The Destruction of Climate Change Information We need to Know and Libraries: This April’s Climate and Science Marches

Placard we carried at the April 29th Climate March

This post will be updated.

Saturday, April 29, Citizens Defending Libraries had representatives in Washington D.C. to spread the word, handing out thousands of flyers, that the shrinking and elimination of our libraries also threatens us with the loss of the information we need to know about climate change and how to deal with it.  For instance, the biggest science library in New York City, SIBL, the Science, Industry and Business Library, definitely one place you would hope to go to study climate change, is now being closed down, totally eliminated, the collection of science books it is supposed to house is biting the dust.

NYPL officials provided the New York City Council December 14th with an extremely dubious excuse for elimination of the Science library and its books: that it had abandoned collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to "the internet" to learn about science instead. 

Really? . . .

. . . The headlines in days before the Climate March were helping us make the case how specious this reasoning was.

•         Two days before the Climate March FCC Chair Ajit Pai unveiled a plan to end net neutrality, essentially privatize the internet meaning that private financial interests will will control the rights deciding the availability of information on the internet and how accessible it is:  

In Washington, D.C., the chair of the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday outlined a sweeping plan to dismantle net neutrality rules, which seek to keep the internet open and prevent corporate service providers from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for internet service.

Not unsurprisingly, it's a plan that's backed by the Koch brothers who want hare fighting for and manipulating our government and country into perpetuating the heavy and continued use of the climate-changing fossil fuels in which they are so heavily invested.  See also this follow-up in the week afterward:  Trump's FCC Chair Declares New War on Net Neutrality After 10-Year Battle for Free & Open Internet, May 09, 2017.

•         The day before the Climate March the Trump administration removed the Evironmental Protections Agency's pages relating to climate change, climate science, the impacts of climate change and what readers can do about climate change, all gone from the site replaced with a banner headline saying "this page is being updated."  See: EPA removes climate change page from website,by Devin Henry, April 28, 2017.

Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Carolyn McIntyre at the Climate March

Citizens Defending Libraries co-founders Carolyn McIntyre and Michael D. D. White at the Climate March

Here are the flyers we distributed thousands of at the March-

Small Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Small Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Selling and Shrinking Our Libraries,Eliminating Books and Librarians
    (VIA THE TRUMP TEAM’S KUSHNER & SCHWARZMAN) 
Shutting Down The Internet
    (ELIMINATING NET NEUTRALITY)

And Purging Climate Information from Government Websites Destroys the Information We Need To Survive

It Also Attacks Democracy. .
. . .  Reduces equal access and opportunity. . .

(For more see- Noticing New York- Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction of Information We May Need To Know To Survive)

Sign our petition on the web: Citizens Defending Libraries
Take action and inform yourself via
our web pages, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube

Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Flyer distributed at Washington D.C. April 29 Climate March.

Eliminating Books, Selling and Shrinking Libraries- is an attack on Democracy, equal access and opportunity. . .. . and our chance for all of us to know about climate change and participate in its solutions?

DID YOU KNOW?:

•    Canada's government has destroyed irreplaceable climate change data in Canadian libraries, collected at taxpayer expense and gathered over more than a hundred years. Canada has the world's longest coastline, traveling up into the Arctic where some of the fastest, most critical climate change is taking place.

•    Records once available respecting New York climate history are no longer to be found at the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library. Banishing books, the NYPL is also totally eliminating the 34th Street Science Library because science can be fund “on the internet,” but the Trump administration is purging internet climate change information and wants to dispense with “net neutrality” access to information.

•    The reckless bulk destruction of rare and valuable books and information at the San Francisco Public Library meant that books with information about global warming were trashed and sent to landfills as the library bankrupted itself, shrinking into a technologically focused `library of the future'.

•    In the empty shelves of Brooklyn Public Libraries you can’t find Jane Jacobs’ writings suggesting that the answers for humanity’s survival will be developed ground up and that our relationships with nature need to be symbiotic.

(For more see- Noticing New York- Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction

of Information We May Need To Know To Survive)

Are libraries being purged of information with the Orwellian objective of preventing the public from knowing what it needs to know and creating more manageable, easier to control, top-down narratives in sync with the latest Koch brothers press releases?

Will our future news and information have to come from the likes of fracking endorser former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, appointed as United Nations `Climate Change Envoy'? 

Sign our petition on the web: Citizens Defending Libraries
Take action and inform yourself via
our web pages, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube

(You can also sign petitions against the elimination of net neutrality like the one from Mozilla.)