EAST LANSING, Mich. - A project supported by Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism sheds new light on a 34-year-old trove of environmental images.

In 1971, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started Project Documerica to record that agency’s successes and failures in battling environmental degradation.

Some 22,000 photographs from that effort can be found in the National Archive.But there is little awareness of this historic resource. A rich source of material for journalists and other researchers has remained mostly hidden — at least until now.

“This archive serves as a benchmark of historic environmental conditions in the United States,” said Jim Detjen, director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. “It’s our hope that bringing new attention to them will spark environmental news stories across the nation.”

Jeremy Herliczek, an MSU School of Journalism graduate student, with the support of the Knight Center, has created a Web site that features galleries of images of environmental themes plucked from the archive.

His effort assists journalists and other researchers to compare environmental images of particular regions then and now. It gives a sense of the environmental issues that these photographers believed were important when EPA was created. And it shows how they can find images to spark trend stories and illustrate local issues.

Images are diverse and range from coal miners with black lung disease to automobiles that were then believed to be the fuel efficient, alternative energy vehicles of the future. These and other images prompt journalistic questions about changes in environmental threats and progress.

The site gives a fascinating history of the collection and acts as an easy interface for others for future inquiries. There is a wide assortment of environmental photo galleries:

• Strip mining, efforts against it, environmental impact and land reclamation projects in Ohio, Illinois and Montana.
• “Our Only World,” a 1973 exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution of 113 Documerica images that toured the country calling attention to the nation's environmental crises and efforts made to reverse it.
• Automobiles and their impact on culture, economy, land use and air quality.
• Architecture and Chicano youth in urban environments in El Paso, New York City and Chicago.

To ease the online search for thousands of images, selection strategies are available on the Web site so comparisons can be made between today’s environmental conditions and issues with those recorded 30 years ago.

“There are hundreds of environmental stories in the archive just waiting for journalists to uncover them,” Herliczek said.

The site is at www.ej.msu.edu/documerica/Home/home.htm