Deep in the Arctic, somewhere between Norway and the North Pole, an underground vault houses seed samples from hundreds of thousands of crops. The shelter was built in 2008 to protect a source of edible plants in the event of nuclear war or major natural disaster.
Now, an international network of academics and non-profits are building a similar bunker online to protect environment and climate data from what they see as similar threats from President Donald Trump and his administration.
As pages disappear from the White House website and national organizations are restricted from releasing information to the public, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative group, or EDGI, is in the process of systematically combing through U.S. government websites to find public data sets and archive them for public access, as well as monitor and report changes the government makes to data access.
The organization “believes in evidence-based policy making and public interest science,” according to its website, to which data is a critical component.
Days after Trump was elected in November, Michelle Murphy, a member of the group and professor at the University of Toronto, started organizing. She and her colleagues have learned to take statements from leadership seriously and act quickly in response, she says.
“During the Harper administration here in Canada, we saw many different tactics for the oppression of environmental data, years and years of it,” Murphy says. “This is not new; the U.S. is part of a longer arc, but we saw the boldness of it in Canada and saw an even greater intensity coming in with the Trump administration.”
This isn’t the first time scientists have mobilized again political agendas in the U.S., either. A union was formed to combat changes to the Environmental Protection Agency during former President Ronald Reagan’s administration, Murphy says, and the tobacco industry has a history of suppressing scientific data.
EDGI has been closely monitoring Trump’s transition team announcements to develop a plan of action. They decided to focus early efforts on saving data from the EPA when Scott Pruitt, a “very well-known climate change denier,” Murphy says, was appointed to head it.
“It was a good signal that the EPA was going to be acted on quickly,” Murphy says. The climate change page was one of a handful wiped from WhiteHouse.gov moments after Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America.
EDGI is working with Internet Archive, a non-profit Internet library, to store as much of the data as possible. The group of 60 individuals has archived terabytes of data, Murphy says. Countless others in a network of institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, are also collaborating with the group’s partner, Data Refuge, to build a shared data resource.
Spurred by an event at the University in Toronto in December, similar guerrilla archiving and coding events have been popping up across the country, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Indianapolis and Ann Arbor this month, and one scheduled in New York for Feb. 4.
The transparency inherent to the academic and coding communities has been inspiring, Murphy says.
“The open, sharing, non-ownership and friendliness, that part really cheers me up and makes me feel hopeful,” she says. “Another way is possible.”
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Activists Mobilize to Archive Environment and Climate Data originally appeared on usnews.com
