Collaborative Research with Farmworkers in Environmental Justice

Abstract

Environmental injustice occurs when a particular population, most often low-income people of color, is exposed disproportionately to an environmental health hazard. On the continuum of an environmentally unjust situation, there are several stages and levels at which inequities occur. A corporation makes a decision to locate a waste incinerator in a neighborhood that, because of historical socioeconomic discrimination, has become a low-income African American community in an industrial zone. Community members are stonewalled and intimidated at a public hearing about a local environmental health problem by industry and government officials who sit far away from the audience and use technical jargon to describe the issue. Native-Americans lose an important diet staple and economic activity when an industry's runoff contaminates the fish in a body of water. These examples illustrate geographical, procedural, and sociocultural inequities contributing to environmental injustices.