MyEnvironment

You’ve likely wondered what the air and water quality was around you, and how it could be impacting your health— but it’s unlikely that you have ever truly known the exact levels of toxicity. In 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency put out a search engine called MyEnvironment, where the user can search for a location in the United States and receive a cross-section of environmental data and graphs around various metrics including air, water, energy, health, climate and land, as well as community resources and environmental reports. These metrics not only provide environmental data like toxicity levels, UV-indices, current ozone, and emission levels, but also actionable information like clean diesel programs and clean drinking water sources near your location. Considering that Flint, Michigan and many other areas throughout the United States including a large number of Indigenous reserves, still do not have clean drinking water, this could be an extremely useful app for monitoring water quality and determining if it needs to be boiled on any single day. All of this data can be superimposed on an interactive map of the specified area, which can also be downloaded as common geofile types for further map creation as a bonus. Environmental datasets for MyEnvironment have been continuously updated every year. As our climate continues to change, search engines like MyEnvironment could be incredibly useful for people all around the globe, especially if it can be done in real-time, something MyEnvironment has yet to achieve.

More Ideas

Air Pollution Robot

The dangers of air pollution to human health are well documented, though the traditional methodology of collecting and reporting on sample lags behind the need to keep abreast and regulate air pollution in a meaningful amount of time. The use of drones and robots have been identified by researchers as resources that can be tweaked […]

Artificial Life, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Industry/Natural Commodities, Lifestyle, Monitoring

Telematic Rivers

Erica Kermani’s artwork seeks to answer a central question: if rivers were seeing an equal, living entity, would humans take issues like climate change threatening them more seriously? In his year-long art exhibition in 2017, Kermani, in collaboration with Diana Salcedo & Jeana Chesnik, created a new forum of interaction between humans and rivers to […]

Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies

Co-occupied Boundaries

Art is easily found in nature but rarely is what considered art today inherently natural. The concept of co-occupied mediums that serve to be both functional for nature and aesthetically pleasing to people is being actively explored by Asya Ilgun and Phil Ayres, from the CITAstudio at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In […]

Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies