Environmental Inequalities: Literature Review and Proposals for New Directions in Research and Theory

Abstract

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.

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

“…Unfortunately, the nature of racism is not one of them. In a review of thirty recent empirical studies, only a handful attempted any substantive discussion of racism itself (Baden and Coursey, 1997;Bullard, 1990;Hamilton, 1995;Krieg, 1995;Pulido et al, 1996;UCC, 1987) 7 , although others have probed the nature of race and racism in general (Bullard, 1994;Goldman, 1996;Pulido, 1996;Szasz and Meuser, 1997;Zimmerman, 1994). Instead, the literature is largely characterized by "common sense" assumptions that reflect uncritical, popular understandings of racism 8 .…”

“…White privilege, together with overt and institutionalized racism, reveals how racism shapes places. Hence, instead of asking if an incinerator was placed in a Latino community because the owner was prejudiced, I ask, why is it that whites are not comparably burdened with pollution (see Szasz and Meuser, 1997)? In the case of Los Angeles, industrialization, decentralization, and residential segregation are keys to this puzzle.…”

US Metropolitan-area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes

“…Since then, a steadily increasing number of researchers have investigated the relationship between neighbourhood demographic composition and environmental hazard presence (Szasz and Meuser, 1997;Bowen, 2002). However, relatively few researchers have attempted to determine why the distribution of social groups around environmental hazards takes the form that it does or why some studies have found strong evidence of environmental racial inequality while others have not Weinberg, 1998).…”

“…A third possible explanation is that studies vary according to the region and type of region (i.e. rural vs urban) examined (Brown et al, 1997;Clark et al, 1995;Szasz and Meuser, 1997).…”

A Bridge to Challenging Environmental Inequality: Intersectionality, Environmental Justice, and Disaster Vulnerability

“…Although environmental inequalities persisted historically (Taylor 1997;, environmental justice was not utilized as an organizing concept until the 1980s, when African American communities, black scholars, and the progressive United Church of Christ began to draw attention to environmental inequities experienced in black communities (Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009;Szasz and Meuser 1997). Developing shortly after the civil rights movement, Everett Parker and Robert Bullard pursued environmental injustice narratives around civil rights and the experiences of African Americans in the southern United States, which were largely left out of mainstream environmental movements (generally white, male, wealthy; see Taylor 2000).…”