RE: Maps: How can we help people find environmental information?

[Mike Meuser <meuser@mapcruzin.com>]

You are absolutely right.  Those tools could be made available
and are essential to knowing what is going on in the real 
world.  The rub is, of course, that it's tough enough to obtain
access to accurate current data much less historical data.  I
did some research that tracked industrial and demographic
change in silicon valley from 1970 through 1990.  It was a 
killer to get the data, but doable.  EPA and census working
together could make this much more doable.  If interested here's
the citation: "Unintended; Inexorable: The Production of 
Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, CA, with 
Dr. Andrew Szasz, American Behavioral Scientist, Special 
Issue: Advances in Environmental Justice: Research, Theory, 
and Methodology, Volume 43(4), (January 2000), pp. 602-632."

One resource that is widely available is RTK Nets data
products.  They have a great deal of historical data.
Unfortunately much of it lacks the geographic reference one
needs to do trend maps unless one has an unlimited budget for
geocoding and other more time intensive ways of locating these
sites.  I'm sure that EPA has this data, but will they make
it available?  So far, even the current envirofacts database
that has the locational data is unavailable (ever since the
shutdown).

This brings me back to the Cumulative Exposure Project (CEP) as 
a recent example of how difficult EPA makes it to do trend
analysis. Last year it was about to be released but was then
shelved by Carol Browner under pressure from Air Boards and
Mayors. The reason? It was run with 1990 data and "did not
reflect more recent improvements in air quality".  Sounds
like a perfect study for trends analysis.  So, EPA says they
will rerun the data with the 1996 data.  Now they say they 
never did it and instead modelled only a small subset of
urban air toxics (HAPS) making trend analysis, verifying
the original claim very difficult if not impossible.  This
has taken me many hours and I just keep hitting one EPA
brick wall after another.  Clearly certain "stakeholders"
have a lot more clout than others.  Also, not that the new
data product deals with urban rather than rural issues while
recent air quality data indicates that rural, not urban air
quality is worsening.  Go figure!