Mind the (data) gap: The Community Science Model

• In Event: Climate Data Protection Under Trump: Strategies and Tactics

Abstract

Decades before the Endangerment Clause of 2009 mandated that the federal government must regulate greenhouse gases for their effects on human health, the drilling sites and refineries for oil and gas industries generated local pollution and health impacts for nearby residents, which continues today. To pursue spatial justice, those who live on the fence-line have embarked upon community science research projects to track, monitor, and document their lived experiences in an age of governance by data. Because these “hot spots” of acute exposure are neither tracked nor regulated despite the mandate, community science bridges gaps in government environmental data and regulation too. As a result, community science and its grassroots data archives are an important case study in this moment of a changing role of government in environmental regulation.

This paper contextualizes the current momentum to “save” government data with long-term community-based data collection efforts, where activists manage highly impacted environments in the absence of detailed data collection by the government. These community-based efforts have historically focused on gaps in existing government data as part of a call for more and different data collection. Now that government science is under attack by those meant to be its stewards, activists must defend not only the political importance of scientific data collection, but also call for civic engagement by scientists in the community science model.

Author

• Liz Barry, Public Lab