Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the U.S. States, 1990–2014

Abstract

Objective To examine state‐level environmental inequality trends over time by constructing a new, longitudinal data set and comparing change in environmental and economic inequality. Methods We use Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) RSEI (Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicator) database to create measures of exposure to industrial air toxins and inequality in exposure by race and poverty status. Measures were calculated for each of three periods: 1990–1994, 2000–2004, and 2010–2014. Results Exposure declined but inequality persisted. The geographic patterns displayed by race‐ and poverty‐related environmental inequality differ. But, states with higher levels of race‐based inequality had higher levels of exposure. Poverty‐based environmental and economic inequality exhibited a moderate, positive relation that was spatially patterned. Conclusion While environmental quality improved, we saw little progress in reducing environmental inequality. Though both race‐ and poverty‐based inequality remain, they result from different mechanisms. Future research should examine the relations between deindustrialization and economic, environmental, and political inequality.

Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure in the United States by Race/Ethnicity and Income, 1990–2010

“…2018 ), location [e.g., by state ( Bullock et al. 2018 ; Salazar et al. 2019 ), urbanicity ( Mikati et al.…”

Metal biomarker mixtures and blood pressure in the United States: cross-sectional findings from the 1999-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)

“…A limitation of our study is that we only considered the differences in conditional inference trees by race/ethnicity and did not account for possible differences in tree structure according to socioeconomic position independent of race and ethnicity. Both race/ethnicity and socioeconomic position play important roles in shaping exposure to environmental hazards in the United States [27][28][29].…”

Metropolitan Manufacturing Decline and Environmental Inequalities in Industrial Air Pollution in the United States

“…One of the most important and well-documented forms of environmental degradation is industrial pollution. Research analyzes how racial disparities across neighborhoods occur alongside national trends in decreasing industrial air pollution finding that the benefits of less industrial air pollution are unequally accruing to whites thereby extending racial environmental inequality (Ard 2015;Salazar et al 2019). Taken together, we can situate these neighborhood-level findings within a racial capitalism perspective that highlights how economic processes-such as the production of industrial air pollution-cannot be disentangled from racial inequalities that form the socio-spatial structure of American cities (Pulido 2015;Pulido 2016;Pulido 2017;Robinson [1983] 2000; see also Pellow 2018;Zimring 2017).…”

“…It is not necessarily that these emissions are disappearing, as some research suggests that the most highly polluting manufacturing facilities may have moved to pollution havens in other countries (Li and Zhou 2017). Moreover, environmental justice research examining this decline of industrial emissions finds that the benefits have been uneven and that environmental inequality persists (Ard2015; Mitchell et al 2015;Salazar et al 2019). An area as of yet unexplored, though, is how this drop in industrial air pollution relates to drops in manufacturing work.…”