I was pretty excited when a few years back Jeremy Herliczek, a photographer and a graduate student at Michigan State University, offered to create a portal to a little known gem of the Environmental Protection Agency. Called Documerica, the EPA project attempted to document the state of the environment at the birth of that agency.
The trouble is that accessing those old environmental images is difficult. So, too, is simply sorting through them.
Jeremy’s project for his masters thesis was to create galleries of some of the best images, explain the history of the project and also explain how to manipulate the ponderous system for retrieving them.
MSU’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism – which produces Great Lakes Echo – sponsored his research and hosts that effort. Take a look. Make sure to click on the link for the galleries Jeremy curated.
That’s pretty nice stuff.
But frankly I had forgotten about it until recently reading on MinnPost that Documerica is going on tour. The National Archives is sending the images out on a series of traveling displays. Check out that report for another dose of the images of the U.S. environment from the 1970s.