When Data Justice and Environmental Justice Meet: Responding to Extractive Logic through Environmental Data Justice

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Abstract

Data justice scholarship frequently critiques state and corporate data collection for surveillance, while organizers pursuing environmental justice often rely on more data and monitoring to document environmental racism. This paper asks: what happens when data justice and environmental justice meet? To address the tensions between these approaches, we develop a dynamic framework of environmental data justice (EDJ) that brings concerns from data justice together with longstanding values from environmental justice work. EDJ stems from and guides the practices of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) - a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing public comments and rapid-response reports about the broader undermining of the EPA, EDGI mobilizes EDJ to challenge an ‘extractive logic’ that currently threatens the integrity of and access to federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. Extractive logic disconnects data from provenance, privileges a matrix of domination, whitewashes data to generate uncertainty, and reproduces itself. By engaging in EDJ, EDGI aspires to create new environmental data infrastructures and practices that are participatory and embody equitable, transparent data care while refusing extractive data practices both externally and internal to the organization.

Authors

• Lourdes Annette Vera, Northeastern University

• Dawn Walker, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

• Michelle Murphy, Department of History and Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto

• Becky Mansfield, Department of Geography, Ohio State University

• Ladan Mohamed Siad, Faculty of Design, Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD)