Data for Life: Linking Environmental & Data Justice

Data justice rooted in land is the path to upending our culture of mass data extraction. But the connection between data and land isn’t always obvious.

Wasn’t it the tech industry of the late 2000’s that coined the phrase, “Data is the new oil”? That tagline at the start of the big data movement would telegraph the growth of the tech industry’s reliance on unlimited access to our personal data.

Last year, over 98% of Meta’s Q2 revenue came from buying and selling of our personal data for digital advertising. Extractive data practices hold up the tech industry and allow it to survive. If our data is the new oil, then our bodies are the exploration wells, our homes and neighborhoods, the rich shale deposits.

Across the country, environmental justice advocates are fighting back against extractive practices in the oil and gas industry and other chemical/manufacturing industries that threaten our air, water, and soil.

Terrains for Data Justice

On the Texas Gulf Coast, the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe is fighting back against Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) companies building refineries on their ancestral lands, the coastal wetlands of the Rio Grande Valley. Extraction is nothing new in this terrain.

So often, corporations and their government allies use data to tell a story about our beloved lands that minimize or hide the reality of the harm being inflicted on people and other living beings. Advocates are used to seeing numbers represented in ways that de-legitimize and sideline activist efforts to stop the harm they can see with their own eyes.

In this way, data extraction reinforces natural resource extraction. The pattern repeats because colonial knowledge reinforces itself, and does not make space for other ways of knowing to exist.

Work at the intersection of data justice and land justice is the future of the data sovereignty movement. Indigenous Data Sovereignty first and foremost demands that Indigenous data be handed over to ownership and governance by Indigenous communities.

Many Indigenous data practices across cultures involve applying data to support right relationship with natural systems, an antidote to the extractive data practices that enable environmental harm.

Land defenders and environmental justice advocates can benefit from learning how data is used and abused by corporations to allow environmental harm. At this point, data justice is an essential tool to support life to continue on our planet, in order to counter the data narratives circulated by bad actors.

Data Defense for Environmental Justice Organizers

This week, the People’s Data Project and the Open Environmental Data Project released a zine with tools and tactics for environmental justice advocates to apply data justice in their work with communities: Data Rights in the Fight for Our Environment.

First, we define data rights in the context of environmental justice and its intersections with Indigenous rights, labor rights, and human rights. Environmental data rights mean that our environmental data belongs to us and our communities, so that we can survive.

Then, we provide a template for mapping a specific scenario where you need access to or are struggling to use community data. Finally, we provide a clear set of tactics that might help depending on the type of scenario you’re exploring.

Are you trying to get access to government permitting data to monitor wastewater dumping by a chemical manufacturing company? Consider organizing people to submit freedom of information requests or appear at public comments to demand access to a specific dataset.

Are you trying to make use of a community science database measuring air quality across neighborhoods? Consider using a storytelling tool to identify how people’s lived experiences show up in the data. Or, consider designing legal or governance processes for community members to access and use the data themselves.

Why This Matters

Rooting data justice in the fight for our environment has helped us better understand how to use data in ways that actually serve us and our communities. As Navajo researcher David Tsosie at the Dine Center for Research and Evaluation has told me, “We use data for life.” And that’s a model we can follow across all of our communities.

Data can help us better understand our relationships to the natural world and each other, and correct course when our relationship to the environment is out of alignment. If we’re careful of the ways data can be used against us, we can take control of it ourselves to build a just future.