Historical spatio-temporal data on North American radical environmental direct-action events

TL;DR

This paper provides detailed historical data on radical environmental direct-action events in North America from 1995 to 2007, enabling new analyses of such activism.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel dataset of radical environmental direct-action events with spatio-temporal and textual details.

Findings

The dataset includes event type, date, geolocation, and targets of each event.

A spatio-temporally aggregated version adds environmental and social correlates for statistical analysis.

The data supports both qualitative and quantitative studies of radical environmental activism.

Abstract

Social and political event data are widely used in scientific research. However, event data concerning the direct actions of radical environmental groups is comparatively scarce, due in large part to inconsistent news coverage and the clandestine nature of the groups involved. Leveraging original reports maintained by radical environmental groups and their allies, this article codes historical spatio-temporal event data on radical environmental direct-action events in the United States and Canada during a period of heightened prominence in radical environmentalism: 1995-2007. The article's event level data include information on event type, date and geolocation, and the target of each event, as well as the original textual reports of each coded event. This data will facilitate a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative analyses of radical environmental activism, alongside validations of recently developed large language model (LLM) tools for event data extraction. We also offer a separate spatio-temporally aggregated version of these same data. This second dataset is aggregated to the 0.5 × 0.5 decimal-degree spatial grid-year level and adds additional environmental-, environmental group-, and social-correlates. Accordingly, this second dataset will readily enable spatio-temporal statistical analyses of radical environmental direct-action events, their causes, and their determinants—phenomena that have been previously under-explored in large N studies.

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