Environmental Justice

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Does every income, racial, ethnic, and age group have an equal right to protection from environmental hazards? This question is central to the emotionally charged debate about the location of industrial and waste management facilities and the application of regulations and funds to protect people and neighborhoods. The environmental justice movement came to the forefront of environmental health politics during the 1980s when a landfill for PCB-contaminated waste was located in a poor, largely African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina. That controversial siting led to a study by the United Church of Christ (UCC) which found that hazardous waste management facilities in the United States were disproportionately located in areas that had minority and poor populations.

The UCC research prompted more than two dozen studies that have examined waste management and industrial facility locations, air pollution incidents, and measures of public exposure to toxins to determine whether minority and poor populations bear an unfair toxic burden. The research, which has produced contradictory results, has looked for evidence that the process used to make decisions were equitable, and that the outcomes were equitable. Differences in the findings are largely explained by differences in what populations were chosen as potentially burdened, what activity was supposedly causing the burden, what burden was measured, what the spatial scale was of the analysis, and what statistical methods were used in the analysis. Overall, the evidence proving that poor and minority populations across the United States are disproportionately at risk from environmental hazards is not conclusive.

Nevertheless, this research has made environmental equity an important policy consideration. On February 11, 1994, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12898, which required all federal agencies to take steps to overcome any disproportionately adverse environmental effects on the poor and minorities. Many federal agencies now have environmental justice offices, take steps to consider the impact of their activities on poor and minority populations, and try to increase minority representation in their agencies. Some states have followed the federal example, and citizens groups have also been active. For example, in May 1996 a citizens group in Chester, Pennsylvania, sued the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for approving the location of a waste management facility in a largely African-American neighborhood that already had five such facilities and had high rates of morbidity and mortality among its residents. Title VI considerations have become important in the siting of new facilities.

On the other hand, mayors such as Dennis Archer of Detroit have expressed concern that a blanket application of environmental justice concerns hurts the redevelopment of inner-city neighborhoods—precluding, for example, the placement of new factories on remediated brownfield sites. Environmental injustice is also invoked as a reason to curtail suburban sprawl, which removes resources from inner cities and leaves unwanted land uses and poor people in its wake.

MICHAEL R. GREENBERG

(SEE ALSO: African Americans; Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry; Assessment of Health Status; Brownfields; Environmental Determinants of Health; Environmental Movement; Ethics of Public Health; Ethnicity and Health; Hazardous Waste; Minority Rights; Not In My Backyard [NIMBY]; Poverty and Health; Risk Assessment, Risk Management; Toxic Torts; Toxicology)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bryant, B. (1995). Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Sexton, K., ed. (1999). Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology 9(1):Environmental Justice Issue.