We haven't developed what some have called the precautionary principle which will say look, if there's a reason, if a product is safe, that's fine, but it's really the responsibility of an industry to tell us it's safe and to make sure it's safe. It's not our responsibility to wait until the damage is done.
The history of lead is a history of neglect. It's a history of decisions on our part not to address the broad implications of what we did to ourselves during the industrial revolution and in the first part of the century when our cities expanded broadly, when we built our housing and we began to depend upon lead as a mainstay of our new industrial culture. We put this stuff in even though we knew it was dangerous, we knew it was going to hurt kids.
We found ourselves believing or allowing ourselves to believe what our industries told us, which is lead helps to guard your health was one of the ads that appeared in the 1920s. Lead takes place in modern games, lead is part of our everyday life, all these ads and propaganda that came out of the very time when physicians and public health workers and reports were appearing of children around the country who were literally at that point dying and going into convulsions because lead was poisoning them.
We've had a century in which we've allowed some industries to basically pollute the air, pollute the water, pollute the ground, pollute the rivers, and we've been trying sporadically to clean air acts and ways of regulating them. But we now are sitting in a world that's filled with all sorts of materials that we don't really know the impact of. It's not like they're necessarily all poisonous but it's odd to put all these materials into our environment and watch.
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Jean Ziegler Professor