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
20