Tetraethyl lead is an extremely toxic substance that, in minute quantities, improves the efficiency and performance of internal combustion engines. From “Tetraethyl Lead,” http://heritage.dupont.com/floater/fl_tel/floater.shtml
Good for engines it may have been (eliminates piston knock), but research has strongly shown that even small levels of lead, especially in children, can result in lowered intelligence and impulsive and agressive behavior.
In an article called “Criminal Element” in the Oct. 21 New York Times Magazine, writer Jascha Hoffman cites a paper by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, just published in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Reyes, and other researchers, studied data which suggest a link between the sharp drop in Americans’ blood levels of lead after the Clean Air Act mandated lead-free gasoline in the 1970’s and ’80’s, and a drop in criminal behavior rates, particularly violent crime. Was getting the lead out of gasoline a factor in the drop in crime? It might be, according to what Hoffman calls a “new environmental theory of criminal behavior.”
Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, says the answer to the question of why crime declined so sharply in the early 1990’s, when experts anticipated a huge crime wave, “lies in the cleanup of a toxic chemical that affected nearly everyone in the United States for most of the last century.”
According to global statistics, Hoffman writes, “Crime rates around the world are just starting to respond to the removal of lead from gasoline and paint.”
I recall seeing, in 1950s issues of popular magazines like Life, full-page advertisements from, I think, the Ethyl Company, extolling the virtues of lead in gasoline. The ads featured happy, smiling families, motoring along in their new Oldsmobiles through the tranquil countryside, with purring engines and tanks full of leaded gas.
There are, of course, sceptics.
So what’s the connection with Kephart?
OK, I’m reaching here. But in the 1916 edition of his Camping and Woodcraft, perhaps Kephart had premonitions of what modern industrial life foretold for human health. Quoting (but not citing, unfortunately) William Morris from his The Earthly Paradise, Kephart wrote:
“…Basking and sporting in the great clean out-of-doors, one could, for the blessed interval,
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town.”
