Previous research suggests that minority residential areas have a disproportionate likelihood of hosting various environmental hazards. Some critics have responded that the contemporary correlation of race and hazards may reflect post-siting minority movein, perhaps because of a risk effect on housing costs, rather than discrimination in siting. This article examines the disproportionate siting and minority move-in hypotheses in Los Angeles County by reconciling tract geography and data over three decades with firm-level information on the initial siting dates for toxic storage and disposal facilities. Using simple t-tests, logit analysis, and a novel simultaneous model, we find that disproportionate siting matters more than disproportionate minority move-in in the sample area. Racial transition is also an important predictor of siting, suggesting a role for multiracial organizing in resisting new facilities.

The paper outlines the theory of generalized plasticity in which yield and plastic potential surfaces need not be explicitly defined, and shows how a very effective general model describing the behaviour of sands and of clays under monotonic or transient loading can be developed. The model is currently one of the simplest and yet one of the most effective ones for describing the full range of behaviour.The hierarchical structure of the model limits the number of parameters which have to be experimentally determined for a given material to those strictly necessary for the problem at hand.A discussion of currently used models is included.

Environmental justice offers researchers new insights into the juncture of social inequality and public health and provides a framework for policy discussions on the impact of discrimination on the environmental health of diverse communities in the United States. Yet, causally linking the presence of potentially hazardous facilities or environmental pollution with adverse health effects is difficult, particularly in situations in which diverse populations are exposed to complex chemical mixtures. A community-academic research collaborative in southern California sought to address some of these methodological challenges by conducting environmental justice research that makes use of recent advances in air emissions inventories and air exposure modeling data. Results from several of our studies indicate that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden in the location of treatment, storage, and disposal facilities and Toxic Release Inventory facilities. Longitudinal analysis further suggests that facility siting in communities of color, not market-based "minority move-in," accounts for these disparities. The collaborative also investigated the health risk implications of outdoor air toxics exposures from mobile and stationary sources and found that race plays an explanatory role in predicting cancer risk distributions among populations in the region, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic indicators. Although it is unclear whether study results from southern California can be meaningfully generalized to other regions in the United States, they do have implications for approaching future research in the realm of environmental justice. The authors propose a political economy and social inequality framework to guide future research that could better elucidate the origins of environmental inequality and reasons for its persistence. Key words: air toxics; cancer; environmental justice; risk; social inequality; treatment, storage, and disposal facilities.

Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA's National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then consider the distribution of these risks using both simple comparisons and a multivariate model in which we control for income, land use, and other explanatory factors, as well as spatial correlation. We find large racial disparities in California's ''riskscape'' as well as inequalities by other factors and suggest several implications for environmental and land use policy.In2000,SunlawEnergy,acompanyseekingtobuildanewnaturalgas-poweredpowerplant, approached the city of South Gate, an industrial suburb along the Alameda Corridor in Los Angeles County. While such plants often trigger resistance, partly because of fears of air pollution, the company promised to make use of a new cleaner pollution-control system that had only been deployed thus far in mini-generators. As this was to be the first test of whether the technology could be brought up to scale in a larger plant, many environmentalists from around the region and the state were supportive, particularly given that the statewide energy crisis in California was creating pressure for a rapid build-out of the power grid. Labor unions were also interested in the jobs that could be generated along with the electricity. Some local community members and city leaders were not so enthusiastic. Invoking the notion of cumulative exposure, they argued that a new plant, no matter how clean, was an

In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between ethnicity and potential environmental hazards in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Using a variety of techniques, including geographic information systems (GIS) mapping, univariate comparisons, and logit, ordered logit, and tobit regression analysis, the authors find that, even controlling for other factors such as income and the extent of manufacturing employment and land use, minority residents tend to be disproportionately located in neighborhoods surrounding toxic air emissions. The results generally support the propositions of the proponents of “environmental justice”; in the conclusion, they consider what this might mean for urban land use and environmental policy.