The residents of southeastern Newport News, Virginia, have long complained about the "coal dust." They say the air is so thick with the stuff it will coat their porch furniture. Newport News and neighboring cities on the mouth of the James River ship Appalachian coal out to the rest of the world, and, every year, tens of millions of tons of coal rumble along on carts and tumble down conveyor belts in towns around the river. Meanwhile, a 2005 Virginia Department of Health study found that people in Newport News' Southeast Community were twice as likely to have asthma as people living in other parts of the city and state. A 2012 study found the neighborhood has one of the lowest life expectancies in Virginia. Was there a connection between the black dust and asthma? What, exactly, was in the air in southeast Newport News?
To answer questions like these, you need data, but in Newport News in 2015, nobody was collecting those figures. Nobody, that is, except the industries themselves, which were required by law to submit reports to the federal Toxics Release Inventory. From this toehold of numbers, environmental organizations in Newport News were able to push for big changes, including suspending the air permit of a factory they found to be their second-largest polluter (which turned out not to be the coal facility after all). "For many communities that don't have community-specific data at all, TRI is a great starting place," says Erica Holloman, a toxicologist who worked as a coordinator for the Newport News-based Southeast CARE Coalition from 2011 to 2016.
However, as the Trump administration has sought to drastically slash the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, databases that the agency runs, including the Toxics Release Inventory, are under threat. Activists worry that means less pollution information will be available to America's most vulnerable communities. Britt Paris, a doctoral student in information studies at the University of California–Los Angeles and volunteer for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, even has a new name for the threat: data justice.
[For more on this story by, FRANCIE DIEP go to https://psmag.com/news/future-...-justice-under-trump]
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