EPA Crowdsources Massive Photo Project

coondoggie writes "Challenges from U.S. government agencies are all the rage these days and the Environmental Protection Agency today became the latest group to issue one: Take cool pictures of your surrounding environment to become part of historical record. The EPA's Locations Challenge looks to update a 40-year old agency project known as 'Documerica' which included more than 15,000 photographs of images of American environmental problems and everyday life. In the 1970s the EPA hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems for the project."

Re:Great! Let's take pictures of

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the nuclear facilities will be the cleanest out of your list.

AKA "Help the EPA justify its existance"

[WoodstockJeff]

The worse the pictures, the better. EPA wants reasons to increase its funding and enforcement efforts, but no excess budget to hire people to do it for them.

photo EPA buildings

[Anonymous Coward]

They arrive at between 9-11am, and leave between 2-3pm. At least a third of the offices are vacant or being used for "storage" throughout the day, but at least a third of the offices leave the lights on most of the night. Want to know how to cut the federal budget and improve the economy at the same time? Cut several thousand EPA jobs. Leeching hypocrits.

Re:How much will they pay me?

[alphatel]

How much money do I get for each pic I send them? Oh right, it's supposed to be on a volunteering basis, which is a euphemism for "amateurs only".

Don't be fooled into thinking the lack of money will be the big problem. Helping the government find you by submitting images of your natural habitat will only increase the likelihood of being identified.

Lesson 2 in How Not to be Seen is not to choose obvious cover. In Lesson 3, their neighbors ratted them out. Sending them photos of your beloved lands, well that's the equivalent of standing up.

Self propagation

[Coolhand2120]

Any time you have an agency that both discovers its own problems to solve and then solves the problems it finds will always find more problems that need solving. Just like the TSA, after the TSA was ramped up all of a sudden so many new places that were never subject to TSA searches all of a sudden became "weak points" discovered by the TSA.

This is exactly like a crappy anti-malware program (which I consider malware in and of itself) that tells you about the "critical security threat found: cookie from amazon.com" in order to prove how useful it its poor owner.

IMHO the EPA is the greatest threat to our economy in our lifetime. I can think of several examples in my life where the EPA has caused real financial harm to companies in the guise of protecting the environment, but actually harmed the environment. Here's a good example. My friend works at the Long Beach, CA steam plant. The EPA has dictated that they can only have 2 of their 5 stacks operational at any time. The city however requires power, so they two stacks that they do run must run at an inefficient higher level, causing more "harm" (steam) to the environment than if they ran all five of the stacks at a more efficient lower level. There are at least two other examples in my life of the EPA causing massive problems while not even solving the problem they "discovered" in the first place, so imagine how many other people have evidence of the EPA running amok, causing great harm and no good.

And try telling the EPA their wrong.