Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 127

the United States, but later also in other countries such as Australia,
Japan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other members of the
EU - in direct worldwide public access to environmental emission and
performance data of thousands of polluting companies. Here we will
especially focus on how the U.S. environmental movement has devel-
oped the Scorecard Web site, using publicly available information (of
the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), as well as a number of other
available datasets) for countersurveillance by citizen-consumers (Roe,
2002 ; Karkkainen, 2001 ; Natan and Miller, 1998 ; Cohen, 2000 ; Sand,
2002 ; van den Burg, 2004 ).
In 1998, the U.S.-based nongovernmental organisation Environ-
mental Defense Fund developed the Web site Scorecard to provide cit-
izens with freely accessible and understandable information on local
pollution levels, polluters and possibilities to take action. 11 Entering
a postal code or selecting a locality on the map provides one with an
overview of the different pollution levels in that locality, the companies
responsible for these pollutants and their relative ranking.
In addition to merely providing information, Scorecard also enables
citizens to take action: sending a fax or an e-mail to local compa-
nies, local authorities or a congressman; joining a local environmental
organisation; or starting a lawsuit. After some years, a section on envi-
ronmental justice has been added to the site, with differentials in envi-
ronmental burden by place, minorities, race, class and so on. Through-
out the United States, Scorecard is based on existing data collected by
scientific or governmental agencies. Because original data often is hard
to access and difficult to interpret, Scorecard enables individuals to
easily access and collect information on local environmental burdens
and interpret them. This is also one of the main difficulties for Environ-
mental Defense Fund: to collect data and translate this into a format
that refers to the everyday experience of lay actors. “The best numbers
available today are very far from being perfect measures of the environ-
mental burdens that different people experiences - and of course, num-
bers can't tell the whole environmental justice story. But systematic data
on the 'where' and 'how much' of unequal environmental conditions,

11

In his interviews with Bill Pease (the lead developer of Scorecard at
Environmental Defense Fund) and with Michael Stanley-Jones (one of the users
of the Scorecard Web site when he was located at the Silicon Valley Toxics
Coalition), Schienke ( 2001a and 2001b ) provides interesting backgrounds on
the development and use of this Internet- and GIS-based system.