Long Neglected 1985 EPA Article Warns -- Beware What's in Your Pipelines

The EPA Journal published a long neglected and important article way back in 1985, of accidental but great relevance to climate change. It ought to be required reading, even though the article makes not a single mention of either climate change or global warming.

It does, however, have a most relevant section of seven short paragraphs about the Roman Empire called "Addicted to Lead." Remember, this was published in 1985, so as you read the section excerpted below, when you see the word "lead", think "carbon" instead.

Called "Lead Poisoning: A Historical Perspective," the article begins with a review of the primary role lead poisoning played in the decline of the Roman Empire, which used lead for every conceivable use: as a preservative for food and wine, in cosmetics, for utensils, plates, pots and pans. Even though the Romans knew lead in big doses could cause serious health problems, they did not understand the consequences of the slow and invisible accumulation of lead in the human body. Lead's most important use in Rome?

......inexpensive and reliable piping for the vast network plumbing that kept Rome and the provincial cities of the Roman Empire supplied with water. Indeed, the very word "plumbing" comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum.

Here's the section called "Addicted to Lead":

The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems, even madness and death. However, they were so fond of its diverse uses that they minimized the hazards it posed. Romans of yesteryear, like Americans of today, equated limited exposure to lead with limited risk. What they did not realize was that their everyday low-level exposure to the metal rendered them vulnerable to chronic lead poisoning, even while it spared them the full horrors of acute lead poisoning.

The symptoms of acute lead intoxication appeared most vividly among miners who were thrown into unhealthy intimacy with the metal on a daily basis. Romans reserved such debilitating and backbreaking labor for slaves. Some of these unfortunates were forced to spend all of their brief and blighted lives underground, out of sight and out of mind. The unpleasantness of lead mining was further neutralized late in the Empire when the practice was prohibited in Italy and consigned completely to the provinces.

Lead smelting, which had once been commonplace in every Roman city and town, eventually followed mining operations to the provinces. Italy, the heart of imperial Rome, grew tired of the noxious fumes emanating from lead smelting forges. The obvious damage to the health of smithies and their families was a matter of little or no concern.

Roman aristocrats, who regarded labor of any sort as beneath their dignity, lived oblivious to the human wreckage on which their ruinous diet of lead depended. They would never dream of drinking wine except from a golden cup, but they thought nothing of washing down platters of lead-seasoned food with gallons of lead-adulterated wine.

The result, according to many modern scholars, was the death by slow poisoning of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Symptoms of "plumbism" or lead poisoning were already apparent as early as the first century B.C. Julius Caesar for all his sexual ramblings was unable to beget more than one known offspring. Caesar Augustus, his successor, displayed not only total sterility but also a cold indifference to sex.

The first century A.D. was a time of unbridled gluttony and drunkenness among the ruling oligarchs of Rome. The lead concealed in the food and wine they devoured undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the outbreak of unprecedented epidemics of saturnine gout and sterility among aristocratic males and the alarming rate of infertility and stillbirths among aristocratic women.

Still more alarming was the conspicuous pattern of mental incompetence that came to be synonymous with the Roman elite. This creeping cretinism manifested itself most frighteningly in such clearly degenerate emperors as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus. It is said that Nero wore a breastplate of lead, ostensibly to strengthen his voice, as he fiddled and sang while Rome burned. Domitian, the last of the Flavian emperors, actually had a fountain installed in his palace from which he could drink a never-ending stream of leaded wine.

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