Eira Tansey

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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

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