impacts of lead. Others, such as Paula Lavigne, noted their anxiety about lead levels in the soil. Still others, including as Terri Sanders, expressed concern about the potential impacts of lead on members of their community. Lead's impacts are multivalent; they reknit the fabric of communities, insinuate themselves into family life, and invade bodies. Lead is a social problem and it can also be an intimate threat.
Once a community realizes that these risks exist, especially among young children, it can exert great pressure to enact change. The creation of the Omaha Lead Superfund Site is a very visible reminder of that community power. Community engagement can be improved when it works through well-supported organizations with a deep investment in the community. As both Brenda Council and Kara Eastman noted, the process of generating meaninful change is never easy, and its impacts are often uneven. The historical legacy of past policies that segregated housing, denied access to healthcare, and broke apart communities not only increased risk to lead exposure, it fostered distrust between those in need of services and service providers. The uneven landscape of remediation reflected these patterns.
Most interviewees expressed their belief that they had witnessed positive changes, but they also acknowledged more work needs to be done. All interviewees emphasized the importance of building trust between community and government/nonprofit organizations. Trust could be established through a variety of ways, including collaborations between community groups and healthcare providers. Trust also depended on acknowledging (and breaking down) societal barriers to change. The latter work, as Judith Hill noted, is difficult and progress is less apparent. Several interviewees, in fact, noted that lead pollution and exposure has cycled out of public view. This may reflect a lack of visibility now that the period of soil remediation is at low ebb, but it is just as likely that the issue is following the life cycle Hill identifies in other social and environmental injustices that affect Omaha.
These interviews remind us that lead remains a significant threat and likely will remain so until underlying inequalities are addressed. So, what should remediation look like?