EDGI and the Right to Trust our Environmental Health

I grew up in unincorporated Snohomish County, Washington—an area I often characterized, at the time, as the kind of place where people have guns and horses. As a kid, the woods behind my house felt like an endless adventure: a massive Pacific Northwest wetlands, where beavers would build ever-changing dams you might cross on foot (if you didn’t fall in), where stickerbushes grabbed at your clothes, and dripping thick underbrush would open up into spacious cedar groves that, even to a child, felt sacred.

Democratizing Data Reports Released by EDGI’s Environmental Enforcement Watch

Seventy-six congressional report cards released by Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s Environmental Enforcement Watch on October 22, 2020, show a decline in compliance and enforcement for key U.S. environmental laws under the Trump administration. The report cards are summarized in the new report, Democratizing Data: Environmental Enforcement Watch’s Report Cards for Congressional Oversight of the EPA, which provides for the first time an analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data on compliance and enforcement in the districts and states of the representatives and senators serving on the two congressional committees tasked with overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meet the Interns: Environmental Enforcement Watch

Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) is EDGI’s latest project. A collaborative effort across several of our working groups, EEW is a series of online workshops aimed at increasing EPA ECHO data literacy through our custom Jupyter Notebooks, in an effort to foster community research and polluter accountability. Our interns—young, passionate individuals—have put in countless hours developing and fine-tuning every aspect of our EEW workshops. We thank them for their many ideas and efforts, without which EEW would not be what it is today. Without further ado, here are our interns: