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Solving Environmental Problems with Information Technology

by Eileen Gannon

CPSR News Volume 13, Number 2: Summer 1995

He is headed down the hall, where all of them have gone, to a spacious room filled with the best equipment Apple Computer makes and three computer programmers who manage about 200 gigabytes of data. Media representatives are so common in our office that we're no longer surprised when reporters from the New York Times or "Primetime Live" set up residence.

They're here for one reason: the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has unlocked important governmental data and developed database applications that allow anyone who can click a mouse to scan numerous details about the economy and the environment in every county, congressional district, and state in the nation. We pull most of the information from government databases that would have otherwise been ignored or stored away on bureaucratic mainframes.

It all started three years ago, when Ken Cook and his staff of three at the Center for Resource Economics (now EWG) started filing Freedom of Information Act requests in electronic form. Since most of the data had never been requested outside of the government, the process was arduous and slow.

Eventually the data started to arrive on nine-track tapes. EWG knew the power of the information, but was faced with the question of how a small, startup nonprofit could afford to purchase the needed computers and staff even to download *e data, not to mention programming, manipulating, analyzing, and understanding millions of records. Then along came an EarthGrant from the Apple Computer Corporation in the spring of 1993. Click. EWG was off, with one full-time and one part-time computer programmer.

Now a 15-member group, who just received a second EarthGrant of nearly $100,000 in equipment, EWG performs analyses of large, previously unpublished computer records to "georeference" environmental policy issues. The results of our studies have been on the pages of every major and most minor newspapers in the country.

Our first big hit was the report Pesticides in Children's Food published in June 1993. The day it was released, the Clinton Administration announced a historic change in federal policy - a commitment to reduce pesticide use in agriculture. The computer story behind Pesticides in Children's Food illustrates how we work.

What made the report so powerful was our innovative analysis of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) data from their testing program for pesticide residues in food. No one had requested or obtained these FDA data files before, but we did, through the Freedom of Information Act. FDA refused to give us the information in electronic form as we asked; instead, they printed out 6,000 pages and shipped them to us. Undaunted, we took 1,700 of those pages to a commercial scanning shop and recreated the government's database. Then our staff proofread it for 10 days against the original hard copy.

That database detective work enabled us to analyze pesticides in 22 foods that are heavily consumed by infants and children under the age of five. We found, among other things, that little kids get much of their lifetime "allowable" dosage of pesticides from food in the first few years of life. They get a much larger dose of carcinogens in food than previously estimated. And if they are among the millions of children whose drinking water comes from surface water supplies (as in most midwestern cities), they consume a very large dosage of carcinogens in the tap water that they drink directly or in infant formula.

Having done this analysis, we then took great care to present the information responsibly and constructively. We did not want to inspire a food scare or prompt consumer hysteria. We wanted to provide straight information about real risks that can and should be eliminated in the foods that little kids and the rest of us eat almost every day. It was that tone, and the authoritative substance of our work, that persuaded three federal agencies to officially recognize our work and its importance to their deliberations.

More studies with similar impact followed: Tap Water Blues, an original analysis of 20,000 water samples, brought the issue of herbicides in drinking water to the 14 million people who are routinely exposed to such pollution. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency not only adopted our study methodology, but initiated a special review of three of the five herbicides we analyzed in the report.

EWG's greatest feat so far, in mid-March 1995, was the report City Slickers, which tracked farm subsidy payments flowing into the 50 most populous cities in the nation. We found that over the past decade, taxpayers wrote 1.6 million agriculture subsidy checks worth more than $1.3 billion to a- handful of absentee owners, corporations, and other ''farmers'' who live smack in the middle of the country's biggest cities. EWG's analysis of 110 computer records of $106 billion-worth of farm subsidy payments made since 1985 found over 74,000 recipients whose current mailing address is in at least one of those top 50 cities. When we looked at major suburbs and satellite cities of just 28 of the 50 cities, we found another $528 million, bringing total payments to $1.8 billion.

This study, which will be followed by a series of EWG studies on the structure and function of federal agricultural assistance, comes at a time when budget cutters want to overhaul farm programs. EWG aims to inform and invigorate the debate to help family farmers who live on the land and to protect the environment on which they depend.

EWG will continue to apply its capabilities in research, data and policy analysis, technical assistance, and outreach to issues of toxics, ecosystem protection and management, and environmental budget matters, among others. This expansion will include aggressively obtaining and analyzing hundreds of datasets within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency whose enormous potential for environmental activism has never before been useable.

EWG's goal is to use information technology to help activists achieve environmental reforms at the local, state, and federal levels. EWG gives activists the ammunition they need to raise awareness of and interest in environmental problems among the media and in the policy community by using information relevant to their own backyards. We also help environmental advocates participate in a more consistent and coordinated fashion in policy debates extending beyond their communities. Reversing the old adage, we aim to help environmentalists "think locally, act globally"

Eileen Gannon is Director of Development and Finance for the Environmental Working Group. She can be reached at 202-667-2982 or eileen@ewg.org.

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