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:5, Insightful)
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.
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What's the License? (I looked but I couldn't see the terms.)
Do the individuals get to be lucky enough to retain copyright and "license" them to the government? Want to bet that a whole ton of them will get batch-sold to companies for other uses without your permission?
Could this be the chance to show them how dangerous copyright is? Ooh! I figured it out! It's the perfect Anti-SOPA weapon! "Hi Megacorp. You posted a copyrighted picture. Awww, too bad, your website comes down now." -- In theory anyway.
But th
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Are you kidding? Photographers want to be identified with their work.
They'll proudly point to it and say "That's my photo!"
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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.
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Great! Let's take pictures of (Score:5, Funny)
all the chemical plants and nuclear facilities, and behind government buildings where they leave the garbage. Then there's airports and other public places, they can be environmental hazards too. It could get cold being outdoors so much so I'll grow a beard. And while I'm down town maybe I'll pick up some fertiliser for my garden, or take my copy of the Quran back to the library. What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Great! Let's take pictures of (Score:5, Funny)
From what it sounds like, you could become a hipster.
Re:Great! Let's take pictures of (Score:5, Funny)
*shudder*
While he did ask what could go wrong I imagine he was talking about minor things like security trouble and arrests, not major catastrophes like that.
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I bet the nuclear facilities will be the cleanest out of your list.
AKA "Help the EPA justify its existance" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Which is fine, isn't it? Pardon me for sounding like redneck American (I am not even American), but considering that trillions of dollars have been spent on destruction, it would be could if some of that funding could be diverted to useful like monitoring and preventing environmental abuse.
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Another use of this could be to take photos of the currently pristine areas that are proposed to be disturbed by oil and gas pipelines coming down from Canada. Give everyone a nice "before" record.
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Well, vote for Ron Paul and the EPA will have even less of a budget then it currently has.
Ron Paul: Idealist. Take that as you will, but I have my own opinions on him.
You call it "American environmental problem" . . . (Score:4, Funny)
. . . I call it my "front yard" . . .
photo EPA buildings (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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San Joaquin Valley (Score:5, Informative)
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How about I take pictures of the once-fertile farmland that the EPA turned into a desolated desert and drove 70,000 people out of work and out of the area? Think they would highlight that one?
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?
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As far as the GP, it was a desert before the irrigation. It is turning int
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Sorry, I don't live on the other side of the planet, I live on the other side of the country. I am very aware of environmental issues, in my backyard and many beyond. I don't pretend to know everything about everything.
It's nice that we built a paradise in the desert, but can't that water be put to better use somewhere that will use it more... efficiently? I mean, we can build cities on the ocean if we want to, too, but what's the point? Sorry about your community that was living in an artificial paradi
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.
totalitarians (Score:1)
the smartest, most righteous, safest, most patriotic thing we can all do is not cooperate at any turn. our government has become a police state already. each new stage of this descent into totalitarianism is couched in the innocuous sounding requests for voluntary compliance -- only this time compliance goes further into actively helping them. let's not forget the two stunningly ineffective failed websites from the last couple years -- flag@whitehouse.gov and attackwatch@whitehouse.gov -- both of which urge
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Self propagation (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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I know, if we don't let Job Creators and their Corporations pollute like they did in the prior two centuries, well we're just fucked.
Can you cite anything related to this, or is this just a dubious anecdote? That said, it is near Los Angeles which has nasty smog problems as it is.
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No, as I said, a friend is a operator at the steam plant, I heard this via word of mouth not a news article. Is my friend lying to me? I doubt it. Running two stacks instead of whatever is most efficient causes more harm to the environment than if the EPA had not been involved, so the EPA is making the smog problem worse. And no, I have no citation. You c
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Submission fails to note that they want pictures of the same locations as the original project.
Plus, if you follow through to the collection of original photos you're supposed to recreate [flickr.com] you'll discover that they've helpfully sorted them by photographer, and not, say, location.
Because who wouldn't want to sift through 15,000 photos organized by photographer to see if they can find one near them that they can recreate?
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Did you try using it? It goes to the National Archives website. Click on one of the states. Let's try Alabama.
First result is "White House Central Files Subject File, compiled 1977 - 1981." What does that have to do with the Documerica project, done 1971-1977? Well, I guess they overlap a year. Apparently that's close enough.
The next result is "EPA GULF COAST WATER SUPPLY RESEARCH LABORATORY, DAUPHIN ISLAND. STAFF MEETING, 05/1972" (yes, in all caps).
Click through that, you get a very verbose description of
How about (Score:1, Funny)
We send them pictures of the many ways the EPA fucks our every day life. 5 million pics of high gas prices on the way. I know those EPA terrorists think that the gas prices are too low for their plans. But why the hell should we make it easy on those bastards to wreck our lives?
how long before someone gets jailed (Score:1)
I thought it was now established that the only ones taking pictures in public were; perverts, hippies obstructing police business and terrorists plotting attacks ?
It works like this: (Score:2)
A Waste (Score:1)
help the EPA? don't measure radiation, floride (Score:1)
Why would I want to help them rolling out their globalist affilated agenda 21, destroying my life, at the local city level.
Fukushima hot particles in the USA vs No Burn Day (One is proudly on TV the other is silence) those aren't journalists! they won't tell you your home's air filter probably is a hot object, they won't tell you the daily readings, just the agenda 21 crap SMOG, Polin, Spare the Air Day, No Burn Day. What difference does it make if you have no job, no money, but you have firewood, and no
It seems like (Score:1)
Here ya go (Score:2)