Green Geeks Liberate Environmental Data

A screenshot of a rescued EPA data mapping tool. Image: Public Environmental Data Partners website.

Reporter’s Toolbox: Green Geeks Liberate Environmental Data

By Joseph A. Davis

As environmental data goes missing, these are times when hackers can be heroes to journalists. Meet Public Environmental Data Partners.

It’s a loose coalition of programmers and developers who are reversing the Trump administration’s removal of politically inconvenient data from the internet.

Once the data is rescued, they put it into usable form — searchable, visible, map-formatted and downloadable.

 

Where the data comes from

Well, most of it was on the web a few months ago when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Then it vanished.

For example, Toolbox has exclaimed over the years about how vital the EJScreen data tool is for finding and reporting on environmental injustice. Now it’s gone.

Well, gone from the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but not from the web.

A group called the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, better known as EDGI, preserved the data before it vanished, and Public Environmental Data Partners set up the interface for using it. Toolbox applauds.

Toolbox was also happy when Thomson Reuters Foundation (now rebranded as Context) published a take on Public Environmental Data Partners by Adam Smith in April.

 

How to use the data smartly

You can see the growing list of rescue projects Public Environmental Data Partners has worked on. It includes the GitHub complex from the Centers for Disease Control (GitHub is an open programming platform). It also includes a map of the incidence of eastern equine encephalitis.

The list includes lots of Energy Department data: the Energy Justice Dashboard, the Wind Energy Community Benefits Database, etc. It includes pipeline data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

And more. Not all are gone yet and not all are back online yet, but they are working on it.

Groups contributing to the Public Environmental Data Partners include:

• The CAFE Research Coordinating Center at Harvard and Boston University
• The Catalyst Cooperative
• Earth Hacks
• The End of Term Web Archive
• Environmental Policy Innovation Center
• Fulton Ring
• Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)
• Open Environmental Data Project
• Rooted Futures Lab

One key Trump approach to censorship is to focus obsessively on words. For example, under Trump, we don’t say “diversity” anymore. Everything with the word in it vanishes. Don’t say gay? Yup. But it seems now that anything with the word “climate” in it vanishes as well.

 

Trump’s EPA has stopped collecting data

about U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

This is head-in-the-sand stuff.

 

Trump’s EPA has stopped collecting data about U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This is head-in-the-sand stuff. Not saying “climate” doesn’t make it go away; it makes it worse.

Under Trump, a lot of things containing the word climate are disappearing, mob style. But they do not sleep silently with the fishes. Data wants to be free.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 20. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.