Facilities and enforcement case searches can both easily be limited by geography (EPA region, city, state, zip code, county, proximity to national border, and watershed). The tool also automatically produces maps that allow users to see the distribution of facilities across space.
This database uses a broad variety of data. Most of the data is collected by the EPA itself. Users are able to search for facilities regulated under the following systems:
When looking at individual facilities, the database provides detailed facility reports, enforcement case reports (civil and criminal), air pollutant reports, effluent charts, pollutant loading reports, effluent limit exceedances reports, CWA program area reports, permit limits reports, and other facility documents as available. The database provides easy ways to download and map the data. The database also allows users to narrow facilities searches using demographic data from EJScreen (also maintained by the EPA), the U.S. Census, and tribal land data.
Users can also look for information on federal administrative and judicial enforcement actions through an enforcement case search.
ECHO is maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Its purpose is to provide comprehensive information about all of the facilities regulated by the EPA. It is connected directly to the EPA's internal enforcement record system, so information is currrent.
The Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) Database, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) Database. 2022. Available online: https://echo.epa.gov/ (accessed on 17 March 2022).
This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018; huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution).
“While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.” (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418).
“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409).
This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved.
Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.
The authors "define disaster media as a heuristic, or approach, that recognizes the ways “natural” and human-made disasters are communicated about, constructed, and variously exacerbated or relieved through media means. This heuristic is not simply a temporary model for problem solving but tries to account for ecological forces and material conditions" (my emphasis).
They close the article with three provocations:
1) All Media on Deck: the current moment of combo disaster (COVID and climate crisis) requires the production of more public and open access materials (of various kinds), but also boosting of media literacy. The auhtors acknowledge the conundrum of producing more media, while being confronted with sustainability issues and the call for "no-carbon" media.
2) Relief and media Production: a critical look at the kinds of assumptions that governments/NGOs/industry bring to COVID-19 relief efforts (videos, websites, maps, algorithms...) -- what counts as relief and for whom?
3) Focus on Social and Environmental Justice: "In moving forward, it will be crucial to approach disaster media as a domain in which structural reform agendas that interweave social and environmental justice can flourish."
In the article, the authors address visualizations of COVID cases, including related satellite mages of air pollution in Southern California and China (generated by NASA/ESA) as well as of mass graves in Iran.
First, they provide basic framing of how to critically read air pollution satellite imagery. Connections between COVID-19 measures and improvements in air pollution are not identifiable in a straightforward way.
"Figure 1a, for instance, uses bright magenta to indicate greater concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and light blue to signify cleaner air. However, such color choices can be misleading: there is no material correlation between nitrogen dioxide and the color magenta; and reduced traces of this chemical do not turn the sky a paler shade of blue. [...] color-coding selections imply, satellite images are not just scientific; they are cultural as well."
Second, they point out the paradox role of satellite imagery to account for the inequitable impact of COVID-19
"satellite image, from a US satellite operator, locates pandemic “excesses” in an Iranian “elsewhere.” But this is an increasingly deceptive proposition, given that the United States has one of the highest COVID-19 per capita transmission and fatality rates in the world."
Third, they draw comparisons between the "hockey stick" visualization of global Climate Change and the various "curves" used to display COVID-19 developments:
From a disaster media perspective, the film’s global warming graph depicts a dramatic climate shift, projects imminent catastrophe, and issues a world warning. Its circulation in global media culture for the past fifteen years potentially informs the ways people are engaging now with similar-looking charts of coronavirus death and illness. Historically, news media have relied on sensationalistic photos of human suffering to convey a sense of disaster, but in the age of big data and the current pandemic, numbers speak, and graphs and curves tend to dominate the mediascape. In both cases, scientific experts and publics must grapple with how these graphs make meaning, what datasets they rely upon, and how these media come to stand in for highly complex conditions.
Finally, they remark that COVID-19 visualizations are always incomplete - because of lack of testing and withholding of data - but also because stories of e.g. workers are missing. They reference the cover of the New York Times (May 24, 2020) that displayed the names of 100,000 people who had died from COVID.