Save the earth's libraries
FROM THE moment early in his first term when President Bush reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the Bush years have not been good ones for the Environmental Protection Agency. The latest blow has been the shutdown of five of the agency's regional libraries and the limiting of hours at others, including the branch in Boston.
Once congressional Democrats take over in January, they should summon EPA head Stephen L. Johnson to explain why a saving of $2 million justifies such a reduction in access to crucial information.
An EPA library is no place to get the latest John Grisham novel. But if you are looking for data about lead in drinking water supplies or mercury hot spots from coal-burning utilities, an EPA library is the place to go. The largest source of environmental information in the world, the EPA libraries house more than 500,000 books and reports and 25,000 maps.
Some of the most important users of the libraries are EPA employees themselves, as they prepare to prosecute cases against environmental scofflaws. The shutdown of the agency's main library in Washington, regional libraries in Chicago, Kansas City, and Dallas, and a library for evaluating new chemicals, is an act of unilateral disarmament in the lopsided contest between polluters and government regulators who lack the support of the White House. A 2004 report by the EPA itself found that the benefit-to-cost ratio for its library services ranged between 2 to 1 and 5.7 to 1. A memo this August from the EPA's own Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance expressed concern that the loss of librarians' institutional memory and expertise would hamper its work.
EPA says it will digitize information in the libraries and thus make it more accessible than it has been. According to the agency, material that is unique to each of the closed libraries will be digitized by January, and other material will be online in two to three years. But critics question whether the EPA has a dedicated fund for this work. A June 8 memo from the agency's chief financial officer warns that next year's reductions could even curtail EPA laboratory operations.
"This is a slow-motion lobotomy of the agency," according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit watchdog organization based in Washington. At a time when scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of climate change, the new majority in Congress should not stand by and let the Bush administration strip its environmental agency of the tools it needs to function.
