EPA Website Censorship & Innovating with a Blog Library? (v.2)

A few weeks ago, I was at a natural area in NW Ohio and picked up a wonderful booklet that was so beautiful and informative. I just had to share a PDF file with my readers. I think nature geeks should have access to lots of great resources to learn about the ecosystem and environment that surrounds them.

Living in the Oak Openings [PDF link] [PDF Backup]
Oak Openings Official Website: https://www.oakopenings.org/landowner-guide/

But - the web is so dynamic ... if you make a link to a resource today, in a month from now or in three years ... that link might no longer work. This happens quite a lot!

I recently went to refer back to a wonderful document that I had shared a while back about the natural history of the lake St Clair region. It was produced and published by the EPA. I was amazed with its depth and thorough writing. It featured many photos and references to both sides of the border, and had several references to Windsor, Essex County. For example - they even mentioned the canard creek watershed and had a few photos and references to Ojibway Park.

So I went  back to a former blog posting that had a link and I noticed the link was "broken". With some research on the EPA site, you can find an "Archived" version of the file, but that file has been watermarked and is basically illegible.

This file used to exist at this URL: http://www.epa.gov/ecopage/stclairbiodiv/stclairbiodiv.pdf   .... but that link is dead - only three years after I linked to it. Luckily, I saved the PDF locally to my computer and only today was able to upload it to an online file sharing resource.

Lake St Clair Biodiversity Report from EPA (archived, backup copy of the file) [Dropbox Backup LINK] .


The EPA moved that file to this location: https://archive.epa.gov/ecopage/web/html/index-14.html  ... it is now "archived" - and they watermarked that beautiful report with an opaque 1.5" left margin watermark that obscures the text. Its basically unreadable! How could they just ruin a 145 page document like that? So again - I am sharing the un-archived version here: [Dropbox Backup LINK].

Time magazine wrote up an alarming article [here] about how one of the first things the Trump administration [and scott pruit] did was to discard hundreds of pages from the EPA's website. Any reference to climate change or global warming was removed. There was also a page about climate change aimed at a young audience and ... you guessed it...All 50 pages of its content was removed.

Image Source: http://time.com/5075265/epa-website-climate-change-censorship/

So... if you find a great source of information ... share it! But don't forget to try to keep a backup copy of that resource. Services like Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive make it easy to upload and share to the world with a simple link.

This has sparked an idea that I have been thinking about for a while which is to create a page dedicated to great natural history resources. Look for it soon!

Some recent happenings include:

• Seeing a (juvenile?) Red bellied Woodpecker with a "golden nape" ( see the "lower" woodpecker in the the image below)
• Finding a Western Chorus Frog jump onto my backyard concrete patio slab while jumping out of the path of my electric lawn mower. I trapped it in a plastic tote bin and released it back into the natural hedgerow behind my house.
• Saw several Common Checkered Skippers at Assumption Church near the Ambassador Bridge in west Windsor. Two were obliging enough to be captured with my cell phone!

Good birding!