By Kelsey Breseman, EDGI EDGI initially formed as a reaction to a presidential election, but has matured to fill an ongoing need for public accountability for data. The organization’s first work brought together volunteers from across the United States and internationally to ensure the archive of thousands of pages and databases of publicly held information … Read more
By Kelsey Breseman EDGI is proud to announce that we are now officially a partner of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). The partnership was announced at the ESIP Winter Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland, where data managers, data scientists, and other data-related professionals gathered to discuss better futures for data in the earth sciences space. … Read more
INSTRUCTIONS: To see the annotations, click on the text that is highlighted in yellow below; the relevant annotations will then appear on the right side of the screen. BACKGROUND: Just over fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon signed the landmark National Environmental Policy Act into law, requiring consideration of environmental impacts in all federally run … Read more
By Kelsey Breseman Heather: What is it we go into decentralization wanting, and what is it capable of doing? Kelsey: When we talk about decentralization in terms of social structures, it is almost entirely about increasing individual trust. But when we talk about it in a technical context, it is almost entirely about removing the … Read more
By Kelsey Breseman, EDGI As of December 2019, ToxMap and ToxNet are being retired from the National Library of Medicines website maintained by the National Institute of Health. EDGI has written previously about the impact of this removal of access in our post “Goodbye to ToxMap–and our Environmental Right-to-Know”. In advance of the removal of … Read more
On December 16, the National Library of Medicine is retiring the revelatory environmental mapping tool known as ToxMap. Ever so quietly, the door will close on what has arguably become the most accessible and user-friendly portal created by the federal government for letting Americans know about the toxics lurking next door.
By: Gretchen Gehrke, Marcy Beck, Alejandro Paz, Sara Wylie, Kelly Wilkins, and Kelsey Breseman EDGI’s Website Monitoring team has just published the first of a new kind of report: from the perspective of web resource governance, we assess observed changes to EPA’s Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction Effluent Guidelines webpage, the primary resource for the … Read more
By Kelly Wilkins and Kelsey Breseman This month EDGI hosted an environmental justice youth summit in partnership with the Environmental Chelsea Organizers, or ECO, a group of six teenage activists working under GreenRoots, a community-based organization fighting for environmental justice and an improved quality of life for the people of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Guest speakers included … Read more
The rationales offered by the Trump Administration for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement echo a widely publicized speech by Trump in July 2019 that may well foreshadow the environmental messaging of his 2020 reelection campaign. As media fact-checkers then noted, Trump’s speech misrepresented his administration’s ongoing work to weaken the laws and regulations that … Read more
By EDGI’s Website Monitoring Team There have been substantial changes to the EPA website during the Trump administration that negatively impact the quality of information provided to the public. Most, but not all, of the changes that EDGI has observed occurred under Administrator Pruitt, but the Wheeler administration has not replaced removed resources and has … Read more