Atlas Obscura
Over the past month, Native American tribes and their allies have been working to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a project perhaps best described as āKeystone XL v2.0ā. While the pipeline has not yet been stopped, the tribes won a significant victory recently when the Obama administration temporarily halted its construction.
Within the federal government, the #NoDAPL fight pitted the EPA against the Army Corps of Engineers. The key point of contention between the two agencies was the question of how to best determine DAPLās environmental impact. The Corps used county-by-county and state-by-state data, while the EPA believed that finer-grained data from ācensus block groups or census tractsā was more appropriate. By assessing DAPLās impact over larger areas, the Army Corps of Engineers obscured its effects on the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
1) You need to read @mckennaprās piece on the Dakota Access pipeline. And thereās one spot in particular to notice. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30082016/dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-sioux-army-corps-engineers-approval-environment/
2) Army Corps says Dakota Access has no environmental justice probs. EPA disagrees. Why? Because theyāre using different measures @mckennapr
3) @mckennapr points out that Army Corps enviro justice analysis was county-by-county or state-by-state. EPA looks for ācensus block groupsā
4) Basically, Army Corps says no enviro justice problem on Dakota Access bc they looked at demographics in way that diluted Native presence
5) This is what I mean by ānumbers arenāt objectiveā. Numbers come from a story. If you donāt know the story, you donāt really know numbers.
6) Army Corps numbers say Dakota Access doesnāt disproportionately impact Native Americans. But thatās only bc of way they measure.
ā Maggie Koerth-Baker, September 7 2016 at 08:57
Subtle changes in how data is gathered and aggregated can lead to huge differences in the story that data tells. Unfortunately, there remain significant gaps between those telling our stories and those writing them.
It turns out that Google has been algorithmically identifying potential ISIS recruits and manipulating their search results to surface āderadicalizingā content. Now that program is set to be deployed against right-wing extremists within the US.
Now, Iām happy to see non-violent approaches to dealing with potential terrorist threats. But sanctioning corporations to manipulate our information environment for political ends gives me pause.
What other programs like this are out there? Who decides which populations are targeted? Who decides what information they should be ānudgedā towards? How do we hold programs like this accountable?
And perhaps most importantly, can we hold programs like this accountable at all?
Hermit crabs in Okinawa have begun using trash generated by the islandās human population for their homes. Which might seem terrible at first, except that solitary bees in Canada are doing something similar, and may actually be finding the new building materials beneficial.
Something that I think many in the environmental movement still struggle with is the idea that humanity is part of, not apart from, ānatureā. The cities we build, the waste we produce, the landscapes we change⦠For many of our fellow travelers on Earth, human civilization is an unmitigated catastrophe.
But for others, our cities and waste are just another ecosystem service.
A visualization of anticipated species migration driven by climate change.