SUSTAINABILITY
BY NANCY TAYLOR ROBSON, WITH ADDITIONAL RESEARCH BY LOIS J. DE VRIES
The Shifting Sands of Digital Data
How disappearing information is affecting your work right now
As garden communicators, our job is to inspire and inform. It’ s both a calling and a pleasure that we enthusiastically share to help enrich the lives of others, and our world. It’ s also a responsibility. We are teachers who act as bridges between the sciences that impact gardening, which run the gamut from botany and biology through ecology to geology and meteorology, and the general public. And as teachers, we are tasked with calling people to action. With a story about butterfly gardens, for example, we’ re encouraging our audience to plant for pollinators, whose numbers have been decimated over the past 30 years. For that reason and many others, we need reliable access to verifiable, research-based information.
WE ALL DEPEND ON OTHER PEOPLE“ Anybody who is writing wants unbiased information when making recommendations,” said Casey Sclar, executive director of the American Public Gardens Association. We also need to be sure what we’ re using is not unsubstantiated opinion or worse, opinion masquerading as fact, which can be tricky to discern.“ It’ s very difficult to distill inherent bias on the part of the source,” noted Sclar.
Scott Aker, supervisory research horticulturist at the U. S. National Arboretum and columnist for The American Gardener, agrees:.“ If someone’ s trying to sell a product, if they have the motive to sell, they are not unbiased.”
Many of us have long relied on government sources for research-based information,
If you depend on Federal websites for information resources, you may find that some of it has already floated away.
and were dismayed when some government science web pages and sites, especially those at the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, were drastically altered recently. For example, after the appointment of the EPA’ s new director, the agency’ s extensive climate change information website was essentially closed for reconstruction.
INTEGRITY OF AGENCY WEBSITES AT RISK In an April 29, 2017 Washington Post article, Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin noted that the EPA announced“ that its website would be‘ undergoing changes’ to better represent the new direction the agency is taking …” The April 28 press release from EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs J. P. Freire stated,“ As EPA renews its commitment to human health and clean air, land, and water our website needs to reflect the views of the leadership of the agency.”
Reflecting the views of the leadership of the agency is a different objective from offering unbiased research-based data.
The University of Pennsylvania’ s DataRefuge project sponsors events across the country in which volunteers identify, assess, prioritize, secure, and distribute reliable copies of federal climate and environmental data so that it remains available to researchers.
“ Science is not immune from bad decision-making, just as it’ s not independent from politics, and all of the negative trends we see socially,” observed marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
PHOTO COURTESY ARTCORESTUDIOS / PIXABAY. COM PHOTO COURTESY TOOKPIC / PIXABAY. COM
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