EPA Crowdsources Massive Photo Project 48
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:How much will they pay me? (Score:2, Interesting)
How much money do I get for each pic I send them?
Rofl - you mean how much money is the government going to bill you the taxpayer for, for each picture. I figure $3 million per picture is a fair estimate.
Re:San Joaquin Valley (Score:5, Interesting)
Um.... I'm no expert, but what did that farmland look like before humans irrigated it? And, what were the environmental costs associated with the irrigation project?
Well it's been irrigated since the beginning of the 20th century, with most of the infrastructure in place since the 1920's. So I assume any pictures of the area beforehand are rare or non-existent. The only negative environmental cost was in the early 1980's when attempts to deal with the raised water table by subsurface drains resulted in increased selenium levels which was too high to be tolerated by migratory bird populations. That issue was quickly dealt with and is no longer an issue.
The EPA's concern was decreased populations of Delta Smelts in the San Joaquin river, which they attributed to the pumps. This connection was never satisfactorily made, but they made the decision to cut off the pumps anyway. There was no study into the impact of the Delta Smelt population, thorough investigation of the reasons for it, any effects that the reduction of Delta Smelts would have, or what the trade-offs were.
The real issue is that when the alarm was raised to "do something" about the Delta Smelt, the usual suspects (Monsanto and DuPont) made sure that it was not their products, used extensively throughout the watershed areas for the San Francisco bay, and so another scapegoat was found. So their shills in the Federal bureaucracy made sure that the finger was pointed to the irrigation pumps instead. They irrigate land mostly used for orchards, where it's mostly small farmers that us a lot of migratory labor and significantly less Monsanto and DuPont products than the farmers in the bay watershed area that till, RoundUp, plant seed, RoundUp, spray pesticide, and clear-cut harvest every year.