The Environmental Data Justice (EDJ) Working Group works with the productive frictions between emerging data justice concerns and long-standing principles of environmental justice. While data justice has challenged the nonconsensual use of data in surveillance practices, policing, and racial profiling, environmental justice movements often call for increased, open, and participatory data in order to document environmental racism and inequality. The EDJ Working Group recognizes the many conflicting justice concerns that data manifests and aims to bring together research communities to struggle together across these differences with a commitment to intersectional justice.
The EDJ Working Group is interested in documenting and analyzing all forms of environmental harms, including, corporate and government practices of manipulating and withholding data, as well as government failures to adequately collect and use data. However, we do not stop there.We also aspire to move beyond theories of change based primarily on proving environmental harms to communities, lands, and bodies. Instead, our goal is to facilitate collaborative, action-based research that creates civic technologies, environmental data infrastructures, and equitable and transparent data care practices. To this end, our work includes critical assessments of existing models, infrastructures, and practices of data collection, storage, and dissemination, as well as projects that generate alternative kinds of knowledge, technologies, and imaginaries towards more just worlds. In these ways we hope to contribute to an open and public conversation between the growing data justice and environmental justice communities.
EDJ Resources
Read our initial thoughts to elaborate an EDJ framework, collected during a day-long event preceding the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science.
EDJ syllabus 1.0 (2019)
Academic Articles
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together (2018)
Data Tools
Interactive Research Notebooks
Current Projects
Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) explores open environmental datasets in partnership with community groups using data science tools. EEW’s strategic goals are to:
- Draw large-scale public attention to lack of environmental enforcement
- Work with partner organizations, especially marginalized communities, to build data efficacy through mutually beneficial relationships
- Inform EPA visions of alternative forms of public engagement—a Green New Deal for environmental data
- Prototype community-oriented structures for environmental data, i.e. by health factors for a community
- Bring attention to the relationship between environmental enforcement, environmental racism, and other interlocking forms of oppression (particularly white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, etc.)
Events
July 31st-Sept 25th, 2024: Building Civic Technologies for Environmental Data Justice | A five-part workshop series by Environmental Enforcement Watch exploring the alternative tools EEW is building to contextualize hard-to-access EPA data. Register here.
May 13th, 2021: Environmental Justice: EPA Data Accessibility for Latine Communities | An online event with environmental justice groups and Latine advocacy groups addressing the obstacles Latine Communities face with accessibility to environmental information. A summary of this discussion can be read here.
April 29th, 2021: EEW Open Hour | An event providing a networking space and structured conversation around the challenges participants from across the country face producing, using, and accessing environmental data for justice.
October 22nd, 2020: Democratizing Environmental Data: Panel Discussion & Report Release | An online event on the release of our Democratizing Data summary report and 76 report cards for representatives and senators who serve on the The House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works committee.
November 16th, 2019: EJx Youth Summit | A youth-led online event sharing perspectives and resources on youth organizing in environmental social justice movements, co-hosted by GreenRoots’ Environmental Chelsea Organizers (ECO).
February 28th, 2019: Environmental Data Justice: Vision and Values | Our first public event to start off a series of conversations at the intersection of data justice and environmental justice work.
If you are interested in contributing to our work or learning more, send us a message at contact (at) envirodatagov (dot) org. Our weekly meetings are open to the public.