Workplace Ambient Pollution and Workers’ Sociodemographics: Extending Environmental Justice Research

From the First National People of Color Congress on Environmental Leadership to WTO street protests of the new millennium, environmental justice activists have challenged the mainstream movement by linking social inequalities to the uneven distribution of environmental dangers. Grassroots movements in poor communities and communities of color strive to protect neighborhoods and worksites from environmental degradation and struggle to gain equal access to the natural resources that sustain their cultures. This book examines environmental justice in its social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions in both local and global contexts, with special attention paid to intersections of race, gender, and class inequality. The first book to link political studies, literary analysis, and teaching strategies, it offers a multivocal approach that combines perspectives from organizations such as the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and the International Indigenous Treaty Council with the insights of such notable scholars as Devon Pena, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Valerie Kuletz, and also includes a range of newer voices in the field. This collection approaches environmental justice concerns from diverse geographical, ethnic, and disciplinary perspectives, always viewing environmental issues as integral to problems of social inequality and oppression. It offers new case studies of native Alaskans' protests over radiation poisoning; Hispanos' struggles to protect their land and water rights; Pacific Islanders' resistance to nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste storage; and the efforts of women employees of maquiladoras to obtain safer living and working environments along the U.S.-Mexican border. The selections also include cultural analyses of environmental justice arts, such as community art and greening projects in inner-city Baltimore, and literary analyses of writers such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Barbara Neely, Nez Perce orators, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Karen Yamashita artists who address issues such as toxicity and cancer, lead poisoning of urban African American communities, and Native American struggles to remove dams and save salmon. The book closes with a section of essays that offer models to teachers hoping to incorporate these issues and texts into their classrooms. By combining this array of perspectives, this book makes the field of environmental justice more accessible to scholars, students, and concerned readers. CONTENTS Introduction: Environmental Justice Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy / Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel SteinEnvironmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion with Simon Ortiz, Teresa Leal, Devon Pena, and Terrell Dixon / Joni Adamson and Rachel Stein Politics1. Testimonies from Doris Bradshaw, Sterling Gologergen, Edgar Mouton, Alberto Saldamando, and Paul Smith / Mei Mei Evans2. Throwing Rocks at the Sun: An Interview with Teresa Leal / Joni Adamson3. Endangered Landscapes and Disappearing Peoples? Identity, Place, and Community in Ecological Politics / Devon G. Pena4. Who Hears Their Cry? African American Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Memphis, Tennessee / Andrea Simpson5. Radiation, Tobacco, and Illness in Point Hope, Alaska: Approaches to the Facts in Contaminated Communities / Nelta Edwards6. The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific Islands / Valerie Kuletz Poetics7. Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism / T. V. Reed8. From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice / Julie Sze9. and Environmental Justice / Mei Mei Evans10. Activism as Affirmation: Gender and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Barbara Neely's Blanche Cleans Up / Rachel Stein11. Some Live More Downstream than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environmental Justice / Jim Tarter12. Struggle in Ogoniland: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice / Susan Comfort13. Toward a Symbiosis of Ecology and Justice: Water and Land Conflicts in Frank Waters, John Nichols, and Jimmy Santiago Baca / Tom Lynch14. Saving the Salmon, Saving the People: Environmental Justice and Columbia River Tribal Literatures / Janis Johnson15. Sustaining the Urban Forest and Creating Landscapes of Hope: An Interview with Cinder Hypki and Bryant Spoon Smith / Giovanna Di Chiro Pedagogy16. Teaching for Transformation: Lessons from Environmental Justice / Robert Figueroa17. Notes on Cross-Border Environmental Justice Education / Soenke Zehle18. Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies: Teaching Environmental Justice to Mainstream Students / Steve Chase19. Teaching Literature of Environmental Justice in an Advanced Gender Studies Course / Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine

Environmental JusticeVol. 13, No. 3 RoundtableRoundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in AmericaModerator: Sacoby M. Wilson, Participants: Robert Bullard, Jacqui Patterson, and Stephen B. ThomasModerator: Sacoby M. WilsonAddress correspondence to: Sacoby M. Wilson, 4200 Valley Drive, 2234D School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA E-mail Address: [email protected]Dr. Sacoby M. Wilson is an associate professor and director of Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH), Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA. Search for more papers by this author, Participants: Robert BullardRobert Bullard is a distinguished professor of Department of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Jacqui PattersonMs. Jacqui Patterson is senior director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.Search for more papers by this author, and Stephen B. ThomasDr. Stephen B. Thomas is a professor, Health Policy & Management; director, Maryland Center for Health Equity; School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:16 Jun 2020https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2020.0019AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookXLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byLearning on Health Fairness and Environmental Justice via Interactive VisualizationCommunity Perspectives and Environmental Justice in California's San Joaquin Valley Humberto Flores-Landeros, Chantelise Pells, Miriam S. Campos-Martinez, Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, Jose Pablo Ortiz-Partida, and Josué Medellín-Azuara12 December 2022 | Environmental Justice, Vol. 15, No. 6Identifying environmental factors that influence immune response to SARS-CoV-2: Systematic evidence map protocolEnvironment International, Vol. 164Beyond fairness: the Covid-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice20 March 2022 | Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 6Selecting Data Analytic and Modeling Methods to Support Air Pollution and Environmental Justice Investigations: A Critical Review and Guidance Framework8 February 2022 | Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 56, No. 5The Social and Economic Implications of Environmental Justice for the Elderly: A Case for Social Work Interventions in the Caribbean10 July 2022The Analysis of Urban Park Catchment Areas - Perspectives from Quality Service of Hangang Park -31 December 2021 | Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 49, No. 6Building Adaptive Capacity Through Civic Environmental Stewardship: Responding to COVID-19 Alongside Compounding and Concurrent Crises11 November 2021 | Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, Vol. 3COVID-19: Evidenced Health Disparity5 August 2021 | Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, No. 3Pandemic disruptions in energy and the environmentElem Sci Anth, Vol. 8, No. 1At the Edge of Resilience: Making Sense of COVID-19 from the Perspective of Environmental HistoryJournal for the History of Environment and Society, Vol. 5 Volume 13Issue 3Jun 2020 InformationCopyright 2020, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Moderator: Sacoby M. Wilson, Participants: Robert Bullard, Jacqui Patterson, and Stephen B. Thomas.Roundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in America.Environmental Justice.Jun 2020.56-64.http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2020.0019Published in Volume: 13 Issue 3: June 16, 2020Online Ahead of Print:June 5, 2020PDF download

Latina/o environmental justice literature, prompted by organizing against environmental racism and for ecologically linked social responsibility, emerges in the late 20th century, but environmental justice literary interpretation and critical theory examines texts from any period of Latina/o literature, engaging the nexus of nature, culture, and environmental degradation and justice. Latina/o environmental justice literature includes many genres (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, memoir, testimonio, and performance art, to name a few) and has umbilical connections to a large body of lived experience, longstanding theory and praxis, traditional environmental knowledge (TEK), and environmental justice movement activism. This body of literary poetics that followed the emergence and naming of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s had precursors in the cultural poetics of the civil rights movement and related struggles for justice, equality, nonviolence, feminisms, human rights, and environmental protection. Antecedents to Latina/o environmental justice literature are found in oral literature, pre-Columbian texts, and subsequent Latina/o writing. Definitions of environmental justice within the context of the burgeoning environmental justice movement in the latter decades of the 20th century contribute to interpretations of the literature from this period forward. The last decades of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century saw environmental justice themes emerge in many genres, and Latina/o literature made significant contributions to the broader field. Studies of cultural poetics of environmental justice contributed to that diversity. Contemporary environmental justice literary scholarship summarizes past approaches, traces ongoing work, and offers future directions—redefining and rebirthing environmental justice and climate justice poetics, given global warming and resulting climate change.

ContextThe importance of justice is increasingly recognized in environmental policy making. Research on environmental justice offers an important perspective on landscape transformations, both natural and social.ObjectivesThis paper asks how current work on environmental justice might contribute to the development of socio-environmental knowledge of the biophysical landscape. The paper explores the relations between environmental justice thinking and the production of a distinctively capitalist landscape.MethodsThe paper builds on a review of environmental justice and landscape literature and, for the empirical part, on archival studies and secondary sources.ResultsThe paper shows that there remains a disjunction between landscape studies and the environmental justice literature. It provides a theoretically informed approach of bringing together environmental justice scholarship with the transformations of a contested and distinctively capitalist landscape. By studying changes in woodlands and wetlands on the island of Gotland, Sweden, it uncovers a process of the production of landscape that elicits “deep” historical geographies of environmental justice. The massive exploitation of wetlands and forests shows how an approach encompassing environmental justice in conjunction with forms of resource exploitation and conservation can help grasp changes in the landscape.

Climate change, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, species extinction—all of these issues point to one thing: environmental health is a global issue that concerns all nations of the world. Now add environmental justice to the list. From South Bronx to Soweto, from Penang to El Paso, communities all over the world are finding commonality in their experiences and goals in seeking environmental justice. Environmental justice was defined by Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, in his seminal 1990 work Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality as “the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations.” In countries around the world, the concept of environmental justice can apply to communities where those at a perceived disadvantage—whether due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigration status, lack of land ownership, geographic isolation, formal education, occupational characteristics, political power, gender, or other characteristics—puts them at disproportionate risk for being exposed to environmental hazards. At a global scale, environmental justice can also be applied to scenarios such as industrialized countries exporting their wastes to developing nations. In either case, “environmental and human rights have no boundaries, because pollution has no boundaries,” says Heeten Kalan, senior program officer of the Global Environmental Health and Justice Fund of the New World Foundation in New York City. “Environmental justice organizations are starting to understand that they are working in a global context.”

Environmental (in)justice in the Anthropocene ocean

I. INTRODUCTION II. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT IN CALIFORNIA: PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC POLICY A. Defining the Problem B. State Legislation and Regulatory Agencies III. FROM PROMISE TO PROGRESS A. Developing the Cal/EPA Environmental Justice Action Plan B. Implementing the Action Plan: Pilot Projects and Small Grants IV. THE PERILS OF INCORPORATION A. The Politics of Environmental Justice-As-Participation: Where is the Justice in Advice? B. Environmental Justice at the Department of Pesticide Regulation 1. Public Participation at DPR: The Environmental Justice Advisory Workgroup 2. DPR's Pilot Project: I keep coming back to Parlier 3. Litigation and Legislation: Environmental Justice and Pesticides a. Citizen Suits: El Comite v. Helliker et al b. SB-391: Activism Drifting In and Out of the Legal Focus V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, the environmental justice movement has made numerous inroads in defining a number of problems as environmental racism and environmental inequalities. Entire areas of academic research and public policies have emerged to address these sets of social movement concerns. (1) Despite considerable research on environmental justice as a social movement, several important gaps still exist. This article seeks to address those gaps, particularly by elucidating the dynamic relationships between social movement actors and state agencies. California has undertaken, in many ways, the most aggressive and robust high stakes in passing environmental justice legislation and in institutionalizing environmental justice policy. (2) This article provides a critical assessment of environmental justice policy implementation in California since 2004. We chose 2004 as our start date because that is when the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) developed the landmark Environmental Justice Action Plan, enabling the following period to serve as a kind of large-scale laboratory in environmental justice policy implementation. There is a substantial gap in the literature on California, although the state has experienced important experiments with environmental justice policy implementation and activism. (3) This article seeks to remedy the surprising dearth of research on California environmental justice movements. (4) It also addresses the curious gap in the environmental justice literature that has under-analyzed the policy-making implications of environmental justice activism. Specifically, a large portion of the academic research has either focused on social movements, or the application of environmental justice analytic frameworks to different issues (including transportation, air quality, land use and public health). (5) While studies generally cite, for instance, President Clinton's Executive Order 12898 (6), there is less understanding about the ways in which state agencies have regulated and enforced environmental justice. Likewise, many policy analyses, by focusing exclusively on public actors, neglect the interrelationships within the social movement/law/policy-making apparatus that influences the form and outcomes of environmental justice policy. Such an interactive analysis is needed to truly understand and explain the patterns of policy success and failure. We intend our analysis of the successes and failures of California's ongoing experiment with environmental justice policy to inform scholars, the public, legislators and those staff working within state agencies who are grappling with whether these experiments have succeeded, the reasons why or why not, and how to improve their own operations. Our findings are that environmental justice policy in California is implemented primarily as a function of improving participation. …

The Environmental Justice Movement emerged in the 1980s as a political framework uniting diverse struggles by multiply marginalized communities (especially communities of color) against disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Since then, environmental justice has expanded to encompass not just the pollution and hazardous waste issues that first inspired it but a range of other environmental health concerns and environmental rights, and it is best understood as an extensive network of political projects that extends in time and space beyond its 1980s US origins. Despite a common narrative situating environmental justice as one relatively recent stage of the environmental movement, environmental justice has important historical precedents in the organizing work of minoritized communities outside of mainstream Western environmental thought or politics. Similarly, beyond social movements, philosophical work on environmental justice puts pressure on many assumptions of Western environmental thought, revising environmental critiques of anthropocentrism to situate human concerns in multispecies contexts and centering Indigenous and non-Western ways of understanding and living in relation to land. Environmental justice issues have been represented in diverse literatures and across genres (nonfiction prose, literary fiction, poetry, drama, popular and speculative genres, etc.) since the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement in the 1980s. However, the concerns of the Environmental Justice Movement are evident in earlier literary works as well, particularly those by variously minoritized writers, and literary scholarship on environmental justice has often focused on reclamation and canon revision, seeking to identify the presence of environmental and especially environmental justice themes in literary works not previously articulated as environmental because they did not fit neatly into “nature writing.” Climate change produces a range of environmental justice problems relating to exposure, vulnerability, dispossession, and displacement, and 21st-century literature’s increasing engagements with climate change have led to both the telling presence and the telling absence of climate justice concerns. Environmental justice ecocriticism thus does not merely trace connections between the Environmental Justice Movement and literature explicitly responding to it but operates as an interpretive framework that considers the full range and broader implications of literature’s engagement (or lack thereof) with issues affiliated with environmental justice.

The impact of COVID-19 on job displacement in the United States has been unevenly experienced by race, ethnicity, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Although unemployment benefits may mitigate the effects of job displacement, this social safety net is also unevenly distributed across workers. We examine racial/ethnic differences in receiving unemployment benefits among workers displaced by the pandemic. We use data from the US Census Household Pulse Survey (HPS), which is specifically designed to capture the real time effects of the pandemic across a wide spectrum of social issues. (US Census, 2020) Unlike the Current Population Survey (CPS) data used in the monthly unemployment rate calculations, the HPS data allow us to identify workers directly displaced from their jobs by the pandemic. We analyze over 1.3 million HPS interviews from the first stage of the pandemic when the disruptions to the labor market were the most severe, covering the period from June 11, 2020 to December 22, 2020. We contribute to the literature on the labor market effects of the pandemic in two ways. One, the HPS data allow us to identify workers who directly experienced job loss as a result of the disruptions created by COVID-19 and to determine who did not receive unemployment insurance. Two, we present both bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine racial/ethnic disparities for five groups: non-Hispanic whites, Blacks, Hispanic, Asian, and non-Hispanic Other workers. We find that Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to be unemployed without Unemployment Insurance (UI). Black workers are 12.0% of the employed but 17.5% of displaced workers without UI. Hispanic workers are even more affected. Hispanic workers are 15.6% of the employed, but are 23.4% of all displaced workers without UI. Although there are limitations to using the HPS data—the survey was administered online in only English and Spanish and occupational and industry data are not available for displaced workers, the results still provide valuable insights informing the current policy debate about the effects of expanding UI.

“Let justice roll down like waters”: Reconnecting energy justice to its roots in the civil rights movement

Comparing objective and subjective status: Gender and space (and environmental justice?)

/ On 11 February 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations." Under the order, 17 federal agencies and offices are required to compile information about the race, national origin, and income of populations in close proximity to federal facilities that may have a significant effect upon ecosystem and human health. The goal is to protect historically disenfranchised groups from being disproportionately impacted by negative externalities associated with federal actions.This study examines the outcome of efforts to educate federal land-use managers about their roles in implementing the Executive Order in their respective districts. The managers participated in a 6-h Nominal Group Technique (NGT) workshop where they were instructed to weight environmental justice issues versus others associated with hazardous waste problems in their districts. Participant responses were quantified and analyzed through a series of rounds. After each round, participants received increasing amounts of information on environmental justice issues.It was hypothesized that the managers would come to a consensus that environmental justice is an important issue that should be seriously addressed. Prior to administering the NGT, the managers appeared to have limited knowledge of environmental justice issues and thus assigned relatively low rankings to such concerns. After being "educated" by viewing films on environmental justice and reading related literature, in general, managers' weightings decreased and a narrower consensus developed.The authors conclude that exposure to the issue may not be as effective as expected in convincing land-use managers to become sensitive to justice issues so that they may effectively implement the Executive Order.KEY WORDS: Environmental justice; Environmental education; Executive Order 12898, Nominal Group Technique; Land-use planninghttp://link.springer-ny.com/link/service/journals/00267/bibs/24n4p509.html</HEA

Widespread pollution in the former Soviet Union (FSU) led Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr. to refer to the “ecocide” of Soviet citizens (Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege, New York: Basic Books, 1992). Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, in many ways and in many places the environmental situation has improved. One of the reasons for this was plummeting industrial production, which led to the shuttering of inefficient factories; this occurred even though the newly independent states of the FSU lacked the resources, legal structures, political will, and/or public interest to deal with the environmental legacies of the Soviet Union. In addition, the number of nongovernmental organizations focused on environmental issues grew rapidly in the 1990s. How many of these organizations still operate and what their focus is remains unclear, especially since economic issues rather than environmental ones have diverted public attention. In 10 chapters in Environmental Justice and Sustainabilty in the Former Soviet Union, specialists examine recent experiences with environmental justice in Russia, Sakhalin, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Sakha, Estonia, and Tajikistan. The authors’ goal is to answer to what extent increased popular environmental awareness and association activism drive public policy and planning in the former Soviet republics. They do so only to a very small extent; they conclude that emergent, separate environmental justice and environmentally sustainable development agendas have not joined into a single just agenda for sustainability or human security. The authors make no claim to be comprehensive in geography, analysis, and other issues, but have sought to begin a conversation and to establish a research agenda on the growing global awareness of justice, sustainable development, just sustainability, and human security. I select a few of the chapters to give a sense of the important issues in this volume. Laura Henry points out how Russia has a legal foundation for environmental protection and indigenous people’s rights, but recentralization of power and the state’s unwillingness to implement laws have limited the effectiveness of environmental movements. Henry argues that Russian environmental actors and organizations focus on green issues, conservation, or environmental sustainability as opposed to just sustainability or human security. Henry explores why environmentalists in Russia today struggle to promote sustainability—her answer is growing political centralization and the fact that economic and social justice issues have become more crucial to the masses. Many of the environmental issues in the FSU concern resource development—oil, gas, diamonds in Sakha, forests, and so on. Generally speaking, those who live near the resource suffer the immediate consequences of environmental degradation and see their standard of living drop, while individuals in the capitals or foreign investors profit. Kate Watters explores how one community strives to fight health effects of industrial oil development: Kazakhstan, which invited Western investment to develop those resources. Money flowed in for the benefit of the haves, while many who live close to the fields “live in dire poverty.” Jessica Graybill analyzes similar issues in Sakhalin. Shannon O’Lear indicates that “environmental misfortune” in Azerbaijan because of oil exploitation is experienced by range of ethnic groups, not just one group at the expense of others. As usual, income differentials have risen, the percentage of people living in poverty has grown, and citizens unequally share the risks and benefits of the burgeoning oil industry. O’Lear’s survey data show that people who are better off perceive more significant pollution-related health effects than those poorer individuals who actually experience them. Those who are not familiar with the environmental justice literature may find some of the discussion tending toward theoretical issues. I worry that the analysts in this volume overused the notion of “transitioning” states in the 1990s, and tied it teleologically to normative beliefs that all people would be better off in the FSU were the states to adopt some kind of Western democracy. This may be true, but there are tremendous assumptions here. Because the authors focus on the tension between “green” issues (those of environmental or sustainable development) and “brown” issues (those of environmental justice), I would have liked the editors to address this tension fully. Another assumption—again perhaps accurate—is that access to information and public participation are prerequisites for environmental justice. Passive voice abounds in several essays. Things are “thought to have grown,” “are transitioning,” “are largely occurring,” “are being raised,” with the result that the authors encounter challenges tying the analysis of discourses, world views, cognitive maps, and so on to concrete persons. Political scientists, environmental studies specialists, and historians will find something of great interest in this volume. Anyone interested in contemporary environmental politics in the FSU should read this book. The introduction and the conclusion provide the framework for the case studies. Another strong point is a rich bibliography that accompanies each chapter.

This paper argues for incorporating an environmental justice framework into sustainable tourism and ecotourism. Such a framework provides important directions and guidance for addressing injustices related to human–environmental relationships, particularly with respect to disadvantaged, low-income and minority communities. Issue areas include environmental equity, environmental discrimination and environmental racism. Drawing from the environmental justice literature, this paper first clarifies key concepts associated with environmental justice. This is followed by an examination of issues in tourism development that clearly relate to environmental justice (even though the term itself may not have been used). An analytical framework for addressing environmental justice and equity in tourism studies is proposed, incorporating environmental justice concepts and dimensions of procedural and distributive justice. Several theoretical areas that offer potential for developing this bridge between tourism and environmental justice are presented. The discussion opens new avenues for better incorporating justice and equity into ecotourism and sustainable tourism development and research.

A current research trajectory within environmental justice literature has been to explore various measures of proximity to environmental hazards which may contribute to exposure and health risks for vulnerable populations. Research has shown that many low-income residential areas, which often are predominantly comprised of people of color, are located in close proximity to hazardous waste sites. Public health researchers have documented that these inequities in residential patterns can be linked to negative health impacts, resulting in health disparities. The purpose of this article is to evaluate spatial distributions of leaking underground storage tanks (LUSTs) in the Charleston Metropolitan Statistical area (MSA). Furthermore, we aim to use various geographic information system (GIS) techniques that could provide local policymakers and community groups with knowledge to make better decisions for revitalization, planning, and community development efforts. Three GIS techniques were used in this study: 1) mean distance analysis, 2) spatial coincidence, and 3) proximity analysis. To examine the association between distance to the nearest LUST and proportions of non-whites in census tracts, linear regression models were applied. Chi-square tests were conducted to compare differences of race/ethnicity and SES between census tracts that host LUSTs and those that do not host LUSTs. Results indicate that a disparity exist between census tracts that host LUSTs and census tracts that do not host LUSTs based on race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. These data provide additional evidence that spatial disparities exist in the distribution of environmental hazards beyond Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) facilities in the Charleston MSA in census tracts with higher numbers of people of color and poor populations. Community groups such as the Low Country Alliance for Model Communities (LAMC) can use this information in its efforts to revitalize LAMC neighborhoods and achieve environmental justice and eliminate health disparities in underserved communities in the region.