When examining environmental justice and injustice, surprisingly few studies have examined the experiences of Native Americans. In filling this gap, we criticize and build on environmental and political sociology. We make the case and provide evidence that the U.S. military pursues a pattern of environmental “bads” that cannot be reduced to capitalism and that coercive state policies can mold the spatial distribution of people relative to environmental dangers. Our contribution, then, is both theoretical and substantive. First, we recast the environmental sociology literature by specifying the scope conditions under which a “treadmill of production” and a “treadmill of destruction” are applicable. Specifically, we argue that a “treadmill of destruction” is driven by a distinct logic of geopolitics that cannot be reduced to capitalism. Second, we provide empirical evidence of the “treadmill of destruction” by examining the environmental inequality endured by Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. military. We have collected data on a large number of military bases that have been closed but remain dangerous due to unexploded ordnance. We provide evidence that Native American lands tend to be located in the same county as such hazardous sites. In the twentieth century, the United States fought and won two global wars and prevailed in a sustained Cold War. The geopolitical demands of remaining the world's leading military power pushed the United States to produce, test, and deploy weapons of unprecedented toxicity. Native Americans have been left exposed to the dangers of this toxic legacy.

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There is considerable variation in the prevalence, etiology and consequences of alcohol and other drug use across racial/ethnic groups, but studies examining these issues among adult populations remain scarce. This is an important oversight as exposure to many of the risk factors associated with substance use and abuse has been shown to vary by race/ethnicity as well as age. This study examines the causes and correlates of adult alcohol abuse across the three largest racial/ethnic groups in the United States—Whites, Blacks and Hispanics—and provides a theoretically grounded examination of substance abuse by applying two general theories of deviance, Agnew's general strain theory and Akers' social learning theory. Results indicate unconditional support for both theories when applied to White alcohol abuse but more conditional support when applied to patterns of adult alcohol abuse among Hispanics and Blacks. These results suggest that these three racial/ethnic groups experience somewhat different pathways to alcohol disorder.

The treadmill of production has identified and examined an inherent dynamic that results in the inexorable expansion of capitalism. Although it is argued that a number of benefits accompany this economic expansion, the treadmill of production literature has focused on the environmental costs. The treadmill of production embraces the legacy of C. Wright Mills with a focus on the entangled relationships between two aspects of Mills's "power elite"-politics and economics. Building on Mills's inclusion of militarism as one of the three pillars of the power elite, it is argued that there exists a treadmill of destruction that maintains a distinct logic relating to geopolitics and arms races that cannot be reduced to capitalism. The 20th century has witnessed unprecedented growth in the research, testing, storage, and employment of both conventional weaponry and weapons of mass destruction. In focusing on this development, the distinctive role the state plays in creating a treadmill of destruction is stressed.

The research presented here directly engages the issues of environmental inequality by testing the empirical merits of two sociological explanations of urban inequality by comparing landfill and Superfund locations in postindustrial (1970 to 1990) Detroit, Michigan. The results indicate that economic deprivation supercedes race in predicting the location of both landfill and Superfund sites; furthermore, both landfill and Superfund sites tend to be located in census tracts located near to industrial districts contiguous to navigable waterways in Detroit. Using Geographic Information Systems and logistic regression, the results indicate that the probability of living near a landfill is highest among the economically deprived and those least able to “escape” the urban center of Detroit. Substantively, the findings suggest that the process of deindustrialization is decisive in understanding environmental inequality, whereas methodologically, the results underscore the subtle nuances posed by different types of environmental threats.