Back when I was running my mouth on Twitter, I posted this extremely hot take on shabby news coverage of archives. Unlike many of my previous hot takes, I think it’s timeless and I still stand by it 100%. My archivist friends coined it “the Tansey test.”
Since I deleted my Twitter account, I realize there is not a definitive place where folks can go to cite the Tansey test. Before I deleted my account, I downloaded my twitter archive and saved a few screenshots, too. So here you go, y’all.
Each year the Society of American Archivists (SAA) sponsors MayDay on May 1, a day dedicated to disaster preparedness and response. MayDay is intended to be “a time when archivists and other cultural heritage professionals take personal and professional responsibility for doing something simple—something that can be accomplished in a day but that can have a significant impact on an individual’s or a repository’s ability to respond.”
On MayDay, archivists are encouraged to update and review emergency response plans for archives (for example, what’s the plan if you walk into the stacks and find mildew everywhere?) or inventorying disaster response supply boxes (which would include various things to help with a water leak), and a number of other ideas.
Of course Mayday is a distress signal that traces its lineage as a reference to the French m’aidez or m’aider ‘help me!’, and it is this reference that SAA is primarily alluding to. The Oxford English Dictionary traces “Mayday” to the 1920s:
For those of us who identify as comrades, May Day (without the space) on May 1 has long had a very particular meaning. May Day is also known as International Workers Day, and traces its origins to an important event in labor history, the Haymarket Tragedy, which took place only 2 miles from the current headquarters of the Society of American Archivists.
On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25 and May 4, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours’ work for ten hours’ pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.
Since Haymarket, May Day has become an international day of remembrance to honor the labor movement’s sacrifices on behalf of workers. It was widely observed within the United States until the Red Scares.
Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or “May Day,” as an international workers’ holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments. American observance was strongest in the decade before World War I. During the Cold War, many Americans saw May Day as a Communist holiday, and President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as “Loyalty Day” in 1955. Interest in Haymarket revived somewhat in the 1980s.
So how come on MayDay (the SAA version), archivists rarely, if ever, also acknowledge the other May Day (the one that’s been around for over a century)?
A Garland for May Day 1895, by Walter Crane. Crane was an English artist who was sympathetic to the Haymarket defendants. Image via the University of Michigan Labadie Collection.
My friend and archivist colleague Steve Ammidown made the image at the top of this post, and it basically says it all. To effectively respond to archival disasters, archives have to have adequate staffing of professional archivists. A disaster plan is only as good as the people and resources available to put it into action. As someone who has been writing a lot about both labor and climate change issues within our profession, I completely agree with Steve’s assessment that disaster preparation and emergency response cannot be separated from the larger labor and staffing issues that haunt our repositories.
So by all means, archivists – do your part for MayDay. But until we deal with the long-term labor issues articulated by workers each May Day since the late 1800s, anything else is a band-aid on top of a gaping wound.
(Thanks to Steve for letting me use this image and inspiring this post!)
Several months ago, I learned about John Hersey’s epic essay, “Hiroshima.” Hersey, a reporter in Japan between 1945-1946, interviewed several survivors of the atomic bombing. His magnificent essay appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker, and was the focus of the entire issue. In typical New Yorker practice, the cheerful cover (illustrated by Charles E. Martin), gives no hint to what is in the following pages. Published just over a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey’s essay bore witness to the instantaneous deaths of more than 100,000 men, women and children, and the nightmarish hell the survivors navigated in the hours and weeks after the bombing.
I’m not sure when I learned about Hersey’s essay, but as soon as I did, I filed it away for when I knew I would have a couple uninterrupted hours to read it (yes, it takes that long; the essay is also a 160 page short book that’s been in print for decades). You can read it on the New Yorker website.
On a recent bus ride from Cincinnati to Chicago, I finally got around to reading it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more moving account of anything in my life, from the small graces most of us possess, to the way we harden our hearts and close our ears and eyes to others suffering more than us, to the way we traverse all the emotions in between in about five minutes. And yet, this is not any ordinary backdrop: it is a story in which a woman’s skin comes off her hand like a glove, in which men’s eyes have melted out of their sockets, in which a woman carries her dead baby for four days hoping her missing husband will be able to see them before the cremation. It is a story that is anything but universal, because less than 200,000 people are still living today who have ever witnessed being so close to the heat of the sun. Every day we run the risk that an accident could go terribly wrong, or men could become terribly vindictive. The tally of 200,000 witnesses could grow by several zeroes in an instant.
But today, only 0.00002% of the world’s population can tell you what it was like to live through cruelest human experiment ever conducted by science’s most brilliant minds.
A few days after I read “Hiroshima,” news broke that John Bolton is going to be the new national security advisor. The Bush administration was bad enough, but bringing back the greatest villains from those terrible eight years is just too much. Bolton is a batshit madman who is the living embodiment of “some men just want to watch the world burn.” And a week later, we were bombing Syria because Trump felt like he had to back up his bombastic tweets with military action (and I felt more secure than ever that I made the right decision to leave Twitter, given its role as a platform for war-mongering).
Last year, I felt that my rights were hanging on by the thinnest of threads. I still feel that way, but I’ve also been mentally preparing myself for what I’ll do if and when the worst happens with the judiciary destroying everything I hold dear. But lately, at annual events like family holidays or professional conferences, I have a fleeting thought that whispers around the edges. I wonder if something so unspeakably bad will happen, plunging our country into some kind of civil war, that it would prevent us from gathering together again next year.
Going back and reading what I wrote last year, it’s clear I’m struggling to define and come to terms with ideas of citizenship and patriotism. They are concepts often profoundly opposed to one another. Although citizenship is far too often constructed as state-sanctioned legal residence, I’ve begun to appreciate that citizenship encompasses a much more holistic set of experiences than patriotism. One can be a citizen of a state, a city, their neighborhood, their nation, or the planet Earth. Citizenship implies personhood and identity (often in multiple instances), but patriotism implies a certain set of practices oriented around principles of defense. Citizenship is a concept that, in my mind, transcends boundaries and can exist within a borderless world. But patriotism is inherently bound up in the idea of the nation-state (you wouldn’t say your neighbor who picks up the litter in your neighborhood is a good patriot, but you would likely say they are a good citizen). And the geographically-bounded notion of patriotism and the nation-state is where patriotism begins to break down for me.
Historian Christian Appy has said “patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.” After I read Hersey’s essay, I read a little bit about how it was received at the time. Apparently many people read it and wanted to know how much the victims of the bombings blamed Americans, and many were relieved to learn that many of the victims did not blame Americans. I guess discourse about collective trauma, responsibility, truth and reconciliation have come a long way since then, but it’s still a telling clue to how guilt is the essential magnetic force that orients our moral compasses.
When you remove a sense of guilt, you remove an obligation to apologize. Guilt and patriotism do not easily coexist. So instead we tell ourselves that the ends justify the means, that incinerating hundreds of thousands of people who don’t look like us is always a justifiable cost to spare American lives. That having the misfortune to be born in the wrong place in the wrong time in history on the wrong side of America means that you’ll never get an apology when our country fucks up. Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place decades ago, but similar body counts from the insistence on protecting American lives at any cost are still with us.
We are told by our parents at a young age to say we’re sorry when we hurt someone, but when we acquire the means to the most anodyne deadly weapon most of us have – a car – the advice changes. Insurance companies say, “Do not discuss whose fault it was (even saying “I’m sorry” may be considered an admission).” Lawyers and insurance companies advise us that if we screw up, if we hurt someone, if we hit a car, that we should not apologize. Because to apologize would be to admit guilt. And admitting something can be used against you.
It’s no wonder that saying sorry does not come easily to us, and that we cloak our refusal to say we’re sorry under a thicket of legal excuses and justification. It’s not just the US government. It’s our entire culture.
Comments Off on Citizenship for our sanity and safety, Part 2
If you really want the honest truth of why Twitter will never ban Donald Trump from its service, you don’t need to read their public relations statements. Read what they tell the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Twitter is a company that measures its success by how many active users (measured by both monthly and daily metrics, aka MAUs and DAUs) it has. Looking at their most recent SEC filing, it’s clear that the company is working on increasing daily active user activity – likely because they’ve probably hit saturation points with how many new users are using the system. SEC filings require companies to disclose risks, and Twitter states:
If we fail to grow our user base, or if user engagement or ad engagement on our platform decline, our revenue, business and operating results may be harmed.
The size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success. We had 330 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2017, representing approximately a 4% increase from 317 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2016 (see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Note About Our MAU Adjustment” above). DAUs for the three months ended September 30, 2017 increased 14% year over year. Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing their overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements. We anticipate that our user growth rate will continue to slow over time as the size of our user base increases. […] If people do not perceive our products and services to be useful, reliable and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract users or increase the frequency of their engagement with our platform and the ads that we display.
Twitter then goes on to state the following, something which is so brazen in its denial of the problem it has created, it’s actually kind of amazing (emphasis mine):
“[…]if we are not able to address user concerns regarding the safety and security of our products and services or if we are unable to successfully prevent abusive or other hostile behavior on our platform, the size of our user base and user engagement may decline. We rely on the sale of advertising services for the substantial majority of our revenue and a decline in the number of users, user growth rate, or user engagement, including as a result of the loss of world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands who generate content on Twitter, advertisers [sic] may deter new advertisers from using our products or services or cause current advertisers to reduce their spending with us or cease doing business with us, which would harm our business and operating results.”
None of this is shocking or surprising for a company that notes the “substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Twitter.” So when I see Twitter banning Next Door Neighbor Nazis and not banning Trump, I see Twitter trying to have it both ways: attempting to show they’re “doing something,” but also doubling-down on the fact that “world leaders and government officials” are the cash cows that keep on driving engagement. In other words, Twitter does not distinguish between any world leaders threatening nuclear annihilation and world leaders attempting to keep us from sliding into the gates of hell. They are simply content generators, like the rest of us, that lead to advertising. Global consequences be damned.
#####
After the 2016 presidential election, many people implored us to determine where our line was. To identify where angels fear to tread among where there be dragons. To draw a line in the sand. We were cautioned against letting the unthinkable become normalized, that doing so would be to cede the grounds of not only the American democratic process, but our basic humanity.
The problem with this framing is that it conjured up scenes of going up against the barricades, of hoping that the US would suddenly be inspired to go on a general strike when most folks had never marched around and chanted. It set up expectations that America’s citizens would run a marathon when most of us were still learning to walk for the first time.
Over the last year I feel like I’ve been plunged back into being a teenager – when my political baptism was protest against the Iraq War. My country invaded Iraq before I could vote. When I was 17, I somehow convinced my boring west-side-of-Cincinnati Episcopal church to kick in some money to help fund a bus of protesters to go to DC. I spent many dreary afternoons shouting chants on a street corner I can see from the windows of the library that I work at 14 years later.
As the war drums start beating again, there is at least one line that has become increasingly uncomfortable for me over the last several days. I can no longer use a platform serving as a propaganda outlet for normalizing and trivializing the horrors of nuclear war. This is why I’m leaving Twitter, after using it regularly for over seven years.
Twitter is clearly committed to amplifying the voice of a racist demagogue with impulse control and the unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons, and this is in direct conflict with my opposition to war and militarism. The President clearly has many platforms he can use to spread his propaganda besides Twitter – George W. Bush certainly managed to do so well before the advent of social media. By not shutting this down, Twitter is saying is that there is no line in the sand for them; that allowing their service to become a tool of nuclear propaganda is preferable to any possible alternative.
Nuclear proliferation is often discussed in coldly clinical supply-chain terminology. Some state acquired uranium, another is expanding testing of missile delivery systems, etc etc. What gets left out of deterrence game theory bullshit is that banging on the war drums constitutes a form of nuclear proliferation by repeatedly putting the option on the table. As we get further away from the cultural memory of what it means to industrialize war, to efficiently kill thousands (really, millions) of people, joshing about having a nuclear button that is “much bigger,” “more powerful,” and “works” just goes to show that the very person with the unilateral authority to annihilate much of the planet within minutes is treating global holocaust like a fucking game.
#####
Deciding to leave Twitter is not easy. I’ve taken several breaks from Twitter before, typically during Lent. After a while, I don’t miss it that much. But I’ve always hesitated to cut the cord entirely for two reasons: Twitter has undeniably helped me accumulate a lot of social capital in my profession, and it’s been one of the most efficient and fun methods of professional networking I’ve ever found.
Archivist Twitter is a real thing, and it’s been a huge part of my professional identity formation. I joined Twitter right around the time I decided that being an archivist was the career path I would set out on. I used Twitter to follow archives conferences before I started attending them, and then I used Twitter at my first SAA to network. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that start “hey I follow you on Twitter…”
On Twitter, I’ve found professional development opportunities, cultivated new collaborations, learned so much about my profession’s history and culture, and forged affirming and wonderful friendships that are the real deal, with people I’ve broken bread with offline, who I know will be in my life for a very long time. I strongly suspect that a lot of the public profile I’ve built within my field has been thanks to my presence on Twitter. Walking away from that is really hard.
I know how silly this must sound to people who haven’t had this experience with Twitter. Even though I’ve received some pretty ugly harassment on Twitter, my good experiences outweigh the bad. And that’s why it’s taken me months now to come to terms with exiting a service that clearly does not give a shit about the safety and stability of the world at large. I don’t know what my career will look like without the networking and informational capabilities of Twitter, or how promoting my work will change without Twitter. That’s scary in a culture that emphasizes rapid engagement, developing a voice (the nice writer word for brand), and being easy to reach for any opportunity that might land in your lap.
#####
I’ve been thinking a lot about Quaker war tax resistance. Not because I think my decision is on the level with tax resistance, but because it’s about withdrawing one’s personal participation in the normalization of war machinery. On and off throughout history, many Quakers refused to pay taxes that fund militarism. This has often been at great cost to their livelihoods, liberty, and economic security.
I find the history of tax resistance refreshing within a current leftist atmosphere that tries to decouple personal individual morality from the political organizing work of dismantling larger systems of oppression. It’s a mistake for us to assume that choices made to reflect a personal moral stance are synonymous with the organizing work that dismantles oppression. Sometimes it’s a good thing just to make a moral choice that allows one to live with an easier conscience, even if the only person it “makes a difference to” is a single individual.
The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is true. But it’s not an excuse to step away from examining one’s life choices, and too many people treat it as one. You must start somewhere.
We’ve confused Twitter for a commons because it is fantastic at helping us find voices we wouldn’t encounter otherwise, which makes it easy to ignore that Twitter has been enclosed from day one because its only real goal is to make money. To continue to participate in the only form of capital it has – regular participation that drives advertising – is to enable its continuance as a platform that trades in bigotry, undermines democratic processes, and now, reaps money from the proliferation of nuclear threats.
After spending a lot of time thinking about what the current state of archivist discourse is like, I started thinking about how much more and better and varied it could be. So, this last post in this series is a bit of a wishlist of things I want to see develop over the coming years.
Let’s start planting some seeds, archivists.
We need to increase the amount of conversation in general and with more archivists’ voices at the table.
It’s striking to me how few archivists are engaged in public conversation about the profession. I wish it were a professional norm among everyone to engage in active conversations about the nature of our work, and yet there are many archivists out there who are not participating in these conversations whatsoever. As a result, the same voices dominate conversations about digital preservation, archival social justice, metadata, DACS, copyright, etc etc. I personally find this really baffling. Sometimes I get the sense that lots of people are listening, and reading but not… contributing. Why is this? Is it because they feel like they don’t have something to contribute? Is it because we’re afraid to critique others’ ideas? I often hear anecdotal evidence that people are “not supported” in their jobs to read and write, but I also don’t know of many archivists who are working in a billable hours environment.
Divest our dialogue from platforms owned by profit-oriented companies.
This is a big one for me because I am planning to leave Twitter soon, and the only reason I haven’t quit sooner is because Archivist Twitter brings me a lot of joy and information.
I don’t really know what the answer to this is. Could we go back to 2005 with everyone owning their own domain, when people read blogs and left really thoughtful comments on them, and our main hits of new information came via RSS, and that was the main internet discourse? I know that that environment had its issues, but I miss how non-monetized it was and how people didn’t give a shit about their brand and how it was SLOW. I guess I can dream. I personally want to revive Reading Archivists.
We need a renewed emphasis on the public implications of institutional recordkeeping, especially by governments.
I am a bit skeptical of the recent emphasis on collecting social justice from demonstrations and private parties as the major expression of archival social justice (and I say this as someone who is active in some of those efforts). In my opinion, the greatest impact we could have on effecting social justice through recordkeeping is to assert the public interest on records issues – like demanding consistent access to law enforcement records, pushing against the creation of surveillance records, and so on.
Millions of people are affected by records that will never be transferred to an archival repository. These are also the same records that will disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Archivists need to be active participants in these efforts, and right now, we generally are not.
We need the voices of government and corporate archivists in our professional dialogues.
I’m not the first archivist to observe how atomized our already small profession is, and how dominated by university affiliations the general makeup of the Society of American Archivists has been. Clearly many archivists have found organizational homes elsewhere that meet their needs more than SAA. I don’t blame them, but I still miss their voices. As a past Nominating Committee member, and a current chair of the SAA Records Management Section, I’ve seen how much the domination of academic archivists within SAA has pernicious underdiscussed effects. While I’m an academic archivist myself, a huge part of my work is informed by public records issues. It is stunning to me how many archivists within SAA spaces do not understand extremely basic information about FOIA and the way state records issues depart from federal records issues, and I think this is because we do not hear from government archivists as often as we hear from academic archivists within archival discourse.
This would be kind of amusing if it weren’t such an obstacle for our profession. The worst is during the inevitable “politicians who fuck up their recordkeeping obligations.” I’ve seen SAA leaders, who come from an academic background, sharing information that blatantly is contradictory to NARA policy. How the hell are we supposed to advocate for the archival profession when we can’t even get our news stories right?
We need ways for great minds that think alike to find each other for collaboration
Much like finding a way to divest from profit-driven platforms, this one is a bit of a head-scratcher but I still feel strongly about it. I’m pretty well-connected and know who to ask if I’m thinking about starting a new project and want to find collaborators. But this takes a really long time to figure this out for new professionals and it shouldn’t have to be this hard. I wish there was a universal matchmaking directory where people could say “here are the projects I’m working on, I’m looking for collaborators to help me with this part” and then we could all be doing fun amazing things together.
We need more archivists to represent our profession outside of our profession
As my interests have drifted towards environmental issues, I’ve started to attend conferences in other fields. I’ve also published in non-archives journals. And it’s the best thing ever. I realize that flexible conference funding is a huge area of privilege, and I wish I had a good answer for how to start solving this. But I strongly encourage other archivists within whatever capacity they have to present to, work with, and write for non-archivist audiences when possible. It helps us learn how to talk about what we do to people who have no idea what we do (or at history conferences, people who think they know what we do), and often times non-archivists get super-excited about your work when you talk about it, which is lovely and affirming.
[Content warning: brief references to sexual harassment/assault & current media coverage]
Two or three times a week, I go to the campus rec center early to exercise before work. Even though I love the repetitive monotony of the rowing machines, I generally do not row much these days because the rowing machines are in front of a million televisions playing CNN/Fox/ESPN/NBC/ABC/CBS. The sound is turned off, but the ocean of chyron shit is not how I like to start my day.
So I tend to exercise in the parts of the facility that aren’t in front of a million TVs. I often run on the indoor track, but sometimes when I’m feeling lazy, I walk on a treadmill so I can zone out and listen to a podcast. There are treadmills that don’t face the bank of chyron shit, but unfortunately too many new treadmills are souped up with built-in TVs that start up automatically before you can change it to something more benign, like an image of a stopwatch.
This morning I was in lazy mode, and I scrolled through my always-increasing queue of podcasts. I listen to a lot of current news podcasts, and have racked up several unplayed episodes covering the latest revelations confirming far too many men love power more than they love women. It’s too much, it’s all too much, and like many women who’ve experienced abuse and harassment in my past, I’ve mostly disengaged from the ongoing revelations beyond reading headlines. Engaging any more deeply keeps forcing open the places where I’ve packed my sadness and undiluted anger into a form that allows me to function on a daily basis. I picked a podcast about academic writing and hopped on the treadmill.
And no sooner do I hop on the treadmill than the built-in TV starts up with the TODAY show, and my jaw drops when I see what’s going down. There is no more wild distillation of the period we are in than to see Matt Lauer’s women co-anchors announce why he isn’t there. I grab my phone and take a picture of it because every time I think 2017 can’t get any more intense I take a picture or a screenshot, as if documenting all the bullshit insanity could make it stop.
I thought for a second about posting it on social media, and then I remembered how I don’t want to contribute to the problem I, and many other women, are trying to escape from: that most men (given the overwhelming majorities of women who are abused by an intimate partner or harassed by someone she knows) do not love us, do not value our safety, and do not acknowledge our personhood. We know this, and most of us are not shocked by any of this, because we’ve experienced it from men everyone else thought were “the good ones.”
I don’t know that there has ever been a time in patriarchal culture when it hasn’t been hard to be a woman. But the last two months has been an undeniably difficult period to be a woman. I don’t know how this all will end, and maybe thinking there is an end, as if there is a linear story here, is part of our collective delusion.
Since the post-Weinstein effect got rolling, I think I’ve read virtually every essay about women and anger. They speak to me, and I carry the image of Beyoncé smashing in the windows of men’s cars in my heart, all the time. There is a part of my rage that undeniably takes a small helping of solace knowing that powerful men are scared, that many are nervous that their bill will soon come due. But the fragment that’s stayed with me most was from Rebecca Traister’s essay:
…it’s easy to conclude that this moment actually isn’t radical enough, because it’s limited to sexual grievances. One 60-year-old friend, who is single and in a precarious professional situation, says, “I’m burning with rage watching some assholes pose as good guys just because they never put their hands on a colleague’s thigh, when I know for a fact they’ve run capable women out of workplaces in deeply gendered ways. I’m very frustrated, because I’m not in a position right now to spill some beans.”
Online and offline, I’ve been saying over and over that one of the most important things people can do if they care about women is to proactively consume, cite, and promote the work of women. Because all of these stories are not just about getting your ass grabbed, they’re about who has visibility. They are about who gets more bylines (men), who gets more invitations to keynote (men), who gets more citations (men), who gets installed in the cannon (men). They are the stories of who we listen to, and who we regard as authorities.
You often hear a lot of people say at times like this, “listen to women.” And while yes, obviously, duh…. to my ears, this phrase positions listening to women as a choice. It betrays an acknowledgement of the reality that, as a rule, our culture does not choose to listen to women. It especially does not listen to women of color and poor women.
One of the most underrated beautifully radical things said by a famous woman in the last few years is when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the Supreme Court would have enough female justices when it has nine of them. I think about this all the time, and it is powerful as fuck because no one has the choice but to listen to the Supreme Court.
When I talk about how people should consider only reading books by women, or some other avenue of basically transferring their attention from the works of men to the works of women, this is what I’m getting at. I’ve recently learned that some men in my life who talk a good game about supporting women are beyond threatened by this idea, implying that I’m advocating shutting out their voices. The insinuation is that women owe men their attention. It isn’t clear in this equation what, exactly, men owe women to overcome generations worth of hoarding intellectual, legal, and cultural authority.
Is it because they are worried they won’t be writing the stories any longer?
That they won’t be the editors?
And that today’s fact-checkers, today’s women, aren’t afraid to demand an honest story?
Part Two: Or, the landscape of archivist professional dialogue (Part One here)
Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the announcement of the #thatdarnlist shutdown wasn’t the rampant denialism of longstanding problems, but the fact that a lot of A&A subscribers seemed to be genuinely baffled about where to find information about the archives profession after the list is shut down at the end of 2017.
Archivists are information professionals. That a bunch of information professionals are melting down about where to find professional information is truly bewildering. Or as Matt Francis put it:
Seriously, y’all.
So as an act of public service (you can and should thank me for this labor by buying me a beer the next time you see me) here are some of my recommendations for “How to be a professionally conversant American archivist in 2017”. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but it is fairly reflective of the way that I consume professional content. I tend to focus on the American archives profession, and I hope readers will contribute non-US suggestions in the comments.
I can already hear someone howling “but I don’t have tiiiiiiiiiiiiiime to review all these sources.” If you want to be treated like a professional, you need to act like it, and that means being conversant with the ongoing conversations in your profession. No one is saying you have to read everything, but you have to pay attention to something on at least a semi-regular basis, or else quit calling yourself an archivist. I have Additional Strong Feelings about this that I’ll save for Part 3.
Peer-Reviewed Literature
Why you should pay attention to it: Even with peer reviewing’s myriad nonsense (and there is so much, but trust me when I say it’s a million times worse outside of the archives profession), there is no substitute for a process that allows people to call you out on your bullshit. I sometimes see questionable assertions (aka hot takes) by archivists bubble up on social media or blogs that I know would not last through peer review if the person had to marshal evidence for their claim. At its best, peer-reviewed literature can have long-lasting impacts on practice (Greene and Meissner!), provide inspirational reading that feels as relevant today as it did when it came out decades ago (Gerry Ham!), and provide a clear ethical framework for moving our work forward (Michelle Caswell!)
My favorite resources: Many of you might know I created an entire calendar assigning reading days to prominent journals in the field. Since I originally created it for the type of reading I need to do for my work, it skews heavily towards American archives and academic libraries. It’s due for an overhaul, but I think it’s a handy tool and I’m always delighted to hear other people find it useful. (github version if you want to adapt for your own needs)
Blogs
Why you should pay attention to it: Blogs occupy that nice space between needing to say more than can be said via social media, but with greater immediacy and casualness than peer review demands. Within archives-land, there are repositories that have blogs, there are archival organizations that have blogs, and there are archivists that have blogs. A lot of the prominent archivist blogs from several years ago are far quieter these days (ArchivesNext, You Ought to Be Ashamed, Chaos->Order) which is a bummer. Those blogs were sites of incredible archivist dialogue, and I sort of miss blog comment-oriented discourse.
Individual archivist blogs are a gold-mine, since many of us tend to put up copies of conference talks (which often never get published elsewhere). If you’re an archivist who does talks and you don’t have your own blog, please put something up so we can share your work and give your conference talks a second life!
Archives and the Old Mole (the tagline is “Draft work on archives, archivists and socialism” and even when I disagree, I am almost always entertained. More polemics, less practice is the kind of MPLP I enjoy reading in archivist blogs.)
Why you should pay attention to it: Social media – and especially Twitter – is often scapegoated whenever discussions about A&A come up. I think this is unfair, because it tends to erase how useful it can be, particularly given the exodus of many archivists from listservs to Twitter. I have as much of a love/hate relationship with social media as the next person, but I think there is an undeniable amount of fantastic knowledge you can pick up from Twitter. Speaking only for myself, Twitter has helped me find professional development workshops, calls for papers, interesting conferences, and a good sounding board for “Has anyone ever….?” questions.
The free-for-all nature of Twitter is part of why it’s an environment so prone to hostility, but the fact that it isn’t a walled garden also helps make it a very interdisciplinary experience. I’ve discovered the work of a lot of environmental studies people through it that otherwise would have been far more difficult to find via other avenues. Social media deservedly gets a lot of flak for enabling a build-your-own-echo-chamber space. At the same time, I don’t think Twitter gets enough credit for fostering the ability to easily find voices you might not normally encounter. My work has been undeniably improved by listening to many voices on Twitter from marginalized groups that often are not represented in peer-reviewed publications, as conference headliners, etc.
Because Facebook is a walled garden, it lacks both the best-of and worst-of Twitter experiences. And I think the jury is still out on mastodon – I have an account on scholar.social, and there are a few archivists there, but it doesn’t yet feel like a critical mass.
My favorite resources: I know there are a lot of archivists and archival organizations active on Facebook, but for my money (well, time) Twitter is where I’ve gotten the most value. Almost all of the bloggers mentioned above are active or semi-active on Twitter, and are great people to follow. If you’re not currently active on archivist Twitter and want to give it a try, I think a good time to dive in is during conferences, when you can use conference hashtags to quickly identify interesting users. Some archivists on Twitter only talk about archives, some talk mostly about their personal interests, and others fall somewhere in the middle. Lots of people maintain lists of archivists on Twitter (like Kate Theimer’s list) which is a quick way to follow lots of users at once.
Podcasts
Why you should pay attention to it: Alright, let me say out of the gate that this is a thin area at the moment, and I really hope we start seeing more archives podcasts. There is a lot to be said for non-textual mediums as sources of learning new things. At MAC 2017, there was a great session about podcasting, though it was more of a “archives doing podcasts about their holdings” than an “archivists doing podcasts about the profession” vibe.
What are my favorite resources: It’s no longer active, but there was a good podcast running for a brief period between 2013-2014 called More Podcast Less Process. Lost in the Stacks is a radio show hosted by librarians and archivists from the Georgia Tech Library, and they also distribute the show as a podcast. There are rumors that the reviews folks over at American Archivist are working on a podcast, and I am super pumped to see what they come up with.
What’s Next?
I have a long wish list for the archivist information & professional discourse ecosystem. Who knows if it will all ever be realized, but it’s fun to speculate. Look for that in Part 3!
Comments Off on Professionals Without Professionalism, Part 2
The big talk of the town right now within the American archivist profession is that a major listserv, known as Archives and Archivists, or A&A, is being shut down at the end of 2017. A&A is administered by the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and has been in existence for well over two decades. SAA is a membership-supported (i.e. dues-paying) organization, though non-members have long been able to subscribe to A&A. A&A has such a longstanding notorious reputation within the profession that it has its own derogatory nickname that’s been in use for years – #ThatDarnList (almost always hashtagged because it’s most frequently deployed on Twitter, where’s it’s been in use since at least 2009).
Why is A&A so notorious? Simply put, because A&A has a long track record of being a hostile environment for many archivists – especially women, people of color, and young/early-career archivists. Many archivists have written about this, these links from the last few years give a good overview:
Lest you think this problem has been brought on by “snowflake leftist social justice warrior” millenials who eat too much avocado toast and complain about unpaid internships, A&A has had a bad reputation way before anyone coined the term millenial. Things apparently got pretty wild in 1992-1993. Don’t believe me? Well go back and read these two pieces from American Archivist.
Like many other archivists, I’ve cheered the recent decision by SAA Council to end the listserv. I left active subscription to A&A a few years ago and have not returned. I have personally encountered the hostile atmosphere of A&A, and it’s become increasingly embarrassing to see how bullshit on the listserv comes off to new archivists and information professionals who are adjacent to archives. Archivists claim to be professionals, but judging from the listserv, it’s hard to see where some of our fellow archivists could actually claim any sense of professionalism. A&A has not been a good resource for years – many of the most knowledgeable people in our field left it long ago. In fact, the toxicity is now so notorious that it’s getting written about outside of our field. Somehow I don’t think this is the kind of public awareness that the Committee on Public Awareness had in mind.
One of the larger conversations provoked by the shutting down of A&A is the question of staying professionally involved. According to the #thatdarnlist hashtag, many of the subscribers to A&A are now concerned about losing access to this source of information about the profession. I’ve encountered a similar sentiment on a regional archivists listserv, and I find it strange. More on that in a forthcoming post.
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.
Congressional Research Service. (2015a). An Overview of Unconventional Oil and Natural Gas: Resources and Federal Actions.https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43148.pdf
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
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.
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 diein 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.
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.
