Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

Abstract

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus-based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision-making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an “environmental data justice” prioritising community self-determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.