Fall 2000
Letter from Dublin, Ireland
by Michael Stanley-Jones
Ireland is justly famous for the green luxuriance of its landscape. On a late summer visit to the capital Dublin, I caught only a glimpse of the countryside on my way to the UNEP-Infoterra 2000 Global Conference on Access to Environmental Information (September 10-15, 2000). The explosion of high tech development during the past decade is changing Ireland in unforeseen ways. Once one of Europe’s poorest countries, Ireland today is boastful of its now robust economy and newfound wealth. The Irish information officers I met at Infoterra 2000 were candidly proud of the new high tech companies that have brought relative prosperity to their country. Coming from Silicon Valley, I knew I had to share a bit of the darker history of high tech development and alert these colleagues to the potential hazards of microelectronics manufacturing.
UNEP-Infoterra is the environmental information network of the United Nations. 52 country delegations came to Dublin from every continent of the globe to reorganize this network and press for new public rights to access environmental information. The delegates spent five days developing ideal methods of letting information flow from government agencies to the public over the Internet. They adopted a proposal to establish national environmental information web portals - gateway web sites that would assist the public in its quest for information about their country’s environment. The United Nations Environment Programme also plans to develop a global environmental web portal that would sweep all national portals within its network.
As SVTC’s representative and spokesperson for the NGO Coalition European ECO-Forum, I urged the conference delegates to consider working with grassroots organizations and communities in the design of national environmental web portals. Don’t view the public merely as a consumer of environmental information top-down but as a creator and producer of information bottom-up, I suggested. The environment doesn’t exist predominantly in the halls of government agencies; it is in our communities and neighborhoods open to each and every one of us. The public’s direct experience of their local environment is an invaluable resource that we need to draw upon and convey to national and international decision makers.
Governments should be working in partnership with community organizations to reap the benefits of our experience in communicating with the public at the grassroots.
For the Conference I had written a brief paper on interactive web sites that use digital maps to illustrate the links between chemical pollution and environmental health. In my presentation, I highlighted SVTC’s innovative Eco-maps of Silicon Valley (www.svtc.org). Here’s our map of 179 groundwater toxic contamination sites in Santa Clara County, including 29 historic Superfund [national priority listed] sites. Here we represented cancer risks of exposure to 118 hazardous air pollutants in the South San Francisco Bay region. Here are chemical point source pollution sites in proximity to neighborhoods, schools and parks. The reaction from the Infoterra audience was visceral. It was as though I had quickly lifted up a heavy veil and exposed everyone’s eyes to the harsh light of the sun.
I also presented NGO web sites that inspired, or were in turn inspired by, the Toxics Coalition: Friends of the Earth’s Factory Watch, Environmental Defense’s Scorecard, and Children of the Earth-Czech Republic’s Dioxin and Incinerators Internet Map Server. I stressed that the work of governments, NGOs and cartographers benefited from exchanges of ‘best practices’ and collaborative partnerships, such as SVTC’s Clean Bay/Clean Stream PCB Clam Monitoring Project and Projekt IHEAL’s Air Contaminant web site developed by NGOs in the Czech Republic. (SVTC and Environmental Partnership for Central Europe/Nadace Partnerstvi developed this project within the Interactive Health Ecology Access Links (IHEAL) Network.)
After the presentation the Chilean NGO Centro de Investigacion y Planificacion del Medio Ambiente (CIPMA) approached to offer their strategy for globalization of the Aarhus Convention, the UN Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision Making and Access to Justice. CIMPA hopes their country’s new socialist government will become the first Latin American country to sign the Convention. So far only European and a handful of Asian nations have joined the Aarhus Convention, which is expected to come into force in early 2001.
The week concluded with a planning meeting for the new UN Task Force on Electronic Tools and Media. The Norwegian Government will hold a Workshop of the E-Task Force (as it was quickly dubbed by NGOs) in March 2001. UNEP-Infoterra, the European Environmental Agency and the UN Economic Commission for Europe are eager to use the E-Task Force to coordinate their development of electronic access through national environmental web portals.
Through our cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme, SVTC and its NGO allies will continue to press for a global chemical Right-to-Know agreement and strengthened public rights to access and share environment and health information. Ireland’s bright-green fields should remain for future generations to enjoy without the fear of toxic contamination hidden beneath the thinly covered landscape.
Editors Note: SVTC senior researcher Michael Stanley-Jones’ paper, “Interactive Applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Understanding Community Environmental Health” can be found on www.iheal.org.
Michael Stanley-Jones is SVTC Senior Researcher
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