Tories torch and dump centuries of priceless, irreplaceable environmental archives

[Saviolo]

I'll x-post this to the environment group, too. And General Discussion if people think it's worthwhile.
From BoingBoing:
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/04/canadian-libraricide-tories-t.html

From the article:

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.

Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives' war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

Honestly, this may be some of the worst news I've heard in a long time out of Ottawa. How did they decide that they could do this? How did committee discussion and group action lead to this information being irrevocably lost forever? It's baldly obviously why this is a good idea for the Harper gov't. Without the historical data to put the current environmental conditions in context, it's easy for them to continue to deny global climate change and continue to support the wealthy corporations whose best interests are served by loose and weak environmental regulations.

Time for Harper to leave the house. It would be great to see the Conservatives destroyed as they were in 1993.

[arikara]

1. Here's another article on the subject

I just came here to post it. Its sickening.

What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries?

Scientists say the closure of some of the world's finest fishery, ocean and environmental libraries by the Harper government has been so chaotic that irreplaceable collections of intellectual capital built by Canadian taxpayers for future generations has been lost forever.

Many collections such as the Maurice Lamontagne Institute Library in Mont-Joli, Quebec ended up in dumpsters while others such as Winnipeg's historic Freshwater Institute library were scavenged by citizens, scientists and local environmental consultants. Others were burned or went to landfills, say scientists.


http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/23/Canadian-Science-Libraries/

[MAD Dave]

2. Exceptionally Scary!

As a scientist, the destruction of scientific data and libraries is equivalent in all ways to the Nazi book burning of the Second World War.

This constitutes the highest form of censorship of scientists. This data was collected for and paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. Some of the scientific data from my routine analytical chemistry job is more than 30 years old and currently be archived for future access. This data is just process data and data reported to the Gov'ts of Sask and Canada. Nothing special at all.

[polihood]

3. Wow

That's not a good thing at all. Any electronic files?

[Saviolo]

4. I think it mentions

in the article that there was a promise of scanning and otherwise digitizing a number of (or all of) the documents, but it just didn't happen.