Eira Tansey

Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

A career change for climate change

I’m about to embark on a major new professional transition: working full-time for my new business, Memory Rising. Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations, with expertise on climate change, environmental and labor movements, and Ohio Valley regional history.

Memory Rising will offer services such as:

  • Conducting research on archives, public policy, and environmental issues
  • Working with cultural heritage institutions on climate change action and adaptation
  • Providing archival services to environmental, labor, and Ohio Valley organizations that need the guidance of a professional archivist to steward their own archives and historical memory

You can find more on the Memory Rising website and also sign up for a periodic newsletter.

My major professional goal for some time has been to shift climate change to the primary focus of my career in archives and libraries. Until now, it has mainly existed on the margins of my job as an archivist/records manager in academic libraries. Teaching the California Rare Books School seminar and writing A Green New Deal for Archives (coming out soon!) became major turning points in giving me a glimpse of a working life focused on climate change, and I felt an increasing sense of urgency to find a way to make this shift.

I started building Memory Rising a few months ago, as I received more consulting and teaching requests related to climate change. I also have a deep commitment to environmental and labor movements, and my home of Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed, which is why Memory Rising will also serve those communities with the skills I’ve honed as a working archivist for the last 15 years. I’m thrilled that enough behind the scenes activity has come together to make my professional goals a reality. I am leaving my current role at the University of Cincinnati at the end of April to fully dedicate myself to the work that brings me the most meaning and purpose.

In the coming months, I’ll share more about Memory Rising’s work, and will remain a very active presence within archives and libraries communities, as well as branching out into new communities (I recently joined the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, and have learned a ton!). At some point, I’ll also share my story of what it’s been like to transition from working in academic libraries to starting my own business.

I talked to so many people over the last year as I figured out how to make this leap. I am enormously grateful to the kindness and wisdom of old friends, generous colleagues, and new acquaintances who helped me chart out a way to scale up the work that is so necessary for the continuity of archives and cultural memory in the face of climate change. I’m beyond excited about making this new change. Also, if I’m being completely honest as a risk-averse person, I’m slightly terrified of this leap, but the time is right to do it. Climate change remains as urgent an issue as ever, and our profession needs as much help making the transition as quickly as possible. I hope that my path will cross with yours soon as we build a better world that all of us deserve.

Teaching Archives and Climate Change

Last week I taught “Archives and Climate Change” for California Rare Book School. I was very excited to teach the course, and it wildly exceeded all of my expectations for the week. I was profoundly lucky to have an incredible group of thirteen students who came to the course from various professional and personal experiences. The success of the week is very much to their credit, thanks to their enthusiasm for active participation, eagerness to share with each other, and openness to learning from each other. I’ll share in a later post what a transformative experience it was for me, especially at this point in my career, but I want to spend this post reflecting on the actual teaching logistics of the course.

This was my first time teaching anything for more than a couple hours, and I knew it would be additionally challenging given the online format. I am glad that the course was offered online, since I felt this would widen the possible pool of students and allow people to participate who may not be able to take the time or expense to leave home for a week. And of course, given my own concern about the emissions levels of professional development, teaching a course online was an obvious choice.

CalRBS asked me to finish the syllabus a month before the course began, and I was glad to start prepping it much earlier than that, since it helped me organize my thinking around the main subject areas of the course early on. It was super important to me that participants had a solid foundation of the science and policy of climate change. It was equally important that they learn about climate emotions and climate grief: based on my own personal experience, you cannot do climate work for the long haul unless you recognize and care for your own emotions. I front-loaded the course with these two areas (spread across two days), so that by the time we moved into talking about the impact of climate change on cultural heritage generally and archives specifically, everyone had both the foundational science and emotional tools to fully engage with the content.

Developing the syllabus was helpful for organizing the basic thematic structure of the class, but I still had to figure out how to organize each particular day. Given that folks have spent 2.5 years on Zoom, and given that I had 20 contact hours for the course, I did not want a course that felt like it dragged. There were a few topics I knew I wanted to cover that would be primarily lecture-based. However, I know that I personally do not learn best from lectures, and neither do many others. I reached out to some of my instructional librarian colleagues at UC for advice, and spent a lot of time reading about classroom assessment techniques and active learning. I also drew on activities I’ve used in various social justice settings, especially those focused on facilitating discussions and building relationships within small groups. Several years ago I attended a climate grief workshop at a Quaker conference that was based on the work of Joanna Macy, and her co-authored book Active Hope was an enormously helpful resource for the week.

Some things I did in the service of setting expectations up front:

  • I deliberately chose not to record class sessions (except for one super technical afternoon of demonstrating ArcGIS online). I posted PowerPoint decks and course materials (Google Jamboards, Zoom chat logs) at the end of each day in our course folder. I strongly believe recording things by default without a strong pedagogical reason for doing so is a form of surveillance, and that unrecorded spaces allow people to share more freely and with greater candor (especially important given the course’s emphasis on group discussions and sharing).
  • To that end, I also created a pretty stringent privacy policy for the course, which you can read about in the syllabus.
  • I asked people to generally turn their cameras on for any group discussions. I assumed that if a camera was turned off, someone had stepped away or needed some offline time to gather themselves.
  • I held office hours before/after each day, and regularly invited all students to attend for any concerns they had.
  • I left the Zoom room open during the 90-minute lunch period for anyone who wanted to chat with each other. I usually took this time to make some adjustments to the afternoon portion of the course. Most of these lunch periods were fairly quiet, but towards the end of the week some people would come back from lunch a few minutes early to chat with each other.

What I lack in pedagogical training, I (hope) I make up for in abundant enthusiasm and doing my best to read the room so I can tweak things on the fly based on what it seems like people are resonating with. As a result, I built in a lot of activities and group discussions to keep the energy levels going, and allow the students to bond with and learn from each other. Sometimes this took the form of sending students off into “pair and share” discussions, other times it was in small group (3-4 people) breakout rooms. One of the interesting things about CalRBS is that students apply for the course(s) they want to take with their CV and an application statement. The instructors make the admissions decisions, so I knew there would be students coming in with a wide variety of knowledge and experience I simply don’t have. It was important to me to make an environment rich for learning from everyone, rather than an outdated model in which the instructor is assumed to contain all the knowledge. At a certain point in the week, I thought “I feel more like a facilitator helping the students learn as much from each other as they learn from me, the instructor.” This was a really good feeling!

Maybe my first sign that the course would go well was that I was mildly surprised the first day (which was the most lecture heavy) there was so much chatting going on in the Zoom chat box – to the point where there was a request to download and save the chat to our course’s folder with all the other course materials since there were so many resources/links being shared by students. I happily did so that day (and the rest of the week) after putting it to a vote to make sure everyone was okay with it. When my husband (who facilitates a lot of online groups through his volunteer work) asked about the first day and I mentioned how active the chat was, he said “Oh that’s a very good sign!”

The syllabus is embedded below, but since it doesn’t really convey the depth of what each particular day looked like, this is a very brief sample of some of the activities we did:

  • Every morning we did a round robin of reactions to the day’s readings. This took about 30-40 minutes, but it was well worth the time. It often signaled to me what might be worth adjusting or cultivating more attention to in the afternoon part of the course. The students often built on what someone else said, or helped draw out new connections.
  • I really like Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Action Venn Diagram exercise. On Day 2, we watched the video on her website. Each student then had 10 minutes to fill out their Venn Diagram. Then I sent pairs of students into their own breakout room where they had 20 minutes to interview each other about their Venn Diagram (I sent out an alert message at 10 minutes reminding them to switch turns).
  • We used breakout rooms and Google Jamboards pretty regularly throughout the week. On Day 4, we had a “choose your own adventure” breakout room/Jamboard activity. Before lunch, students nominated which topics they wanted to discuss with each other (our focus was on what archival practices could be made more environmentally sustainable). In the afternoon, they selected whichever breakout room they wanted and each room created its own Jamboard. Afterwards, we came back to discuss and review the Jamboards in the group.
  • On Day 5, I expanded the final portion based on student feedback to be something akin to a show and tell/talent show/barn raising as a way to close out the week. Each student had 8 minutes, and could share their ArcGIS StoryMap, their climate venn diagram, or any other project they had been working on/were contemplating in the future.

Here’s the syllabus. Feel free to contact me with any questions! I hope to teach the course again in the future.

A Green New Deal for Archivists

I gave this (Zoom) talk to my friend Rick Prelinger’s “Archives: Power, Justice, Inclusion” course at UC Santa Cruz in early May. I’ve long been fascinated by the New Deal and this was a good opportunity to put some flesh on an idea I’ve been talking about for a while now.

DUST BOWL AND CRASH OF 1929

I want to start with this image.

It’s obviously from a long time ago. The clothes look a little older, almost everyone is wearing a hat. One man has an arm band on with a cross on it.

Image of people in front of a Kansas Red Cross Building wearing gas masks, 1935
https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/210018

If you had showed me this picture a couple weeks ago, I might have glanced at it and thought it was either the flu pandemic of 1918. Or maybe a wartime photo from WWI or WWII, perhaps a group of medical workers shielding themselves against chemical weapons.

This picture was taken during the Great Depression in the state of Kansas. The year was 1935. The residents of this small town are wearing gas masks to protect their lungs from air pollution, and they are in front of a Red Cross building. At the time this photo was taken, the unemployment rate was around 20%. Just a couple years before the unemployment rate was closer to 25%.

Map showing boundaries of Dust Bowl
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4015056/

 At that time, Kansas was in the middle of what was called the Dust Bowl, which was the site of one of the worst environmental catastrophes in US history.

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that started in 1929 and lasted through the 1930s. The Great Depression started when the stock market crashed in October 1929. As prices began to decline for the value of goods across the country, the price drops eventually affected the wheat crops grown in the Great Plains states. As the value of wheat dropped, farmers plowed up more acres to put into production to make up for the lost profits. Initially there was a huge harvest of wheat, but the over supply of wheat led to an even greater drop in wheat prices.

Images of Dust Storms
https://digital.denverlibrary.org/digital/collection/p15330coll22/search/order/title/ad/asc

In order to grow the wheat in the first place, farmers removed the prairie short grasses that had helped hold the soil in place. Many areas of this region also experienced drought. These forces combined to create massive dust storms that look like something out of a horror movie. One of the dust storms were so big they went far east and even reached Washington DC and New York. The devastation of the region made thousands of families homeless, and they migrated out of the region, including to places like California’s Central Valley.

Photographs of Hoovervilles in Pittsburgh and Seattle
https://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3A695.0831.FC/viewer
https://cdm16786.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/lee/id/269

Three years after the stock market crashed, millions of Americans were out of work, and so many had lost their homes that homeless encampments and slums popped up all around the country that were nicknamed Hoovervilles, which was a reference to President Hoover’s failure to meet the challenges of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt (or FDR), the governor of New York, ran against Herbert Hoover and won in a landslide election in 1932.

ELECTION OF FDR AND THE NEW DEAL

Election of FDR
https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:npg_NPG.2013.21?q=record_ID%3Dnpg_NPG.2013.21&record=1&hlterm=record_ID%3Dnpg_NPG.2013.21&inline=true

One of the first acts that the Roosevelt Administration did was to attempt to stabilize the banking system, which was on the verge of collapsing. In the early part of the Depression, there was no guarantee that if you had deposited your life savings in your neighborhood bank that you could get it out. After the economy began to fall apart, people would panic and go to the bank to withdraw their money. If too many people did this, then it could result in the bank literally running out of money and going bankrupt. During the Depression, 1/3 of banks failed and depositors lost over $1 billion of their deposits. 

Photograph of bank run and boilerplate FDIC language
http://nashville.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/nr/id/2258

Immediately after FDR took office in early 1933 was he closed down the banks for several days as a way to alleviate panic while Congress and the White House pulled together legislation to stabilize the banking system.

If you’ve ever deposited something in your bank you’ve probably noticed a little logo that says something like “Member FDIC” or “Your deposit is safe and guaranteed under FDIC.” The FDIC was established to insure banks so that you would not lose your deposits.

As the FDIC and other measures to stabilize the banking system were implemented, storms in the Dust Bowl continued to get worse in 1934 and 1935. The Dust Bowl wasn’t the only place experiencing agricultural collapse – across the country, other farmers grappled with how to handle surplus crops and livestock while prices cratered, and many tenant farmers, especially black farmers in the South, didn’t own the land they were farming on and experienced economic calamity.

FSA photograph of Migrant Mother by Dorotha Lange and American Gothic by Gordon Parks
https://www.loc.gov/item/2017762891/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks#/media/File:Gordon_Parks_-_American_Gothic.jpg

To respond to the problem of soil erosion and farmer poverty, FDR’s administration launched a number of programs that included everything from resettling farmers to different areas, to teaching them different agricultural practices to conserve the soil, to paying farmers not to plant crops in order to control prices.

One of the agencies created to help farmers was the Farm Security Administration, and it hired many photographers – photographers who today have their work in famous museums, like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks – to document both the poverty in rural communities as well as the impact of the government programs.

Over time, all of these programs that FDR’s administration implemented became collectively known as the New Deal. One of the most important ones was signed into law 85 years ago yesterday, on May 6, 1935. This was a program known as the Works Progress Administration. This was a program that created government jobs for millions of Americans who were unable to find paid work during the Depression. Remember – at its peak 1 in 4 American workers were unemployed, and so the WPA literally kept many families from starving and becoming homeless by giving them jobs that paid enough for them to get by.

The WPA was an umbrella of programs that employed everyone from construction workers to help build bridges, dams, and schools to librarians who delivered books on horseback to musicians and playwrights who performed public concerts and plays.

Examples of Federal Writers Project publications

In addition to writers, the WPA also hired scores of archivists as part of a program called the Historical Records Survey. The Historical Records Survey began in 1934 as part of the Federal Writers Project. It was directed by Luther Evans, who would go on to become the Librarian of Congress and UNESCO director.

Photographs of files in attics and basements from Historical Records Survey
https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll34/id/4239/
https://www.ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll34/id/5475

The Historical Records Survey had two major programs: a survey of federal records located in offices outside of the Washington DC area, and a survey of state and local records. The first part was important because the National Archives officially became a federal agency in 1934. The National Archives needed to identify the various federal records floating around, and this part of the Historical Records Survey helped it track down and consolidate records.

Inventory of the County Archives of Hamilton County, (Cincinnati) and excerpt
Hamilton County: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015041071054&view=1up&seq=1

The largest achievement of the Historical Records Survey was surveying county records – of the 3,066 counties in existence at the time of the survey, fieldwork was completed for 90% of them. WPA workers carried out the field work by going to county courts and administrative agencies to determine what kinds of records existed, where they were located, and a short description of the records. The field work also generated significant information about the history of the states and their counties. In some areas, municipal records surveys were also completed, such as for the city of Cleveland. Although there had been some attempts to survey America’s local and state records before (mainly through the efforts of the American Historical Association’s Public Archives Commission), the WPA Historical Records Survey was a significant advance in trying to establish a comprehensive picture of the overall condition of America’s public records and archives scattered across the country.

The WPA and other federal government jobs programs ended with the entry of the US into WWII. But it wasn’t the last time the federal government would pay people for documentation efforts. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was established.

Documerica photographs of Navajo Children and Woman with Well Water
https://flic.kr/p/7vbo9t
https://flic.kr/p/6K4sEP

A few years after it was established, the agency hired photographers to document the state of the environment in the United States. Photographs had already begun spurring new environmental awareness around the time of the EPA. These photos were intended as a visual baseline to show how the American environment looked before the implementation of laws like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Documerica photographers, like the Farm Security Administration photographers, were given a wide range to photograph people in relationship to the environment.

Having a handle on the way records and documentation were integral parts of addressing both environmental calamity and deep inequality is critically important because it helps us understand the role that archivists and other allied professions like librarians, oral historians, writers, historians, and photographers could play in the future.

The United States is almost certainly experiencing the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. We won’t know the full extent until the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its numbers for April this Friday. But there are early projections suggesting that the new numbers are 16%. To compare, the peak unemployment rate during the last major recession between 2008-2009 was around 10%.

One of the things that was remarkable and profound about the New Deal is that it validated that people like writers and photographers had just as much a right to make a living from their work as other occupations.

In the last few years, activists concerned with the combined problems of climate change and economic inequality have proposed a Green New Deal. At the heart of the Green New Deal is the goal of a massive scale investment to transition the United States economy and infrastructure away from its deep dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy, involving every sector for agriculture to transportation. Right now the Green New Deal is more a set of ideas than a political program. Partially this is because to replicate programs at the level that FDR implemented, we need to have a President and Congress that is fully on-board with these measures, and the political establishment over the last 40 years has been a retaliation against New Deal political philosophy that envisions a government that actively works to level the playing field between rich and poor.

Right now, most proposals for a Green New Deal are arguably narrowly focused around infrastructure, agriculture, energy generation, and transportation. There isn’t much yet that envisions a renewal of something like the Federal Writers Project or the Historical Records Survey. So let’s consider what a blueprint for a Green New Deal for archivists and information workers might look like.

List of Green New Deal For Archivists possible projects

A GREEN NEW DEAL FOR ARCHIVISTS AND INFORMATION WORKERS

Compared to when the Historical Records Survey was carried out 80 years ago, archivists have come a long way in terms of our skill sets and knowledge. We also have many examples of archival projects that aren’t just records from federal, state, and local governments – we also have new projects like community archives. A GND for archivists and other information workers could put archivists to work doing a wide variety of projects. The following are just examples, and if you think of your own I hope you’ll suggest them as well at the end.

Archivists as research partners to guide policy decisions

  • Many GND plans call for funding investments in environmental justice projects. Environmental justice is the principle that many polluting industries or toxic waste sites have been disproportionately located near poor communities and communities of color. Archivists could be research partners in identifying and locating records that would help establish a priorities list in every community for environmental justice investment.

Data management partnerships for scientists

  • In order to preserve as much of the scientific findings that continue to unfold around climate change, it’s imperative that the underlying data are managed and preserved so that it can continue to be validated and reused well into the future. Archivists and librarians in universities have significant experience in data management planning and digital preservation. Deploying archivists and librarians trained in these skills at large levels to all research institutions would ensure that climate and environmental data are preserved for future use.

Bioregional documentation strategies

  • Building on the past examples of the Federal Writer’s oral history projects, and the photography of the Farm Services Administration and the EPA’s Documerica, we could employ archivists, historians, photographers, and other information and creative professionals to document the environmental state of America’s different bioregions. Bioregions are areas that are defined by environmental commonalities, like tree species or watersheds. I live in the Ohio River valley watershed, and so in this example, perhaps archivists could work to document the industry along the river, photograph different areas along it, look at archival collections in existing repositories to identify all Ohio River related archives already in existence, and so on.
  • The idea of doing documentation projects on a bioregional basis is because a project like this would be meant to capture the experience of everyone living adjacent to an environmental feature. The Ohio River Valley crosses multiple states, and therefore having documentation projects that conform to political boundaries would mean you could not adequately document a bioregion.

Establishing appropriate archivist and records staffing for government archives

  • One of the long-standing problems within the archives and records field is that government archives and records centers that hold vital records – meaning things like birth, marriage, and death certificates, veterans records, and property records – are chronically and severely understaffed. This has serious consequences as we continue to experience environmental changes. Many of these government archives have microfilmed or digitized their records, but not all of them have. As a result, if a terrible disaster like a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or tornado – many of which could become more severe as a result of climate change – were to hit the archive, it could seriously impact their ability to provide their constituents with records.

Partnering with emergency management and planning authorities for inland migration

  • We know that even if we act very quickly to deal with climate change, there is some degree of sea-level rise due to climate change that is inevitable at this point. A few years ago I co-authored an article examining climate change risks to archives, and we found that over 20% of archives were at risk to either storm surge from hurricanes or sea-level rise. Planning for inland migration is already far behind where it needs to be in the United States, and no one has really solved the question of what to do with a city or county’s records if that area has to ultimately be abandoned. Should its records go to the next county over? Or to the state archives? Archivists could and should be involved in planning what should happen to records from the earliest stages of planning.
  • We also know that many historic sites along coastlines could be permanently lost due to sea-level rise. Under a GND, one of the highest priorities would be documenting those sites through video, photography, oral histories, and other forms of documentation of places that will no longer be reachable due to sea-level rise or erosion. 

Right now it’s tremendously difficult to imagine a world in which we’d not only mobilize all levels of the government to deal with climate change and poverty but to also hire archivists en masse to document it. And yet I like to think of Naomi Klein’s remarks from her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate where she says that our fear may paralyze us and make us want to run, but we have to give people something to run to, and that’s why I think it’s still worth talking about not just a Green New Deal, but the role that archivists and archives can play in the transition from one world to the next.

What We Don’t Know About What We Can’t See: Information and Hidden Infrastructure

This is an annotated version of the lectern copy of my opening keynote on September 30 at Access 2019 in Edmonton. You can watch the recording here (or on YouTube). Around the time I accepted the invitation for this keynote, I had a bit of a personal reckoning about my professional carbon footprint. I’m very grateful that the hosts from the University of Alberta Libraries worked with me to allow me to stay over for the whole conference so I wasn’t a parachute-in keynoter (and if you go to the last slide, you can see the personal carbon disclosure I included – I was glad that the conference featured some discussion around the carbon footprints of library conferencing). As a result of their generosity in hosting me through the entire conference, I was able to take the time to get to know the conference community and Edmonton. I had an amazing time, and this invitation really prompted me to think about transnational environmental issues in a way I hadn’t previously. Ursula Franklin has been one of my guiding stars for the last couple years, and I tried to channel a lot of her energy and thinking as I wrote this. On the car trip I took around Michigan as part of my research, I re-listened to most of her Massey lectures. This keynote highlights what I think are the most profound challenges inherent to information access, political power, and fossil fuels.

Introduction

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 1

Thank you for inviting me to speak with your conference today. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to consider environmental information from a transnational perspective. Preparing this keynote sent me on a crash course into corners of Canadian history and environmental policy I never expected to explore. I feel that gentle critique is an essential part of friendship, and I hope during the questions section you’ll point out what I have inevitably overlooked.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 2

On the evening of August 15, 1953, a group of people gathered at the shore of one of the world’s largest lakes for a champagne toast from a set of bleachers. It was within view of the future site of the Mackinac Bridge, one of the world’s longest suspension bridges that would finally connect Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas after decades of ferry service. But the spectators weren’t there for the future bridge: they were celebrating the arrival of the first section of a twin pipeline that had just been been placed underneath a four mile channel of water at a depth of 250 feet. The arrival of the “North 30” twin pipeline marked one of the deepest water crossings in pipeline history up to that time. Aside from a few mentions in industry journals and Michigan’s legislative record, this milestone went relatively unnoticed elsewhere. And for the next 60 years, no one really paid attention to the pipeline underneath the Great Lakes.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 3

I’m aware that most of you rarely engage with environmental information in your daily work life, except perhaps checking the weather report to determine whether to bring an umbrella to work. You’re probably at a library technology conference because some part of your job description involves using specialized technologies to organize and make information in your library accessible to its users.

But even if it’s not present within your job description, environmental information impacts your life on a daily basis. When you brush your teeth in the morning, the water utility that provides water to your residence is part of a larger infrastructure that generates vast amounts of data that is shared with regulators. The conditions in which your lunch food was grown, the air quality of the park that you may visit on the weekend, and the vehicle you used to get here, are all parts of larger infrastructures, which have reams of environmental information associated with it that you’ll never read or handle.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 4

Perhaps the infrastructure that most deeply shapes every continuous hour of our lives is the one we’re sharing right now, as we sit beneath these lights and in this climate-controlled room that is powered by the infrastructure of energy production. The vast majority of energy used in the world – almost 80% of it – comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels occupy a particularly challenging position at the intersection of infrastructure and environmental information. Fossil fuels are removed from the earth, undergo significant processing, and are often transported thousands of miles away from the point of extraction, thus requiring a worldwide infrastructure for their use. And for any infrastructure to work efficiently, it requires significant amounts of data and information for its operation to know where and when things are coming or going.

So why should those of us here today care about the data of infrastructures outside of our institutions, for which we have no control over? And why especially should we care about the information with fossil fuels, which probably has nothing to do with our job description? I argue it is because librarians and archivists are uniquely positioned among professions to understand how the use of information, and the lack of access to it, impacts communities. Fossil fuel interests in the United States and Canada benefit enormously from a legal framework that allows them to shelter enormous amounts of information from the public. This has serious consequences in the short-term for those who live near the locations of fossil fuel production and transportation infrastructure, but also for the long-term, since everyone alive today and tomorrow will be subjected to the consequences of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 5

You may have heard the figure that just a few dozen companies are responsible for the majority of world emissions. If a patron where you work asked whether your library had information on the business practices of the US or Canadian companies on that list, what could you tell her? You might be able to track down annual reports to shareholders or mandated disclosures to regulators, but what if she wanted information beyond what was in those reports? The answer is that you would quickly hit a brick wall, because so much of it is locked up within the companies themselves. And so we are in a position where in the largest challenge facing humanity today, we librarians and archivists do not have the means to help others access necessary information about these companies because so much of it is private. Not only is this information not in our libraries, it’s often not even in the public domain.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 6

Fossil fuel infrastructure has another challenge associated with it: unlike the roads we travel every day on, its infrastructure is often hidden. It is underground or in fenced off structures we cannot access. In many cases this is for good reason: there is not room aboveground, or the exposure of pipelines to the elements can speed up wear and tear. But the effect of hidden infrastructure is that many of us do not think about what we cannot see.

When we cannot encounter hidden infrastructure firsthand in our daily lives, then information about that infrastructure is the closest proxy we have for being able to observe it. Since most pipelines are hidden in the landscape, pipeline maps are essential forms of infrastructure documentation. A consistent difficulty with infrastructure information is that often times different jurisdictions take radically different approaches to presenting similar contents.

The United States and Canada both maintain national pipeline map websites, and both have similar forms of information, but Canada’s map and the United State’s map involve radically different user experiences. I want to start with this example because it shows how deeply technology mediates our experience of accessing information about infrastructure.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 7

When you start on the Canadian pipeline map, you get a disclaimer and after saying “Yes I agree” you automatically see everything and can pan and scroll around.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 8

You can enter an address, if you want, but if you just want to zoom in and out from Ontario all the way down to a city and back again. You also get some useful data points on the left hand side about incidents and pipeline miles.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 9

Now, contrast this to the United States’ pipeline map, which immediately informs you in stern language that because of security concerns, you can’t zoom in past a certain threshold. For what it’s worth, this is roughly the same zooming capacity as Canada, but I appreciate that Canada doesn’t insinuate I might be up to no good just because I want to understand the geography of fossil fuel infrastructure.

But then, the United States map does something truly weird: it makes you enter a state and county. This is the first sign that this map is not designed with the general public in mind. For scale – Ohio itself has 88 counties, and I can only name about half a dozen. What if you want to view a multi-county area? Too bad – you’re limited to one at a time.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 10

In her talk “The Tool Shapes The Task”, Ursula Franklin talked about how the tools we use shape the types of work we can do. What the US map forces us to do by selecting a county is to consider a pipeline only within the boundaries of a single small political jurisdiction – it doesn’t allow you to look at the pipelines from say, Ohio to Michigan or Cleveland to Chicago. The local examples on the slides depict Detroit and Windsor, which are on either side of the river separating the US and Canada. You’ll notice that neither map showed how pipelines cross borders – and not only do pipelines routinely cross political jurisdictions, they also cross watersheds.

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One of the largest transnational watersheds on Earth is the Great Lakes, consisting of 5 major interconnected lakes spanning 750 miles (or 1200 kilometers). Many people think calling them lakes doesn’t do justice to communicate how vast they are, and so they are also described as an inland sea. When you stand at the edge of a Great Lake, you usually can’t see the other side. What you see instead might be waves.  They contain roughly 21% of the world’s surface freshwater – and about 84% of North America’s freshwater.

Almost a quarter of Canadian agricultural production takes place within the watershed. Roughly 10% of the U.S. population and more than 30% of the Canadian population lives in the Great Lakes region. The Lakes region provided the cities in the region shipping routes and water for manufacturing, but it also provided a convenient place to discharge pollution – leading to infamous milestones in US environmental history such as Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching on fire – multiple times – due to industrial discharge. Although environmental law has significantly improved the waters of the Great Lakes since then, we rarely consider the hidden infrastructure of oil and gas pipelines that can threaten the largest source of freshwater for the US and Canada.

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The pipelines around the Great Lakes are directly linked with the history of oil production in Alberta. The Lakehead pipeline system around the Great Lakes began being built in the 1950s  by Interprovincial Pipeline, which was a subsidiary of the Imperial Oil Company of Canada, and was the predecessor company of Enbridge. This pipeline system was designed to  transport crude oil that was being produced in Alberta’s newly discovered Leduc oil fields. The first phase of the pipeline went from Alberta to Superior Wisconsin. The company then put oil on tanker ships that crossed the Great Lakes to Sarnia, Ontario for further refining. But the increasing production of oil – along with the fact that the Great Lakes iced over every winter – meant that the company looked to build a pipeline to facilitate transportation. The company considered two routes – one, an entirely  overland route that would have routed the pipeline from roughly around Chicago to Sarnia – in other words, on the southern US edge of the Lakes. The second route was one that ran the pipeline through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, down through the Straits of Mackinac, and then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, and over the Detroit River to Sarnia. If you’re wondering whether the company ever considered a third option – of routing it entirely through Canada – well it never really did, because it would have cost $10 million more and added an extra 120 miles of routing.

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The company decided on the second option, through the Straits of Mackinac, because it was the shorter route. Remember, this all took place in the early 1950s, which was at least a decade before many of the major US environmental regulatory laws that required serious consideration of the environmental impact of major engineering projects. As a result, the entire design and construction process was remarkably swift,  beginning in 1952 and going into operation in 1954.

The routing of the pipelines through the Straits of Mackinac has turned this pipeline into one of the most contested pieces of aging fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States. In large part, this is due to the Straits location at the juncture of two of the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The channel is about five miles wide, and due to winds, the currents in the channels change very frequently. While an oil spill in any environment is bad, it would be particularly bad here because the current changes would make it difficult to model where the oil would go. 

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Today this pipeline is known as Line 5. Line 5 has not yet had an oil spill in the Straits – so why has it become the source of significant attention?

In 2010, another Enbridge pipeline, known as Line 6B, began leaking near Marshall, Michigan. More than 840,000 gallons of diluted bitumen leaked into tributaries of the Kalamazoo River over the course of two days. The result was that the Marshall spill became one of the largest inland oil spills in the last several years. If this never crossed your radar, it may be because the largest oil spill in history was still taking place during the same summer in offshore Louisiana with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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After the Marshall oil spill, the National Wildlife Federation began drawing attention to Line 5, and in 2013 used scuba divers and underwater videos to publicly document the condition of the pipelines in the Straits. From this image, you can see that the pipeline has many mussels that have stuck to it, which Enbridge claims are not affecting the integrity of the pipeline – though I would have to imagine they make inspections more difficult. Following this report, the state of Michigan convened two major state-wide committees to implement pipeline safety standards and issue further recommendations. Many of the recommendations involved transparency and access to information about pipelines.

One of the most challenging aspects of information about hidden infrastructure is that it is often deliberately inaccessible to the average person because of who created it. While the federal government can tell me what pipelines are nearby and what they carry, only the company operating it could tell me whether it is currently transporting petroleum, natural gas liquids, or something else.

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The provenance, or source, of information often determines whether information is treated as a commodity – in other words, something with a kind of monetary or property value that isn’t accessible to all people, or whether it is treated as part of the commons, meaning everyone has shared and similar rights of access. 

By and large, environmental information created by the public sector in jurisdictions with open government laws is theoretically available to the public. I want to heavily emphasize the word theoretically: there are glaring exceptions to accessing information across the public sector, especially depending on who has political control. The systematic funding and management issues of Libraries and Archives Canada, and the Harper government’s 2014 closures of several federal libraries associated with environmental agencies show that even information held by the public sector today is not guaranteed to be accessible in perpetuity. Laws matter as well: Canada’s Crown Copyright application means that government documents are not as freely available compared with the United States, in which government documents are part of the public domain.

But the distinction between public and private sector information provenance is still crucial: if it’s created by the public sector, there is a larger body of legal doctrine and precedents across many diverse jurisdictions supporting the idea of public right of access. Freedom of information laws are not the only tool that ensure public access to public sector information: the role of records management in assessing agency records for transfer to archives, or federal depository programs for government documents in libraries also serve to move information created by the public sector into an  information commons.

In contrast, information created by private entities is considered a commodity and not part of the commons. Because of the privileged role that private sectors are accorded within the legal systems underpinning capitalist economies, information is treated as company assets that may be sheltered from the public as trade secrets, confidential business information, or other forms of protection from disclosure. Disclosure of this information has the potential to undermine a company’s capacity to maximize profits, by either damaging its reputation or value, providing fodder for lawsuits, or making it vulnerable to competitive action. When you delve into legal scholarship on how the courts regard business information, the classic examples that come up are things like protecting Coca-Cola’s right to maintain its recipe a secret.

But where things get quite murky, and from my point of view, very alarming is the fact that courts are very deferential to business information as a commodity even when it has serious implications for public interest. Except for information that corporations must share with regulators and with shareholders, they are not otherwise required to share information to the public. Of course, many corporations do voluntarily share information, but voluntarily sharing information is not the same thing as guaranteed statutory access to it.

In the world of people who study environmental policy, there is something known as information asymmetry. This is a way of saying that one party has more information on a particular issue than another. When it comes to environmental regulation, often times companies involved with natural resource development have more information on the potential impact of their activities than regulators have, which poses challenges for regulators to do their job on behalf of the public.

 Furthermore, regulators have to trust that the corporation is sharing authentic and accurate information with them, and there are many examples of companies that withhold information from regulators, both accidentally and deliberately. When corporations are compelled to disclose information to regulators, not all of this information becomes public. While ExxonMobil discloses much information to SEC/EPA, I cannot FOIA everything they have submitted because there are many confidential business information exemptions in FOIA.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 17

A serious example of an information asymmetry took place when Enbridge officials misled the state about the protective coating on the pipelines in the Straits. In March 2017, the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board asked Enbridge about the protective coating on the pipelines in the Straits, and the company told the board it was “intact.” However, five months later information came out showing that Enbridge knew as far back as 2014 that there were gaps in the coating, resulting in the state ordering Enbridge to conduct an investigation.

Information asymmetries have also arisen with Enbridge not sharing information with indigenous governments who have treaty and consultative rights to the land and water through which Line 5 runs.

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Dozens of tribes in the Great Lakes region have issued statements against Enbridge Line 5, and a few of them are beginning to initiate legal action against the company. The Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan has repeatedly sent requests to Michigan’s state officials and Enbridge requesting that the company share the same information it does with other government officials. According to tribal leadership, when they attempted to meet with Enbridge in May 2018 to discuss information sharing, the company executives invited them instead on a fishing trip. The tribe noted that a fishing trip was not exactly a viable alternative to sharing information.

There is often a temptation to try to solve information asymmetry issues with technology. There’s a prevailing sense that building a website or making a data set available to download is the same thing as transparency. 

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 19

This is the “just add technology” theory of transparency, a theory that avoids the messy political question of what information exists in the commons and what information has been commodified but is of public interest. It also often sidesteps questions of maintenance, such as whether funding and staffing will be allotted to ensure that any technology used in the service of transparency delivers on its promises. The “just add technology” theory of transparency can be seen in the state of Michigan reports – if you read them carefully, it is clear that there is not consensus around increasing the legal means to make information available, but to use technology to make already existing public information from the state more accessible. Perhaps this is because both of the committees that existed between 2015 and 2018 included representatives of the energy industry.

The main transparency initiative that was actually carried out as a result of the two reports was the creation of a website, mipetroleumpipelines.com, administered by two of Michigan’s state agencies.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 20

In the board’s final report, the recommendation pertaining to the website stated that the website would continue to be maintained through at least 2020. The recommendation suggested the website should have maintain maps, educational guides, legal primers, and “updates on the future of Line 5.”

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 21

The 2018 report was submitted on December 20, 2018. And this appears to be about the last time anyone thought about updating this website. The last news release on the website was posted the day after the final report, December 21. There are no maps. There is no information about the current regulation of pipelines in Michigan. There are no education primers. There are no links to major cases.

But perhaps what is most concerning is the lack of Line 5 updates – and there have been scores since December 2018. Less than 2 weeks after the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board submitted its final report, new state government leadership was sworn in, including a new governor and attorney general who campaigned against former governor Rick Snyder’s plan for maintaining the pipelines in the Straits of Mackinac by building a tunnel over them. Earlier this summer, the attorney general filed a lawsuit to shut down the portion of Line 5 in the Straits.

Despite many of these developments within state government – there is not a single update on the website showing anyone has worked on it in 2019.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 22

I emailed the Public Information Officer of the Michigan Agency for Energy on August 28 to ask when the website would be updated, and was referred to two other individuals. Despite following up, they still have not responded to my follow up emails.

Finally, I want to show you how ultimately political power is the key question to who has information they’re willing to give you.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 23

If you look at Enbridge’s website, it has this very glitzy page that says “Communication is a two-way street. We want to hear from you, and address any concerns you may have about our pipeline operations.” Well that sounds promising!

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 24

Unfortunately, a two-way street apparently includes some dead ends in Enbridge’s world, as I have been going around in circles with their PR representative asking for information.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 25

Second, even entities developed to serve the public are not great about making information available, if it’s not part of their mandate. Within the world of environmental regulation, transboundary issues are often managed according to legal compacts or agreements between different political jurisdictions. The Great Lakes Commission was created in 1955 due to the Great Lakes Basin Compact. It has 8 member states and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec are associate members. The commission is responsible for coordinating the “development, use, and conservation” of water in the Great Lakes watershed. As an interstate compact, the commission is doing work on behalf of the public, and yet there is not a way to file a public records request with the commission, and the compact’s own language reserves the right to access records only to member state’s designated representatives.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 26

I wanted to review the Commission’s annual reports from around the time of the Line 5 construction to see if there was any discussion of the pipeline construction. I emailed with GLC several times, and even offered to visit their headquarters in Ann Arbor but was ultimately told: “The Great Lakes Commission does not have any kind of public library available on-site. Our offices are not open to the public, nor do we offer document reviews such as you are requesting.”

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 27

Luckily, I did find someone willing to share information with me, and that is the State Library of Michigan. Under a law passed by the state in 1982, the Library has a legal mandate to preserve state documents for public access. I started poking around the Michigan state library catalog a few months ago when I was planning a research trip to the state. I only had a few hours to spend at the library, but there were dozens of documents I wanted to review and knew I wouldn’t have time to pull. On a lark, I emailed the reference librarians to ask if it would be possible to pull everything I wanted to look at in advance, and they were kind enough to have a fully-stocked book cart waiting for me when I arrived.

Now I’m sure that the people who work at Enbridge and the Great Lakes Commission are also very nice and probably want to be helpful. But the difference between them and the State Library is that only the latter is required, by law, to serve the public. And so it is ultimately political power that gets information into the hands of the public.

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As we confront the challenges of accessing information around pipelines and oil production Canada and the United States, it is worth zooming out to consider the fact that both states arguably operate as petrostates. By petrostate, I mean a state in which the production and use of fossil fuels is so critical to both its economic activity and its political elite that any suggestion to transition to non-fossil fuels is viewed as a threat to its way of life. The energy markets between the United States and Canada have long been very closely-linked, and the logic of petrostate politics is everywhere on either side of our border.

In 2018, the United States was the largest producer of oil, and Canada was the fourth largest. Both countries supply most of their own fossil fuels, but when we do import, it is typically from the other. Canada has the third-largest oil reserves in the world. The United States has the fourth-largest natural gas reserves in the world. By all accounts, the amount of fossil fuel production in both the United States and Canada is increasing, at the exact moment scientists  tell us we need to move in the other direction. Petrostate ideology requires certainty that these future projections will not be altered by a concerned, outraged, and informed public, to the point where it pathologizes anyone it perceives is an enemy. You can see examples of this everywhere such as the Alberta Inquiry dedicated to investigation of alleged foreign funding of environmental activism, or the increase in US legislation that would increase criminal penalties against nonviolent pipeline protesters.

In a petrostate, the logic of fossil fueled capitalism is so strong, it even allows allegedly progressive leaders to occupy remarkable heights of cognitive dissonance.

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Barack Obama famously bragged about speeding up oil and gas permits as an “all of the above” strategy, and Justin Trudeau claimed “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

I bring up these examples to point out how deeply embedded the logic of protecting the petrostate is, even among politicians who acknowledge the reality of climate change. The petrostate is so powerful because of how it systematically hides not just its infrastructure but the information about its infrastructure. If the information about its infrastructure and operations were more easily available to the public, that information could and would be used against it, both in the court of public opinion and potentially, in an actual court of law.

So where does this leave librarians and archivists in the world of petrostate politics? There are a number of things we could do, and I could list them on a final slide for you, but I think that’d be a little too easy. The challenge ahead is immense, and a to-do list seems a little too superficial for what we have ahead of us. Instead, I’d like for us to consider a serious shift in how we view our professional identities so we can consider how to better serve the public.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 30

One of my eternal concerns with librarians and archivists is that we define our professional identities by the tasks we perform for our employers, as opposed to the fundamental nature, and importance, of our work. We repeat the things that our employer has placed in our job ads, such as, “I develop retention schedules for my university” or “I run checksums on the files ingested into the digital preservation repository.” What is more rare is for us to discuss our work in a way that evokes our trade; that is, that regardless of our title, we are ultimately all information workers.

When we identify too closely with the specific duties of our job descriptions, we let our employers define our professional identities – and therefore our professional responsibilities – for us. Furthermore, identifying as an information worker allows us to extend a critical lens to how information is stewarded outside of the institutions we work in. In the United States, the advocacy of healthcare workers for single payer healthcare has become a powerful force, as these workers have a unique moral and professional authority when they call for access to healthcare as a universal right regardless of the ability to pay. We need a similar advocacy effort of information workers to insist on the decommodification of information; that information in the public interest should be accessible to the public – even if it was information created by the private sector.

As librarians and archivists, everyone in this room has unique skills you can bring to whatever environmental justice issues are taking place wherever you live. I have been involved in a number of local water issues in my hometown, and because being an information worker is such a core part of my identity, I have used my skills as an archivist to track down historical reports and data to bring to public hearings to enter into the official comments. If you know how to work with a library catalog, or large messy data sets, or data visualization, you have some of the most prized skills that environmental justice organizations wherever you live desperately need help with. If your province or state is considering changing regulations that would impede access to environmental information, you have the professional credibility as an information worker to speak out and organize your fellow information workers to stand against further commodification of information. Perhaps one day, we can create a binational group of information workers dedicated to tactics that prioritize the decommodification of environmental information and expropriation of environmental information from the private sector.

Sometimes we will fail to get information that we need, and then we will need to learn other creative ways of obtaining it. A few weeks ago, I spent some time camping in Michigan near the Straits of Mackinac. You’ll recall that it’s impossible to get the specific location of pipelines because you can’t zoom in all the way. And while technology shapes how we understand infrastructure, it doesn’t always have the final say, especially if you learn how to read the landscape.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 31

I wanted to get as close as I could towards near where the pipeline was in the straits and where it came on land. I looked at the map and saw that the nearest landmark was a lighthouse near the shoreline. On the way to the lighthouse, I found an Enbridge power station.

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I drove down to the water just over the hill to see if it was possible to see where the exact point was that the pipelines went from the lake bed into the shore line – I knew they would be buried but figured there would be a marker post. I found a woman and started talking with her, and she pointed down a few hundred feet to say that the pipeline markers were there. The water has been very high on the lakes lately, and I didn’t think it was safe for me to go further.

So I went back to my car, drove back up the hill, and turned off to the road going behind the power station. And finally I found where the pipeline was – not because it poked out of the ground, and not because of any large sign, but because of who was on top.

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A family of deer was nourishing themselves on the grassy meadow growing on the right of way above this pipeline that many people view as a ticking time bomb . And as I looked at the deer closer, I could just make out a post marker hidden in the meadow grass.

Sometimes there is no way to get information about the environment because of the system we live in which says that corporations have more right to make money than your right to know what is happening to the hidden infrastructure all around us. But even with this petrostate logic, there is no substitute for paying attention to the land, and the air, and the water around us. Sometimes despite the logic of commodification, the information is right in front of you if you know where to look.

ACCESS YEG keynote slide 34

Bearing witness for our kin

The big change around our house these days is quite literally around our house. Working with an organic landscaping business, we ripped out our front yard and replaced the grass with a variety of native and pollinator-friendly plants. Whenever we tell people about this, one of the first questions folks have is “How do the neighbors feel?”

Bee balm

A robin playing near the ferns

I’m delighted to report the neighbors are pretty into it. The front yard still requires a considerable amount of weeding (something we hope will taper off as the plants grow together), so I’m often out working in the front yard on weekends. I’ve met more of my neighbors just in the last few months than I ever did mowing my lawn, and many of them stop to say how much they enjoy our yard.

But the sweetest joy of our yard has been seeing the bees and other pollinators working the plants. The world may be collapsing around us, and indeed bees are in the insect canary in the coal mine. But I feel like with every bunch of flowers, I’m throwing them a small life raft. There are few everyday sights that move me as much as watching bees enthusiastically buzz around flowers.

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I recently saw Robin Kimmerer speak at FGC Gathering (a large conference for Quakers). Kimmerer is a professor in the SUNY system, and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin’s talk was incredibly moving, but what stayed with me was her call for transitioning from the “it-ness” we ascribe to non-human animals and plants and natural elements. We refer to birds as ‘it,’ we refer to trees as ‘it,’ we refer to rivers as ‘it.’

Kimmerer called on us to consider using kin as “a pronoun for the revolution”, inspired by her indigenous language, for the creation around us. She notes how and why to use “kin”:

Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.

The day after I heard Robin speak, I was checking the news and saw one of the most profound acts of bearing witness to our kin in recent memory. A mother with her child on her hip confronted Scott Pruitt, a man who probably thinks of anything winged or feathered or mossed or leafed as “it”, saying to him:

“Hi, I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country,” Kristin Mink told Pruitt inside a Teaism restaurant in downtown Washington, not far from the EPA’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. “This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”

And a day later Scott Pruitt resigned.

I don’t know whether he resigned because of the mother and her child. I don’t know if it was because Pruitt realized that being a sleazy capitalist selling out future generations involves less harassment if it’s dictated from a board room than a public office. I don’t know if all that righteous Quaker energy pouring out of Toledo was bending something in Washington DC.

But I know that bearing witness for our kin, kin who are collapsing en masse, kin who cannot speak for themselves, is one of the most sacred acts we can engage in as a way of trying to repair so much of what has been broken in the march towards elevating innovation over creation. I’m so grateful to that mother and her child for speaking out for our kin.

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A few weeks after I was in Toledo I joined about 75 others to go speak out against proposed deregulation of Ohio River pollution control standards at a public hearing, the only public hearing to be held in a region of 5 million people who get their drinking water from the river. As I was driving down the highway the only thing I prayed for was to pack the hearing. And as I crossed the Brent Spence bridge and could see the Ohio river below out of the edge of my vision, I silently said to kin, “I’ll do the best I can for you.”

Many members of the various faith and political communities I’m connected to showed up. And then I yelled at the commissioners for my allotted 5 minutes for public comment and after that I ended up getting interviewed by a local news station.

This is what I said in my testimony:

Good evening commissioners. My name is Eira Tansey. I am from Cincinnati, and I get my drinking water from the Ohio River. I am a member of the Metro Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Socialists of America is an organization of over 45,000 people across the United States fighting against a capitalist system that silences the voices of working people.

And that is why I am here today: because only a few years after the water crises of Flint and Standing Rock, we are on the verge of another nightmare in which regulators are more interested in carrying out the wish list of polluting industry than protecting the health of the public.

Make no mistake: the public does not want this commission to abdicate its authority and responsibility for setting regional unified pollution control standards. Many of us want you to make existing standards stronger. Over 97% of the responses from the 900 pages of first round public comments called on you to do just that.

We have been told that a majority of ORSANCO’s commissioners favors Alternative 2, a path towards deregulation that happens to line up with the interests and stated preferences of polluting industry. We have been told that the federal Clean Water Act is sufficient to clean up the river, but this is anything but reassuring. As Mary from West Virginia wrote to you on February 22: “If state and EPA agencies’ work is adequate, why do I keep reading that the Ohio River is the most polluted inland waterway in the country?”

Ohio’s status as one of the dirtiest rivers in the country can be directly traced to several of the companies who have requested this commission to gut pollution standards. Alcoa, AKSteel, American Electric Power, ArcelorMittal, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy, Jupiter and Aluminum have all had dozens of Clean Water Act violations in just the last 3 years.

The majority of the commission has not acted in good faith. ORSANCO’s own reporting has found over 100 pollutants for which it has issued standards that are not found elsewhere within federal or state guidelines. It is outrageous that the only public hearing during this comment period is happening at an out of the way hotel in the middle of the week. It suggests the commission is not very interested in hearing from the public. So we must ask – why is a majority of ORSANCO leadership more interested in protecting polluting industries than in protecting the 5 million individuals who depend on the Ohio River for their drinking water?

Could it be because half of the commissioners have ties to polluting industry themselve? They have either worked directly in the mining and energy industries, or they represented them as clients of their consulting firms and law practices. Commissioner Snavely of Kentucky retired from Excel Mining. Commissioner Caperton of West Virginia worked at Massey Energy. Commissioner Flannery of West Virginia is on the National Coal Council. Commission chair Potesta of West Virginia has represented clients like DuPont, who has been one of the worst polluters of all.

This is not sound science or policy making. This is the fox guarding the henhouse door. If the commission guts regional pollution control standards, it is selling out the health and safety of everyone living downstream from polluting industry for the ability of corporations to make more money.

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I don’t know what’s next, for the river, for the bees in my yard, for the animals and the toddlers who love them being carried on their mother’s hips. I’m worried for my kin. Bearing witness on their behalf is the only thing I know how to do right now.

The Necessary Knowledge

This is an annotated version of the lectern copy of my opening keynote at NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2017: Preservation is Political in Pittsburgh on October 25. You can watch the recording here.

There is something I didn’t tell people in my formal talk, but I want to share here. Prior to my keynote, the last time I was in Pittsburgh was when I drove up the day after last year’s presidential election (after having worked the entire day as a poll worker in a Cincinnati suburb), because I was on an environmental panel for the Association of Moving Image Archivists annual meeting that was being held in downtown Pittsburgh. During our AMIA panel, everyone said, “Well I did all my preparation a few days ago, who knows what will happen to the EPA or Paris agreement now?” So it felt like things really came full circle for me to be asked back to Pittsburgh, a city that I love and a city that has such strong environmental and cultural ties to my beloved hometown of Cincinnati, but the site where, among archivists, I processed much of my immediate post-election grief and shock. And so it was a profound and moving experience to return to the same location, a year later, to speak in such a public way about one of the topics nearest to my heart. I am so grateful to the NDSA/DLF organizers for that opportunity.

When I wrote this keynote, there was a lot I left on the cutting room floor. Since I am only planning on revising a small part of my keynote for subsequent publication, this is my main opportunity to throw back in those bits as footnotes, and additional thoughts about the weird times we are all living through. The main text is the lectern copy I used during the keynote itself. The images are the slides I presented in Pittsburgh. Following the lectern copy text are a list of sources, and my extra bonus content annotations.

-Eira

THE NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE

In 1889, an item appeared at the bottom of the Pittsburg Dispatch. Just a few lines long, and sandwiched between reports of train accidents, it read:

Health officer Bradley, of Allegheny, has started a crusade against the doctors who have not reported their cases of typhoid fever, and threatens to fine them $50 for their neglect. There is both an act of the Assembly and a city ordinance requiring these reports, and blanks have been to sent to all the city physicians.

The Act of the Assembly had been in place for years, and it would be expanded as the death tolls rose. Pittsburgh had a disproportionately high number of typhoid cases, and this modest notice foreshadowed the struggles that link environmental protection, public health, and recordkeeping in a way that American society struggles with to this day.

River Pollution

The lack of consistent morbidity reporting by physicians, despite their legal requirement to do so, reflected part of the long transition to government vital record keeping. Record keeping had expanded as government responsibility grew for public health matters. Public health matters were becoming urgent as industrialization and city crowding endangered the health of Pittsburgh’s air and water. As typhoid fever cases accumulated, the requirements regulating reporting and other measures went from half a page of legal guidance, to nine pages of guidance 2 decades later.

25 years after enough death records were issued, researchers established horrifying links between the health of Pittsburgh’s rivers and the health of those who drank from it. Pittsburgh is bounded by the Allegheny to the north, the Monongahela to the south, and both converge to form the headwaters of the Ohio River. Recordkeeping alone had not reduced the prevalence of typhoid, but it provided clear and convincing evidence that river pollution was to blame for the disease. No one could simply write it off as the fault of squalid tenement living or of tainted milk. The primary culprits were political and corporate leaders who had allowed the rivers to be used as a dumping ground, and neglected to create large-scale water treatment facilities. No one could say exactly how much was dumped in the rivers, but everyone knew that industrial waste of iron and steel mills, tanneries, and slaughterhouses, and the human waste of communities upstream from Pittsburgh, had seriously compromised local water.

With sufficient death records to establish links between the water supply and typhoid fever, the picture was stark. Pittsburgh had one of the highest typhoid fever death rates in the United States, far higher than any other major city. Reformers pointed to other cities with successful water management systems, where typhoid fever deaths were a fraction of Pittsburgh’s. During a nine-year period following the health commissioner’s threat to fine doctors, the death toll was between 104 and 130 per 100,000 people, while cities like Washington and Philadelphia had close to half this rate (Wing, p. 66). After four years of political delays, during which an additional 1,500 deaths stacked up, Pittsburgh’s water filtration plant finally went into operation.

This assessment was part of a several thousand page study on Pittsburgh at the turn of the century. Carried out by dozens Progressive Era social researchers, the work of the Pittsburgh survey was published in six volumes between 1910 and 1914, and it covered dozens of topics, including women’s working conditions in sweatshops, the status of orphans and foster children, and steel worker unionization after the deadly Homestead Strike.

Pittsburgh, the home of US Steel and the cradle of Andrew Carnegie’s wealth, was a showcase for the fallout of America’s Gilded Age. One of the frequently occurring motifs of the Pittsburgh survey is a city coated in soot, dust, and grime.1. This grime was inescapable, from factories where workers were directly exposed, to homes where the dust settled inside the walls. The grime was the inevitable outcome of a city that was the steel capital of the world.

Progressive Era reformers drew explicit connections between the wastes of industrialization and public health in ways that ranged from the graphic exposure of books like The Jungle, to the less-visible work of improving the kind of medical and municipal recordkeeping that we now take for granted. Bureaucratized recordkeeping, such as death certificates, were increasingly widespread by the Progressive Era thanks to advances in increased literacy, the emergence of professions, and the role of the state in controlling public health. However, early recordkeeping was inconsistent, presenting issues for researchers. The Pittsburgh surveyors reported challenges accessing and making sense of municipal and corporate records. Surveyors researching workplace injuries relied on coroner’s and hospital records, as only some employers were willing to share their records. Even then, available records omitted pertinent information, or were illegible. Others investigating public sanitation records noted that while violations were often recorded, prosecutions were rarely initiated.

The typhoid surveyors didn’t just draw on death records to establish links between the city’s water supply and typhoid fever, they also created their own records as part of a case study assessing the disease’s economic impact to over 300 families. This work was carried out under the charge of a local settlement house nurse named Anna Heldman, whose existing relationships with local families was viewed as a critical asset for data collection (Wing, pp. 72-74). The surveyors found that there were significant income losses due to sickness from the contaminated rivers. This echoed a problem we continue to struggle with, which is that environmental pollution disproportionately impacts poor communities.

But perhaps what the typhoid fever investigators did best was making records visible in ways that humanized the blandness of statistics. An exhibit of some of the survey’s findings were exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, and the walls featured a frieze depicting over 600 silhouettes of men, women, and children. These represented the area’s typhoid fever death toll from the previous year, and the borders of the published report were similarly decorated. To illustrate the entire 25-year long death toll, the surveyors superimposed a line starting at the courthouse and ending near a filtration plant on the Allegheny River. The line represented an end to end body count of more than 7,422 citizens who had lost their life to typhoid fever, or according to their measurements, a death toll equivalent to almost 6 miles long.

DDT

As the field work of the survey started in 1907 (Butler, p. 4), a child was born 14 miles northeast of Pittsburgh (Souder, p.24). She grew up seeing the smokestacks along the Allegheny River, where a century later, a bridge was renamed in her honor on Earth Day. She transformed the US environmental movement through the publication of a book that shook the country and exposed the hubris of unquestioned technology.

Rachel Carson attended the Pennsylvania College for Women, located in Pittsburgh’s East End, and today known as Chatham University (Souder p.26).2 She studied biology, and went on to become an information specialist for what eventually became the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Souder, p. 5). There she summarized scientific research into information for the public. Before writing her most famous book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson publish highly-regarded and wildly popular books about the ocean, making her a household name well before she turned her attention to pesticides.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring has been called “a beautiful book about a dreadful topic” (Oreskes & Conway, p. 216). Carson shined a spotlight on the indiscriminate applications of popular post-war insecticides like DDT, which was starting to show up in the food chains of insects, fish, birds, mammals, and eventually within the bodies of humans. A counterweight to corporate boosterism of better living through chemistry, Silent Spring painted a horrifying portrait of lifeless rivers that previously teemed with fish, silenced backyards that used to host busy bird feeders, and agricultural workers who fell in fields. Carson showed that indiscriminate use of pesticides could not be isolated to a single area or species. Chemical toxins accumulated in the bodies of non-target species with profound consequences. A bird might die from DDT or its chemical cousins by eating contaminated worms, by ingesting DDT itself, or by starving to death as the insects it ate were wiped out during a spraying campaign.

Rachel Carson knew about the dangers of widespread pesticide applications for years. As a Fish and Wildlife employee in the late 1940s, she edited reports on the division’s tests of DDT (Souder, pp. 7-8). The main regulatory law affecting pesticide use at the time was the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), but it was primarily a registry and labelling law overseen by the US Department of Agriculture. FIFRA was not expanded to examine toxicity on wildlife and public health until 1972 – the same year that the US banned use of DDT (EPA, “FIFRA” & “DDT”).

To write Silent Spring, Carson relied on her well-honed approaches of pursuing correspondence with field experts, reading staggering amounts of scientific literature, and working closely with librarians. In a nod to the enduring importance of librarians’ labor to her writing, she acknowledged that “every writer of a book based on many diverse facts owes much to the skill and helpfulness of librarians” and specifically thanked Department of Interior librarian Ida Johnston, and National Institute of Health librarian Thelma Robinson for their help. Carson drew on everything from Audubon Club bird watcher reports to Congressional hearings to federal agency reviews to research studies in international journals of medicine.

Carson was not the first person to raise the alarm about the danger of pesticides (Carson, p. 31, 170). But what set Carson apart was her ability to synthesize many bureaucratic reports and scholarly scientific findings into a form that resonated with the public – and compelled regulatory action. She knew that the accusations she lodged against pesticide practices were incendiary, and she took enormous care in documenting all of her claims, insisting that the publisher include a fifty-page guide to her sources. This wasn’t just to ensure scholarly rigor – after all, Silent Spring was a book for a general audience – it was to proactively address the very real concern that Carson and her publisher might be the target of a libel suit.

What happened to Rachel Carson next was a blueprint of attacks that have been replicated against researchers whose findings turn out to be very inconvenient to industries and their government enablers. When Silent Spring was published, corporate interests came for Carson with a viciousness that feels both dated and alarmingly contemporary at the same time. She was castigated for her lack of an advanced degree, her suspicious love of animals, and for being just another hysterical spinster. Carson took care in her measured prose to note that she was not opposed to all pesticide use, but that her opposition was to the unrestrained way in which they were used with scant attention paid to existing safety studies.

Eight years after Silent Spring was published, Richard Nixon signed a reorganization plan that created the Environmental Protection Agency, consolidating responsibility for dozens of existing environmental laws – including FIFRA – into one agency. Many of these laws were expanded to require significant new record keeping responsibilities to document pollution emissions, and assure citizen’s right to know about potential toxic exposures. The EPA’s original charge included the mandate that it “[gather] information on pollution” to “strengthen environmental protection programs and recommend policy changes.” (Nixon, p. 5). One of the greatest underrated legacies of the EPA’s creation is that it has enormously expanded the amount of environmental information available to the public through monitoring, reporting, and permitting record systems3. We do not often think of the creation of records as a victory, but effectively addressing pollution without those records is incredibly difficult, as we can see in today’s Pennsylvania landscape.

Fracking

Shortly after President Trump announced he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he stated “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” (Woodall, 2017).4 While the city of Pittsburgh has made notable progress towards a fossil free future, it is also in the center of the Marcellus Shale region, the largest U.S. natural gas field and which covers three-fifths of Pennsylvania, as well as parts of Ohio, West Virginia, New York and Maryland (EIA, 2017a). For the last four years, Pennsylvania has been the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer (EIA, 2017b).

Much of this growth has been due to the expansion of hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. Fracking has been around for decades, but it was not widely deployed until the early 2000s (EPA, 2016; Congressional Research Service, 2015a). Fracking is a process where large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals are injected into deep wells to fracture, or crack open, rock formations to release oil and gas deposits. Fracking’s immediate environmental risks come from potential links to earthquakes, methane leakage, and water contamination. Many of the rural residents in the Marcellus Shale region have complained that fracking operations have contaminated their water supplies.

Fracking poses documented danger to water supplies. But establishing a conclusive link to hold energy companies accountable is difficult because of an absence of industry and governmental records 5. The oil and gas industry claims there is minimal risk, because fracking happens in rock formations below any groundwater supplies. However, there are many other routes to water contamination, including onsite chemical spills, failures in the underground pipes, and improper waste disposal. Contamination of well water, a common water supply in rural regions, is especially difficult to prove because there are often no baseline water purity records prior to fracking. Furthermore, many industries avoid full disclosure of their fracking chemicals by claiming confidential business information (Congressional Research Service, 2015b; EPA, 2016).

Regulation depends on reliable record keeping. Regulations mandate what records will be created in order to ensure health and safety. Industries with potentially serious environmental impact are often not regulated until there is significant public outcry. There is often spotty documentation, at best, on early environmental impacts of new technologies, leaving citizens without the information they need to to prove pollution claims. The problem is worsened by regulatory agencies that struggle with underfunding and an inability or unwillingness to exercise their enforcement powers. It is further compounded by politicians hostile to environmental regulation. These issues can be seen in recent failures of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to regulate fracking.

In 2014, the Pennsylvania Auditor General audited the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), reviewing their performance in monitoring and investigating fracking’s effects on water supplies. This is a huge issue because if you think fracking has contaminated your water supply, you have to start by making a complaint to the DEP, which then triggers an investigation. The audit found failure after failure in both DEP’s regulatory responsibilities and its record keeping practices (Pennsylvania Auditor General, 2014). When citizens filed complaints, they did not consistently receive a final letter stating the conclusion of an investigation, inspection records were kept inconsistently, there wasn’t independent verification of industry’s self-reported waste, records were not organized in a way to answer simple big-picture questions such as “How many complaints were related to impacts on water supplies?” and DEP routinely cited confidentiality concerns as an excuse to block access to public records. The Auditor stated he could not conclude whether “public health is being threatened by the gas industry” because “their record keeping is so poor” (Hurdle, 2014). The findings of the state auditor are similar to what much of the scholarly literature on fracking says – that the dangers to water are known, but no one knows quite how widespread it is because state and industry record keeping is so inconsistent. Although the DEP has recently improved some of its online public records access – including crucial citizen complaint records – finding and making sense of the records is notoriously difficult.

Dissatisfied with the status quo, activists have filed numerous public records requests in order to assemble information in a manner far more accessible and comprehensible to the public. The Pittsburgh-based Public Herald literally went to DEP regional offices to scan thousands of citizen complaints which they’ve mapped and made available on their website, publicfiles.org.6

Conclusion

In each of these regional stories, reliable record keeping has been essential to documenting the links between pollution and polluters. When industry and government roll back regulations that require reliable record keeping, we’re quickly on the road to pollution without polluters, in which we know that  water and air is being contaminated, but we lack the reliable evidence to document exactly who that polluter is.

Last year’s keynote by Bergis Jules, was titled “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives.” Bergis called for us to “[acknowledge] our willful ignorance around the histories of marginalized people of color and to allow new knowledge to affect how we do our work.” The failure of care is a theme that comes up time and again when one considers how injustices perpetrated against the land, air and water are inseparable from the injustices perpetrated against marginalized peoples. Pollution of air and water disproportionately affects poor communities and communities of color, and yet with all our knowledge about this reality, we have failed to embed the concept of care into the way we approach environmental information and record keeping.

What does care look like in an environmental record keeping context? It looks like record keeping that recognizes that impacts to the environment are inseparable to the impacts on our bodies and communities.

While I was preparing for this keynote, I ran across an intriguing example of what this looks like in a story from the Allegheny Front, a website dedicated to regional environmental journalism. The story profiled a local summer youth employment program in which teenagers are working in the predominantly black neighborhood of Lincoln-Lemington on lead poisoning (Holsopple, 2017)7. The neighborhood has older housing stock which means a higher likelihood of lead paint, and like many cities with aging infrastructure, Pittsburgh is grappling with serious lead concerns in its water lines. There is no safe level of lead exposure for children, but the CDC has established what is known as a “reference level at which the agency recommends public health actions be initiated” (CDC, 2017). The reference level is anything above a blood lead level of 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL). In 2013, 7.5% of tested children here in Allegheny county had blood lead levels above the reference level, and several thousand more children have some level of exposure above zero (Allegheny County Health Department, 2015). The Allegheny County Council recently passed mandatory lead testing for one and two-year old children, and the law will go into effect on January 1 (Deto, 2017). A councilman supporting the legislation stated, “Lead testing gives us information, and without information we can’t assess the problem that we are facing” (Boren, 2017).

Over the summer, the students in the youth employment program mapped buildings in the neighborhood, talked with residents about  their lead exposure mitigation strategies, and conducted surveys in cooperation with the Allegheny County Health Department. The students spent 3 days in Flint Michigan talking to activists and community stakeholders there.

I recently spoke to Denise Jones, who served as the project’s director 8. She noted that while there was much quantitative data, there was little qualitative detail. The Health Department might be able to say how many houses were built with lead paint or had lead service lines, but it didn’t have information on how caregivers employed various strategies to keep their children safe. Knocking on doors, clipboards in hand, these students filled in the care-based details that are all too often missing from records that rarely account for how our environments impact our lives.

Preserving and making environmental information accessible is essential if we hope to bring any eventual accountability to power, because the legal and cultural context we live in requires documentary evidence in the form of trustworthy data and reliable records. Polluters know this, and it’s why rolling back regulations that document who is polluting and how is often the first line of attack in what they call bureaucratic red tape – but the documentation that that red tape creates is essential to building legal cases and moral claims against polluters. A disturbing number of today’s attacks on federal environmental protection involve attacks on information.9 Some of these have rolled back proposals for industry to increase its monitoring and reporting of methane. Methane has even more heat-trapping potential than carbon, and methane leaks are highly associated with fracking. Industry claims natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal, but methane leaks undermine that claim. If we don’t require record keeping for methane emissions, it’s hard to determine the extent of our current contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.10

I often think about how many libraries have an uncomfortable inheritance of what the Gilded Age steel industry wrought on air and water, and on the bodies of its workers. Andrew Carnegie made his fortune from steel and he made it here in Pittsburgh, and it was his philanthropy to over a thousand communities that nearly doubled the amount of public libraries in the United States.11 Many of our libraries and archives we work in are deeply tangled in fossil fuels – from institutional endowments invested in BP or Exxon, foundation-funded projects seeded from the money of oil and gas barons, preservation of our digital content on coal-powered servers, and reliance on fossil-fueled transportation to come together to dream of a better future.  Environmental information is critical to our ability to meet the challenges that lie ahead, and I believe as information professionals we have an ethical obligation to incorporate environmental care in our professional practices.

I’ve been working around these issues of archives and the environment for a few years. The  profession knows we need to do something, but we’re not really sure what it is. Should we rewrite our disaster plans to incorporate climate change? Should we put rooftop gardens and solar panels on top of our buildings? Should we incorporate the environmental footprint of cloud storage into our contracts with digital preservation services? Ideally we would all answer Yes to them – and yet they avoid the critical question of environmental information.12

Before we can ask “What should we do about environmental information?” we must answer, “How do we as a profession develop an ethic of environmental justice?” Because we can’t sustain the issue of preserving environmental information for the long haul until we make caring about the environment a very normal and routine aspect of our personal and professional lives. People arrive at an ethic of environmental justice through different routes, but at its core, it depends on cultivating a sense of care and duty for the places in which we live and work, and understanding how environmental degradation compounds existing injustices.

In the archives profession, the “archivist as keeper and caretaker” trope has been thrashed for its implications that archivists are passive agents worshipping at the altar of neutrality. But as multiple archivists have recently asserted the importance of ethics of care in our profession, I would like to think we’re on the way to reclaiming archivists as caretakers in the best and most feminist sense of the word – that to care for something is a profound act of great importance, it’s essential to our ongoing existence, and it is the bedrock for preservation 13. To ensure that information is preserved so that it can be used by citizens for a safe and healthy environment is the opposite of passively keeping information – it is to assert that preservation of information, preservation of the earth, and preservation of public health, are very closely linked.

As we saw after the election, many decentralized efforts took place to address concerns over access and preservation of federal environmental data on websites like the EPA/DOI/NOAA/NASA. In some of those efforts, librarians and archivists played an active leadership role, while other efforts barely had any librarians or archivists present. Why was this? I suspect it is because for many of us, we do not have environmental justice incorporated in our sense of what it means to be an information professional. This information may be invisible to many of us most of the time, but if you like to breathe clean air and drink clean water, you should care very deeply about this.

As I’ve laid out, effective environmental protection depends on environmental information. That space is where we as information professionals most strongly bring our talents. So to return to the question, “What should we do about environmental information?” we need to identify the unfolding threats to its preservation and accessibility, from local to international stages. It’s not just at the federal level, and it was a problem long before the current administration, and will be longer after it. If we’re not given a seat at those tables, to paraphrase Shirley Chisholm, then we need to bring a folding chair.14 We need to assert that we, as information professionals, deeply care about environmental information, especially if we also claim that we care about the communities we serve.

Just as there is not a single solution for climate change, but multiple paths to transitioning to a fossil-free future, there are multiple ways we can work towards ensuring environmental information is preserved and used:

  • We can get involved in groups working on federal environmental data issues, many of which are represented within the DLF community
  • We can become friends with scientists and journalists to organize around our common interests
  • We can help citizen science projects with data management and preservation plans
  • We can teach local environmental activists how to find and use environmental information
  • We can surface new sources of environmental information in our collections, such as weather and ecological data from diaries
  • We can prioritize local environmental topics for our collection development policies
  • We can demand that industries voluntarily disclose more information about their environmental impact
  • We can interrogate the appraisal and retention decisions of regulatory records to ensure records are retained long enough to support the public interest
  • We can fight back against deregulation that rolls back reporting and monitoring recordkeeping requirements

The balance of power concerning the creation and access of environmental information has favored polluting industries for far too long. I’m gravely concerned this imbalance is becoming more severe, at the exact moment when crises of climate change, ecological collapse, and environmental injustice are becoming too urgent to ignore any longer. Whether we identify as librarians, archivists, curators, records managers, or some other branch of the information profession family tree, all of us can – and need to – contribute to preserving environmental information and ensuring its usability.

Rachel Carson lamented in Silent Spring that the evidence against pesticides was stacking up, but far too many people chose to ignore it.

She wrote, “Much of the necessary knowledge is now available, but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity.”

Rachel Carson wrote those words more than 50 years ago, and yet it feels as if it could describe our world today. We need to build an alternative world, rooted in advice and ingenuity. We have the necessary knowledge. Now let’s use it.

References

Allegheny County Health Department. (2015). Community Health Assessment. http://www.achd.net/cha/CHA_Report-Final_42815.pdf

Boren, J. (2017). Allegheny County Council approves lead testing requirement for children. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. http://triblive.com/local/allegheny/12478182-74/allegheny-county-council-approves-lead-testing-requirement-for-children

Butler, E., & Russell Sage Foundation. (1909). Women and the trades, Pittsburgh, 1907-1908. New York: Survey Associates. https://archive.org/details/pittsburghsurvey01kelluoft

Carson, R., Lear, L. J., & Wilson, E. O. (2012). Silent spring. Boston: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin.

CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). (2017). Lead. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/

Congressional Research Service. (2015a). An Overview of Unconventional Oil and Natural Gas: Resources and Federal Actions. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43148.pdf

Congressional Research Service. (2015b). Hydraulic Fracturing and Safe Drinking Water Act Regulatory Issues. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41760.pdf

Deto, R. (2017). Allegheny County Council candidate Anita Prizio thinks county’s new lead-testing rule should go farther. Pittsburgh City Paper. https://www.pghcitypaper.com/PolitiCrap/archives/2017/07/24/allegheny-county-council-candidate-anita-prizio-thinks-countys-new-lead-testing-rule-should-go-farther

EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration). (2017a). Pennsylvania Profile Analysis. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=PA#2

EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration). (2017b). Pennsylvania Profile Overview. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=PA

EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). (2016). Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States  (Executive Summary). https://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=530285

EPA. (2017). DDT – A Brief History and Status. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-brief-history-and-status

EPA. (2017). Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and Federal Facilities. https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/federal-insecticide-fungicide-and-rodenticide-act-fifra-and-federal-facilities

Holsopple, K. (2017). “Teens earn and learn while educating their neighbors about lead exposure.” Allegheny Front. https://www.alleghenyfront.org/teens-earn-and-learn-while-educating-their-neighbors-about-lead-exposure/

Hurdle, J. (2014). “Pennsylvania’s Auditor General Faults Oversight of Natural Gas Industry.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/pennsylvanias-auditor-general-faults-oversight-of-natural-gas-industry.html?_r=1

Nixon, R. Reorganization plans nos. 3 and 4 of 1970, message from the president. Congressional document, House Committee on Government Operations. July 9, 1970. H.Doc. 91-366. https://congressional.proquest.com/legisinsight?id=12896-2%20H.doc.366&type=DOCUMENT

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2012). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. London: Bloomsbury.

Pennsylvania Auditor General. (2014). A Special Performance Audit of Department of Environmental Protection. http://www.paauditor.gov/Media/Default/Reports/speDEP072114.pdf

Souder, W. (2013). On a farther shore: The life and legacy of Rachel Carson.

Wing, F. (1914). “Thirty-Five Years of Typohid.” Kellogg, P. U., & Russell Sage Foundation. The Pittsburgh district civic frontage. New York: Survey Associates. https://archive.org/details/pittsburghsurvey05kelluoft

Woodall, C. (2017). “Trump: ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris’”. Penn Live. http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/06/trump_i_was_elected_to_represe.html

Footnotes

The long game of slow violence

The other night I did the one thing before bed you are DEFINITELY NOT SUPPOSED TO DO which was to watch a terrifying news clip:

I had been off the grid a couple weeks ago when the original editorial ran in the Washington Post. The News Hour guest and editorial writer is a Department of Interior employee named Joel Clement, who was working at a high level with Alaskan Native villages on adaptation issues, and was reassigned by his supervisors to an office that collected oil and gas royalties. He believes this was retaliation against his climate adaptation work, and filed whistleblower complaints. The PBS News Hour reporter asked Clement what we were all thinking: “Don’t you think it’s a little ironic you’re now in an office receiving fossil fuel payments when your previous work was exacerbated by the use of fossil fuels in the first place?”

One of the major things that has always horrified me in addition to the unfettered racism, misogyny, bigotry, and incompetence of Donald Trump, was that I do not trust this man to protect the safety of the people who live here on the most minimal public safety measures. One of the examples I pointed to was Trump’s castigation of fire department officials for enforcing fire safety limits at his rallies. A man that would disregard the safety of his own supporters by trying to bully his way out of fire safety codes was the clearest sign to me that this guy transgressed all normal definitions of sinister, that he was a fucking madman, that the potential body count of Americans on his watch – even those on his side – did not factor in to his outlook.

From disregarding fire safety codes – one of the most important public health measures that keep people alive – it’s not a far leap to shrugging off loss of health care for millions of Americans – another public health measure that keeps people alive. Millions losing their health care would result in many preventable deaths. We know this. Everyone knows this. Stop pretending anyone doesn’t understand this. Anyone who claims cuts to healthcare won’t result in thousands of preventable deaths is getting a paycheck that would frame a GoFundMe for chemo as the ultimate expression of liberty. Today we’re at the point where knowingly putting one’s supporters into a position where they may die is the standard operating principle not just of Donald Trump, but the entire Republican Party.

Republican leadership and Trump can claim until they’re blue in the face that of course they don’t want people to die, and basically folks, you know the drill from here: what terribly offensive liberal paranoia! How dare you claim that the Republican Party is seemingly okay with letting folks die in the streets, this is just more evidence that leftists are the real fascists! This is where looking at the concept of slow violence is critical. Slow violence means reconceiving of the speed at which violence is inflicted, particularly violence that may not register right away or is less visible than, say, a terrorist attack. In the words of author Rob Nixon:

We are accustomed to conceiving violence as immediate and explosive, erupting into instant, concentrated visibility. But we need to revisit our assumptions and consider the relative invisibility of slow violence. I mean a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental, whose calamitous repercussions are postponed for years or decades or centuries. I want, then, to complicate conventional perceptions of violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is focused around an event, bounded by time, and aimed at a specific body or bodies. Emphasizing the temporal dispersion of slow violence can change the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social crises, like domestic abuse or post-traumatic stress, but it is particularly pertinent to the strategic challenges of environmental calamities.

So sure, if the GOP ultimately succeeds in repealing the ACA, bodies won’t be dropping in the streets overnight. But by associating violence with the short-term and the visible, we let those who would let people die in the long-term disassociate themselves from any form of violence and long-term accountability. And here is the problem: these assholes are really fucking good at playing the long game.

Where playing the long game with slow violence gets really scary, like, planetary-millenia level scary, is climate change. To state the facts in case anyone has missed Al Gore 1.0 or 2.0, climate change is real, climate change is primarily caused by consumption of fossil fuels, climate change is already wreaking havoc on plant and animal systems and the people who depend on these resources, and the folks who have contributed the least emissions historically speaking are the ones poised to suffer the most. Slow violence is sort of the defining experience of climate change – if you’re honest with yourself, the warning signs are everywhere around you, particularly if you live near a pole or near a coast. But because there isn’t a stark “before” and “after” timeline, climate change manifests itself as a slow violence, aided and abetted by those who benefit from fossil fuel extraction.

Upton Sinclair once said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And of course, this is the only logical explanation for why the right-wing is committed to not just inaction on climate change, but doubling down on fossil fuel extraction and shifting from denial of climate change’s human basis to handwaving away the effects under the guise of “well, if it’s really happening, we’ll figure it out! Or build a colony on another planet!”

For those of you who aren’t up on your climate change policy definitions, what you’ll often hear are two words – mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is about reducing the use of fossil fuels, adaptation is about building infrastructure and creating policy to help people deal with the inevitable effects of climate change – a certain level of environmental disruption which is already assured, even if we dramatically reduced our fossil fuel consumption immediately. For many people – myself included – these aren’t two opposing paths but joint paths we need to quickly make progress on.

When Trump took office, I was prepared for and expecting that he would go after mitigation efforts – especially the Obama administration Clean Power Plan and Waters rule, and the Paris Agreement. Capitalists gonna capitalist, and these fuckers worship money more than they value the survival of their children. However, I must admit I was not really prepared for the idea that adaptation efforts are now a target. Adaptation efforts don’t really register in the national conversations the brainwashed GOP has on climate change – because how can you adapt to something if you deny the problem’s existence in the first place?

Recall that one of the major objections of the Republican Party to the Paris Agreement was their opposition to contributing money to international adaptation efforts – money that would assist Pacific Island nations who are quite literally threatened by drowning. They are open and upfront about this, as you can see from this Heritage Foundation quote:

One step that Congress should take is to refuse to authorize or appropriate any funds to implement the Agreement, including the tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars in adaptation funding to which the U.S. will commit itself annually.

On the domestic front, a major thing adaptation efforts have going for them is the requirement of serious infrastructure upgrades. Ah, infrastructure! One of those things that always sounds good on paper, but no Republican can seem to find the moral courage to actually fund. Infrastructure is like cute babies, extremely useful during campaign season, but coming in with a lifetime budget for care that no one really wants to fund 100%. Add to the fact that many of the US communities on the frontlines of climate change are Native communities, and this becomes not just a matter of budgetary kicking the can down the road, but yet another example of blatant environmental racism.

Right now, domestic climate change adaptation efforts across the federal government are fragmented, and unlike many European countries, the US does not have a national adaptation strategy (and even before Trump was elected, the federal government admitted it was unable to support total relocation of endangered communities). Much of this is because so much responsibility for planning and infrastructure decisions are at the state and local levels. But a lot of it is because no one really forced the federal government to think about what adaptation efforts should look like until the Obama administration required every federal agency to incorporate adaptation efforts into their climate change response plans – requirements which Trump’s administration has begun to rollback (Text of Trump’s EO here).

When I watched that clip above, I realized that this administration’s indifference to climate change isn’t just surface-level, it isn’t just photo ops exploiting coal miners as we pull out of the Paris agreement, it isn’t just denial that allows the Republican Party leadership to keep chowing down at the fossil fuel capitalism trough, and it isn’t just attacks on Pacific Island nations’ adaptation efforts. It goes very, very, disturbingly and systematically deep to parts of our government the vast majority of us – even people tuned in to climate change policy – can’t comprehend.

To attack domestic adaptation efforts transcends even the normal expectations one would have of American capitalist climate change denialism. One can see how adaptation can actually be embraced fairly cynically to serve fossil fuel interests – “well, maybe the sea will rise, but we don’t have to reduce our extraction as long as we build a giant sea wall one day!”

Instead, attacking adaptation efforts is from the same slow violence playbook as attacking people’s healthcare: we know that this will result in deaths. And the Republican Party is going down this path anyway, fully aware of the consequences, not giving a damn. The long game of slow violence may teach discipline and persistence, but it is based in the purest forms of evil ever wrought upon the world.

Fierce Urgencies 2017 event (Yale): When the Unbearable Becomes Inevitable

(I was honored to join Jarrett Drake and Bethany Wiggin at an event titled “Fierce Urgencies: The Social Responsibility of Collecting and Protecting Data,” hosted by the Beinecke Speakers Series at Yale University on May 4. Here is the copy of my talk + slides. Thanks to Hillel Arnold and Ben Goldman for helping me navigate my way to coherence as I wrote and rewrote my talk, and the Yale organizers who put together an important and compelling day.)

On April 2, curators of an archive in Canada walked into their repository to find a massive disaster unfolding. Water was pooling at the bottom of the storage area floors, and the curators realized with horror that some of the records in their care were lost beyond all hope. How could this be?

Predictably, it was an HVAC issue. The repository in question was the ice core archives at University of Alberta in Edmonton.[i] Scientists drill ice cores from glaciers in order to obtain historical climate records, and then the cores are split up into segments and stored in repositories that are so cold they require some serious protective clothing to enter. Ice cores are important, because they contain vital information about our planet over hundreds of thousands of years, including how levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have changed over time. This enables climate scientists to establish that not only are we experiencing increasing presence of greenhouse gas emissions compared to what we would expect based on past records, but that it has anthropogenic causes, that is, caused by human activity.

There is scarcely any place in the world that will not be affected by climate change. Whether our archives and libraries collect information about the environment scarcely matters, climate change will affect you as a practicing archivist, librarian, or curator, because it will also affect you as a citizen of the world. In many places, climate change has already started to impact archival work, even if we don’t realize it. And frequently we don’t realize it because archivists haven’t fully grappled with our professional relationship with the environment.

I find the story of the melting ice cores poignant and sad because not only did some of these ice cores come from glaciers which are rapidly melting and may not be around long enough to obtain replacement samples from, but because it also illustrates the astonishing gap between the way different fields conceive of the very concept of the record. Because of the information embedded in natural objects like ice cores and tree rings, scientists refer to them as proxy data or proxy records,[ii] and they are a vital part of climate science, since reliable written records on the weather and climate only go back a few hundred years.

However, if we look at how the American archival profession defines data, records, and archives, it becomes clear that we archivists think of records as something created by, for, and about humans. For example, the SAA glossary of archival terminology barely creates intellectual space for the idea that a record could be created by any process except human activity, or that archives would exist for any capacity beyond how they reflect our relationships with human institutions.[iii] Anything from the natural world may be considered data, and historically we have tended to leave data to other professions.

 

 

It has added to my growing conviction that the construction of archives as the product of human activity stymies our understanding of our work and its meaning in the larger environment around us.

Environmental metaphors permeate an incredible amount of archival literature, but the reality is that archivists have constructed “archives” as an almost entirely human enterprise.[iv][v][vi] And you will notice that when we do use environmental metaphors in our literature, it is frequently in a negative light. For example, in the 1987 English translation of German archivist Hans Booms’ work, one finds phrases common to the archival literature, like

●     “archivists have made unsuccessful attempts to staunch this flood of information” or,

●     “The mountain of data competing for storage also begins to grow at a more rapid pace”

When we use environmental metaphors in this way, it is almost as if we are replaying frontier narratives that imagine that environments are inherently wild and out of control, and that humans must subjugate them to serve our needs.


The unfortunate reality is that whether we want to think about our relationship with the environment or not, eventually climate change will force us to confront that relationship.

Even seemingly benign events may be a canary in the coal mine for the future. While coastal sea level rise and dramatic hurricanes capture our most apocalyptic fears, less obvious effects of climate change – like the intensification of Midwest thunderstorms over the coming decades – can lead to highly localized but incredibly devastating outcomes. In my city of Cincinnati, we experienced a taste of this over the past August when a spectacularly intense thunderstorm parked itself over our city, and overwhelmed the local storm water system. This led to flooding in neighborhoods that no one ever recalled flooding before, because of their distance from our local rivers. And yet this is the exact same thing climatologists are warning us will happen hundreds of miles inland. That August storm particularly affected a local institution, and their archivist told me recently it was only by luck that some their collections weren’t damaged in a room that flooded, thanks to being on tables that day.

I believe that there will be a point in our near future in which archivists will have no choice but to adapt to climate change in the way we perform our work. The challenge is whether we do it in a way that reinforces the very problems at our door, or in a way that puts us on the right side of accountability, justice, and community responsibility. In order to begin preparing for long-term adaptation, we need to ask a lot of questions we would probably prefer to put off.

What are some of the risks in a changing climate we might face? It depends on where you are:

●     Some may face immediate collection evacuation risks, prompted by wildfires, floods, and hurricanes

●     Some may face long-term relocation decisions due to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, or if a weather event is so devastating, rebuilding is inadvisable or impossible

●     Some may face increasing infrastructure and preservation costs when current HVAC systems can’t keep up with future increases in temperature and humidity

I suspect some archivists will find themselves being asked difficult questions one day from institutional risk managers who know nothing about archives or libraries. The insurance industry is already taking a cold hard actuarial look at the reality of underwriting certain areas. When our institutions and repositories can no longer have insurance, or afford insurance premiums for areas increasingly vulnerable, what difficult decisions will we have to make about how, when, and where to steward our collections?

What about problems that are likely to be so big that they cannot be resolved at the local institutional level? Will we be ready to meet these challenges profession-wide? These questions are becoming painfully relevant for many. Australian archivist Matthew Gordon-Clark has written about the legal and cultural struggles that will almost certainly arise with determining how the larger archival community should aid in the question of national archives from Pacific Island nations.

 

 

Many of you may know that here at Yale, there is a fantastic group of researchers who study the communication and rhetoric around climate change. The researchers periodically study how Americans think about climate change, and I think these stats are fascinating – 70% of us think CC will affect future generations, a slim majority think it’s already affecting the US, but only 40% think it will affect us personally. How do we make sense of this? It’s not as if we’ll have a clear red line from which we can say “Now climate change is affecting us.” We need to assume it already is, and act accordingly.

The Society of American Archivists Core Values states, “Underlying all the professional activities of archivists is their responsibility to a variety of groups in society and to the public good.” It is my strong conviction that professionally and morally, archivists have to step up and connect the dots between the public good, and climate justice. And we have to do it in a way that recognizes climate justice is fundamentally intertwined with struggles for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Across the globe, frontline communities – poor folks, people of color, and indigenous people –  will face the most severe effects of climate change, despite generally contributing the least emissions. You will note that historically, these are also communities that are underrepresented among archivists, and with whom we do not have a historically good relationship with across the board, and in many circumstances, have even aided in their oppression through description, acquisition, or access practices.

Many of these communities either face barriers in accessing the types of records needed to substantiate their claims of environmental injustices, or have difficulty getting those in power to take seriously the evidence and documentation their communities have gathered together in the absence of official records.

There are currently no comprehensive governmental programs in place in the US to aid coastal frontline communities who must move in order to sustain their cultures and community. This is already a reality for several indigenous communities, particularly along the Gulf Coast[vii] and Alaska.[viii] Our society’s failure to help these communities move is not just an abdication of responsibility for physical safety and wellbeing, but also yet another way in which the cultural heritage of vulnerable communities is marginalized and threatened.

I want to raise a cautionary note. I fear our profession sometimes suffers from a “Document, Collect and Preserve it, and they will come” mindset – either that if we gather material, we will ensure new groups of users will come to find our archives relevant, or that if we help preserve documentation documenting injustice, it will help people come to their senses. To return to my earlier conviction that archivists need to grapple with our relationship with the environment, I don’t think simply collecting about the environment is the answer. We need to completely rethink how to integrate climate change adaptation into our existing work, from appraisal to processing to preservation, because collection and documentation alone does not produce justice.

 

 

If we look at the history of the science of climate change, we can see that collection and knowledge-creation and preservation are not enough. Climate change is arguably one of the MOST documented phenomenons of the post-industrial world, and the general public has been exposed to it for over a century now, with mentions in newspapers going back to at least the second-half of the 19th century, and President LBJ mentioning the dangers of burning fossil fuels in a 1965 address to Congress.

So how is it that we have all this knowledge, but emission levels keep moving up?

Knowledge, on its own, is not enough to move policy. The reason that emissions are increasing is because we have a worldwide system in which vast and moneyed fossil fuel interests have historically been motivated to attack knowledge and expertise on the one hand, while behind the scenes influencing policy through buying their way out of any moral obligation to do anything about it. It is the reason ExxonMobil has joined the ranks of tobacco and the NFL in trying to cover up its own internal research showing how bad their product is (#ExxonKnew), but unlike cigarettes and traumatic brain injuries, their own coverup of documentation in the quest for unfettered profits could hurt everyone and everything alive on the planet now and in the future.

So as one of my friends recently said to me, so what do archivists do? Besides dismantling fossil-fuel dominated crony capitalism, I have three suggestions, starting at home. And I emphasize the phrase “at home,” because while climate change is a global phenomenon, it will have highly localized problems and therefore calls for localized responses:

1.    Start talking about it to anyone who will listen, and when you’re not talking, listen to the perspectives of front line communities in your area. Is there something as an archivist you can lend your voice and skills towards?

2.    Ask what your institution is doing for adaptation to climate change. You may find out that it’s “in the future.” Figure out how to be at that table once the future arrives, and start taking steps internally within your repository towards adaptation, so when the unthinkable becomes inevitable you’re ready

3.    Building professional solidarity with other professions, like journalists and scientists, who are committed to truth-telling.

Science historian Naomi Oreskes has talked about this gap between knowledge and policy: “It’s a cliché to say that knowledge is power. It’s not true actually. Knowledge is knowledge. In our society, knowledge resides in one place, and for the most part, power resides somewhere else. And that disconnect is really the crux of the challenge we face right now.”

Friends and colleagues, let us hope we can rise to the challenge ahead.

 

References:
[i]  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/climate/ice-cores-melted-freezer-alberta-canada.html

[ii] https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/past-climate and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(climate)

[iii] Data: Facts, ideas, or discrete pieces of information, especially when in the form originally collected and unanalyzed.(http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/d/data)

Record: 1. A written or printed work of a legal or official nature that may be used as evidence or proof; a document. – 2. Data or information that has been fixed on some medium; that has content, context, and structure; and that is used as an extension of human memory or to demonstrate accountability. – 3. Data or information in a fixed form that is created or received in the course of individual or institutional activity and set aside (preserved) as evidence of that activity for future reference. – 4. An instrument filed for public notice (constructive notice); see recordation. (http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/r/record)

Archives: Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control; permanent records. (http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/archives)

[iv] There have been a handful of notable archivists who have drawn out some of the conflicts between archival theory and an environmental perspective. Candace Loewen: “…[W]e need to move beyond the search for the obvious “human” element in records to a search for records of value to humans and to the planet as a whole. Perhaps we have been too “human-centered” in our approach to appraisal; in documenting human activities and institutions, the earth itself has been relegated to second place. We have neglected the earth, what Hugh Taylor calls “planetary evidence,” and by doing so we have done a disservice to humanity, to ourselves.” Loewen, C. (1991). From Human Neglect to Planetary Survival: New Approaches to the Appraisal of Environmental Records. Archivaria, 33.

[v] Erik Moore: “In order to gain a sense of the whole system and the trophic dynamic running through the archival ecosystem, archivists should refine archival theory by incorporating ecological models. Since the 1980s, a handful of archivists have done just that. Their work has been for the most part cumulative, but to date has not substantially moved archival theory and practice in North America beyond the focus of intrinsic and instrumental values to a more integrated systemic value.” Moore, E. A. (2007). Birds of a Feather: Some Fundamentals on the Archives–Ecology Paradigm.

[vi] Hugh Taylor (2000 Reflection to “Recycling the Past”, originally published in 1993): “…I believe it is necessary to develop an attitude and a mindset which sharpens our awareness of what we have gotten ourselves into and hence to value those sources which are seeking either to record past disasters as a cause of future comparisons, or, through scientific research, to help us towards the way out through a greater understanding of the breadth of natural complexity. I have been musing in a philosophical way about this subject for some time, and I am anxious that more archivists join in the debate now that I am laying down my pen.”

[vii] https://toolkit.climate.gov/topics/tribal-nations/relocation

[viii] http://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509176361/alaskan-village-citing-climate-change-seeks-disaster-relief-in-order-to-relocate