Abstract
ABSTRACT Hazardous waste and environmental justice are important public issues as well as vital areas of academic discussion. The occurrence of hazardous waste sites in Texas and Louisiana is among the highest in the U.S. This study reexamines the claim that hazardous waste sites are disproportionately located in communities with higher percentages of minorities and poor in the population. Because of varying units of analysis and improper operationalization of variables, research based on this claim has produced inconsistent findings. This paper uses the case of Superfund hazardous waste site locations in Texas and Louisiana combined with a multi-dimensional conceptual frame to rectify weaknesses associated with conventional approaches to environmental justice issues. The goal of this analysis is to address two shortcomings in the environmental justice literature. First, we introduce the concept of relative deprivation and, second, we expand the traditional class focus of such research to include both status and power dimensions. The major hypothesis of this research is that environmental justice issues are better conceptualized as environmental classism rather than environmental racism. The results indicate that a multi-dimensional theoretical approach that includes class, status, and power indicators is superior to previous approaches. Furthermore, results indicate that race is not a significant correlate with the location of hazardous waste sites. We conclude that the operationalization of the concept of relative deprivation is valuable in sorting out the influence of race from other independent variables
Published Version
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