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
Authors: EDJ Working Group What is Environmental Data Justice (EDJ)? How are people and projects creating more just futures working with and against environmental data? The EDJ Syllabus hopes to grow this conversation and collective learning. In this syllabus, we incorporate voices from Environmental Justice, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Data Justice, among other movements. Version … Read more
Authors: Eric Nost, Gretchen Gehrke, Aaron Lemelin, Marcy Beck, Steven Braun, Garance Malivel, and EDGI In EDGI’s latest report, “The New Digital Landscape,” we build on our existing research to analyze how the Trump administration has altered access to climate change information on federal environmental websites and the language used to present it. Over the … Read more
By Leif Fredrickson Last year EDGI started looking into the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement policies, practices and metrics, after our confidential interviewing project with agency employees suggested there were serious problems with enforcement under the Trump administration. Much has changed since our report, “A Sheep in the Closet: The Erosion of Enforcement at the EPA,” … Read more
A summary by Garance Malivel & the EDJ Working Group On February 28th, 2019, the Environmental Data Justice (EDJ) Working Group hosted its first online public event, starting off a series of conversations at the intersection of data justice and environmental justice work. It brought grassroots projects, activists, academics, and students together to learn from … Read more
EDGI has just released its 2019 Annual Report. We’ve grown and matured as an organization, and have been busy over the past year, continuing to make important contributions to highlighting the dismantling of federal environmental protections, and to thinking proactively about models of environmental data justice. EDGI employs four core strategies to achieve our organizational … Read more
Written by Steven Braun As an information designer and visualizer of data, I am often tasked with an important challenge: developing a visual language to communicate the narratives expressed by the data with which I’m working. I typically respond to this challenge by deciding on a visual metaphor – a concept, symbol, or object, often … Read more
EDGI’s comment focuses on removals of and reductions in access to online resources directly relevant to the proposed redefinition of Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act (CWA) that constrain the public’s ability to effectively participate in this rulemaking process, to understand the impacts of the proposed changes to which aquatic resources would be designated as jurisdictional, and to track CWA implementation.
Authors: Jesse DiValli, Sara Wylie, Gretchen Gehrke The Department of Interior’s (DOI) biography page for David Bernhardt, the nominee for Secretary of the Interior, omits description of Bernhardt’s long history of work for fossil fuel and mining companies who have a vested interest in increased access to the public land that the DOI stewards and … Read more