Environmental Justice: The Data Way
![From the 1986 USDA report, "Black Farmers and Their Farms," a map titled "Concentration of Black Farmers in the [U.S.] South, 1972. Counties in states from Texas to Maryland and Delaware. Black farmers are concentrated along the coast from Virginia to Georgia and along the Mississippi from Tennessee and Arkansa to Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as parts of Alabama and the Georgia/Florida line, with some outliers in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas.](https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/56631/images/black_farmers_map_Page_09.jpg)
Data on race, income, and proximity to environmental benefits and burdens can be used to study environmental justice and injustice. In fact, some policy efforts have been defined based on percentages of races and measures of income in a given community. Some useful tools for examining and finding data on environmental justice include:
Mapping (& Data)
-
EJSCREEN, a "screening and mapping tool" from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
-
Walk Score, a tool that assesses a neighborhood's quality of life from the point of view of access to resources by walking and public transportation.
-
Food Access Research Atlas, A U.S. Department of Agriculture food desert mapping tool. Where is it hard to get access to food?
-
Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, for an international perspective.
Data
-
Resource Center for Minority Data at the ICPSR (Interuniversity Center for Political and Social Research).
-
Black America and COVID-19 (link to data section). A far-reaching guide by staff from Harvard Library and the Graduate School of Education. The data section has lots of great discussion and resources for health justice.
U.S. Government (and Critics)
(in addition to the EPA and USDA resources above)
-
U.S. Federal Depository Libraries across the country can help you with finding government publications of all sorts, including data.
-
GovInfo.gov, the U.S. Government guide to locating U.S. Government information.
-
data.gov, the U.S. Government guide to finding U.S. Government data.
-
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative: Archiving and thinking critically about government environmental data. Also check out their working group on Environmental Data Justice.
For current Harvard Affiliates:
-
Social Explorer: U.S. Census interactive maps and reports. Currently provides access to data from 1790 to present at census tract, county, state and national level.
-
Policy Map: "50,000 indicators accessible through a state-of-the-art mapping and analytics." Try the tabs for Quality of Life and Health, for example.
-
Data Visualization Support from the Harvard Library.
-
The Harvard Map Collection can help with spatial data and digital cartography.
