Gretchen Gehrke is co-founder of the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, which was formed in 2016 to track and analyze changes to federal environmental data and practices under the previous Trump administration. It’s now a leader in a new field: environmental data justice.
Their website is a treasure trove of information about access to environmental data and the prevalence and consequences of suppression of data and of specific terms like “climate change”, and the lack of enforcement of policies such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. In an email interview with Salon, Gehrke explains the Environmental Right to Know: that is, the belief that people have the right to know about environmental issues that affect them, and the ability to influence environmental governance decisions in a meaningful way.
While the right to know is a general principle used in various contexts, in the United States it has been codified in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, authorized in 1986 by Title III of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act. This legislation was a response to the world’s worst industrial disaster, a 1984 crisis in which over 500,000 people in Bhopal, India were exposed to highly toxic methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant, killing at least 2,000 people directly and injuring thousands more. The plant was majority-owned by an American company, resulting in lawsuits against the U.S. company (later dismissed) as well as in India. The goal of the EPCRA, then, was to impose regulations and increase citizen knowledge of chemicals used in our communities in order to prevent a similar disaster from happening in the United States.
As Gehrke’s EDGI noted last month, web pages have disappeared and language has been changed on the Environmental Protection Agency website since Donald Trump returned to power. Changes seem to have related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility-related pages, to environmental justice, and, as documented by Jacobin, to climate change, echoing the removal of climate science data from the EPA website (and the term “climate change” itself, across federal websites) during the first Trump administration.
"The scrubbing of websites removes critical information the public needs about issues that affect their health and well-being."
When Salon checked it out this week, the current site still described the Community Right-to-Know Act — although the main page explaining how the principle applies appears to be gone (it’s archived here.) Other Right to Know information still on the EPA website include a 1992 document explaining how the right to know relates to the Toxic Release Inventory, which was created as part of the EPCRA and, back then, provided information about some 20,000 companies and how they disposed of hundreds of chemicals. Now it’s up to 799 individually listed chemicals in 33 chemical categories, as a page of the EPA site that was last updated on Jan. 7 explains.
You can also, as of this writing, still find instructions for using a 2017 application called MyRTK, short for My Right to Know, that allows you to search for local information about pollutants, toxic release inventory compliance, and chemical release incidents. There seems no way to be sure what else may or may not have been purged from the site.
“Access to data and information are foundational to the Environmental Right to Know,” Gehrke told Salon. “The scrubbing of websites removes critical information the public needs about issues that affect their health and well-being, and strips the public of their agency in determining their own actions and their democratic participation in governance issues. Information suppression undermines the environmental right to know, and our democracy as a whole.”
Information suppression thus undermines that right to know, and undermines the workings of democracy itself. After all, a right’s not much good if you can’t realize it because your government doesn’t accept that it’s a right you have. And it seems that they don’t.
On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has "privately urged President Donald Trump’s administration to reconsider a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change." Ignoring these facts threatens "the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources."
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As well as scrubbing websites of vital information, the Trump administration has taken data and mapping tools offline, Gehrke explained. These tools, she explained, allowed the public to use federal environmental and health data in their advocacy without having to be data scientists themselves. Shutting them down impedes research, advocacy and policy progress.
Organizations including EDGI, scientists, and librarians have been racing to preserve data since the first federal health data began disappearing from websites in January. And this month the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project published a selection of materials and webpages relating to environmental justice and climate change that have been deleted from federal agency websites.
The situation has been nothing short of chaotic, with Zane Selvans, co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative, which works to “liberate open data about the U.S. energy system” — that is, to make public energy data easy to access, telling Salon in a video interview that the data preservation communities has had scares “on subsequent Friday afternoons, there have been frantic text messages or just rumors from folks that such and such data is going to go down.”
Most of the public energy data Catalyst works with — data used by both private companies and public interest groups, by fossil fuel and renewable energy developers — has mostly remained available, Selvans said.
“So far, it’s been a lot of fear, a lot of rumors, not a lot of core energy system data going away, but [we have] definitely less confidence in commitment to [the administration’s] ongoing preservation of relevant data sets. Because the energy system data is clearly very closely related to both environmental impacts and to social justice impact, which has previously been a priority of the U.S. government,” Selvans told Salon.
The rumors, though, also included a scare about potential loss of NASA scientific data (which is collected from the real world rather than coming from a model, making it irreplaceable in a way that modeling data like much of the energy system data is not).
“I think that that particular concern was more in the flurry of cost cutting, is this contract going to be maintained? Is it going to be accidentally forgotten about or canceled? Because there just seems like this flurry of activity that wasn’t maybe super well considered or planned out, and so that’s one way it could go down,” Selvans said.
In addition to the risk of Trump’s purges denying public access to data both by accident and by design, there’s the question of relevance over time. All the efforts to archive data can’t solve the problem of data needing to be updated.
“The ongoing maintenance and production and distribution of these data sets is something that we obviously can’t do no matter how well-organized we are, because a lot of this data is being produced by the government labs or by government agencies.” Still, if those agencies decide to stop collecting vital data, having an archive is still useful, Selvans said, especially if there could be a centralized, accessible directory of non-governmental archives.
Catalyst, along with EDGI, is part of the Public Environmental Data Partners, a volunteer coalition of dozens of organizations and individuals working to preserve access to environmental data.
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“By preserving this information, we are supporting the public to stay informed and to resist the revisionist history and gaslighting that we observed during the first Trump administration,” Gehrke said.
But she doesn’t believe archiving efforts can possibly be enough to address the information crisis caused not just by the administration’s current attack on federal data or on specific terms or concepts like climate change or diversity, but also by a failure of digital age information policy to address it, or attacks like it that should have been predicted from experiences with that first round of Trump, and with the already-rampant rise of misinformation and disinformation — policy failures that in themselves, Gehrke believes, have led us to the current political landscape.
Hard data, Selvans explained, connects with the censorship or purging of words like environmental justice or diversity because in order to address an inequity — say, air quality in one area that is dramatically worse than in wealthier or whiter areas — you have to measure things. You have to measure things to even be aware that the inequity exists, making the disappearance of data and language not just an attack on the right to know, but an attack on our right to even know what we're no longer able to know.
“Given the priorities that seem to have taken over at this point and the kind of data that has so far seemed most impacted, that feels like the most frightening part, to be like we’re not even going to know how these [environmental policy] impacts are distributed,” Selvans said.
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