The first battles that led to the formation of the Environmental Justice movement also produced the first studies of race and exposure to toxins. Subsequently, demographers, geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians and legal scholars have all contributed to an ever-expanding body of studies. We review the most important works that have been published in the 1990s, focusing especially on studies of waste sites, studies of toxic industrial emissions and, finally, on local histories that have begun to show in detail how environmental inequalities develop over time. We explore the ways that the close association between movement and research produced both gains and losses for that research. The political power and moral force of the movement gave the research effort great impetus, but it also defined the research agenda in ways that steered inquiry away from certain potentially important topics or themes. We end the paper with brief discussions of two of these neglected topics: first, investigating where economic elites and their exclusive residential communities are situated geographically in relation to toxic hazards; second, setting environmental inequality in global and historical contexts and theorizing it as one facet or moment of the larger social inequalities that have characterized modern society from its inception.

American Christians have become increasingly polarized on issues of climate change and environmental regulation. In recent years, mainline Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church have made explicit declarations of support for global climate action. Prominent Southern Baptists and other evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, have issued statements that are strikingly similar to the talking points of secular climate skeptics, and have attempted to stamp out ÒgreenÓ efforts within their own ranks. An analysis of resolutions and campaigns by evangelicals over the past 40 years shows that anti-environmentalism within conservative Christianity stems from fears that ÒstewardshipÓ of GodÕs creation is drifting toward neo-pagan nature worship, and from apocalyptic beliefs about Òend timesÓ that make it pointless to worry about global warming. As the climate crisis deepens, the moral authority of Christian leaders and organizations may play a decisive role in swaying public policy toward (or away from) action to mitigate global warming.

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This paper explores the relationship between legitimate corporations that generate hazardous waste and elements of organized crime with whom they contract for the removal, treatment, or disposition of those wastes. The scope and importance of hazardous waste as a social problem is first described and the variety of organized crime participation in waste handling is summarized. The paper then explores the factors that enabled organized crime to become active in this sector of the economy. Lax implementation and en forcement, the most common explanations, are discussed. The formation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 is analyzed to show that there was a prior and more fundamental factor: large corporate generators of hazardous waste fought for a regulatory structure that would prove to be highly vulnerable to organized crime intrusion. This fact is then used to discuss and critique two current explanations of the relationship of corporate generators to organized crime waste handlers: "ignorance" and ')owerlessness." Finally, it is argued that although generators did not consciously intend to facilitate organized crime entry into hazardous waste hauling, they did subsequently enjoy tangible benefits from that entry.

Although we have a large body of work on ‘religion and nature’, much less has been written about the specific question of ‘religion and climate change’. Moreover, to date much of that literature on religion and climate change is theological and prescriptive, laying out arguments for why it is legitimate for believers/adherents of one faith or another to be concerned about climate change. Comparatively little can be characterized as empirical or social scientific, examining what faiths and their adherents are actually saying or doing about climate change. To our knowledge, this special issue will therefore be the first devoted solely to beginning to answer these questions from a social-scientific perspective.