When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice

ABSTRACT

Environmental data justice (EDJ) emerges from conversations between data justice and environmental justice while identifying the limits and tensions of these lenses. Through a reflexive process of querying our entanglement in non-innocent relations, this paper develops and engages EDJ by examining how it informs the work of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing rapid-response reports about how federal agencies are being undermined, EDGI mobilizes EDJ to challenge the ‘extractive logic’ of current federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. ‘Extractive logic’ disconnects data from provenance, privileges the matrix of domination, and whitewashes data to generate uncertainty. We use the dynamic EDJ framework to reflect on EDGI’s public comment advising against the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule for Transparent Science. Through EDJ, EDGI aspires to create new environmental data infrastructures and practices that are participatory and embody equitable, transparent data care.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental data justice
• extractive logic
• whitewashing
• data justice
• environmental justice

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the care and labour of EDGI members, in particular the generous conversations within the EDJ working group. This article has benefited from review and feedback from Eric Nost and other EDGI members.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lourdes Vera is a PhD Student in Sociology at Northeastern University. She studies environmental data practices for health and justice.

Dawn Walker is a PhD Student at the Faculty of Information. Her research focuses on participation in civic technology and design practices.

Michelle Murphy is Director of the Technoscience Research Unit and Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on decolonial approaches to environmental and data justice with a focus on the Great Lakes. She is urban Métis from Winnipeg.

Becky Mansfield is Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on chemical geographies, environmental health knowledges, and the politics of deregulation.

Ladan Mohamed Siad is a community-supported researcher, designer, and artist. Currently pursuing MDes at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) in the Digital Futures program in Faculty of Design. Ladan’s work focuses on intersections of design, technology, and art, creating multidisciplinary and multisensory interventions surrounding embodied experiences, transnational blackness, data justice, black queer trans feminist frameworks, and human-data interaction.

Jessica Ogden is a PhD Candidate based in Sociology and the Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Southampton. Jessica’s research focuses on the politics of data, web archiving and digital data scholarship.

ORCID

Lourdes A. Vera http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5390-6397

Dawn Walker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-7955

Jessica Ogden http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4696-7340

Notes

1 Currie and Paris (2018); Lamdan (2018); Dillon et al. (2017); Mansfield et al. (2018) discuss the breadth of EDGI’s activities.

2 ECHO contains compliance and enforcement-related information from EPA, spatial, local, and tribal records as well as additional environmental data sets: https://echo.epa.gov/resources/echo-data/about-the-data.

3 TRI frames discussion of known issues with self-reported data under the heading ‘Data Quality’: https://www.epa.gov/toxics-release-inventory-tri-program/tri-data-quality.

4 This form of rapid academic analysis is in line with previous EDGI commentary on the ‘Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act’ or HONEST Act (H.R. 1430) (Underhill et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

EDGI has been supported by Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Packard Foundation as well as individual donors. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32ES023769. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.