Between her family and her day job, Rebecca Lave had a busy enough life before Donald Trump came along. But any remaining free time vanished after his election last year. Lave, an associate geography professor at the University of Indiana, still begins the day by making breakfast for her 11-year-old daughter and sending her off to school. But then she has to pore through a mass of emails from three insomniac Harvard graduate students who likely have been up all night documenting how President Donald Trump’s administration is altering government websites related to science and the environment.

Later in the day, maybe during a break between classes or before she goes to bed, Lave will analyze what the students have documented. Or she’ll take a call from a senator’s office. Or she’ll speak with prospective volunteers. If she gets a free moment, maybe she’ll do a quick media interview.

“I’m tired,” she told me, laughing. “I haven’t read a book for pleasure since before Christmas.”



Lave is one of the scientists and academics who are, as The Washington Post alarmingly characterized in December, “frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.” In January, after the president took office, information indeed started to disappear—namely, from pages on the White House website related to climate change. In response, journalists produced a stream of stories about the “heroic guerrilla scientists and librarians” working to preserve publicly funded data and information about science.

It’s all the more heroic when you consider that most of these people are working on a volunteer basis. Lave is among some 70 people devoting their free time to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a group that’s monitoring about 25,000 federal government website pages, mostly at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA.