Environmental Justice Literature Research Articles

Invited Perspective: Moving from Characterizing to Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure.

Invited Perspective: Moving from Characterizing to Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure.

Encounters with the Flesh of Fish: Subsistence Fishing along the Anacostia River

AbstractCoursing through Washington, DC, the Anacostia River is simultaneously an object of rehabilitation and a symbol of ongoing contamination. The river is a place where roadway runoff, sewer spillage, and trash add to the mix of industrial polychlorinated biphenyls and alkanes long wedded with the sediment. Yet, time spent with subsistence fishers along the Anacostia River also reveals how returning to the water’s edge, setting lines, hooking bait, or cleaning and consuming fish has the potential to expose the capitalist state. This essay considers the many facets of exposure beyond the sense of harm replete in environmentalist and environmental justice literatures. This essay ethnographically maps a constellation of bodies, environs, and exposures; it draws on Black feminist theory, including Leith Mullings’s conceptual treatment of environment, Audre Lorde’s erotics of the body, and Hortense J. Spillers’s analytic of the flesh, to conceptualize exposure as always an exposure to and an exposure of, or exposé. Through this synthesis, I not only trace the contours of a capitalist state where legacies of uneven contamination undergird selective prosperity but also attend to the excesses of exposure—what else there is to say about the river and ways of carefully paying attention along its banks.

Leveraging Multimedia Patient Engagement to Address Minority Cerebrovascular Health Needs: Prospective Observational Study

BackgroundSocial inequities affecting minority populations after Hurricane Katrina led to an expansion of environmental justice literature. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey rainfall was estimated as a 3000- to 20,000-year flood event, further affecting minority populations with disproportionate stroke prevalence. The Stomp Out Stroke initiative leveraged multimedia engagement, creating a patient-centered cerebrovascular health intervention.ObjectiveThis study aims to address social inequities in cerebrovascular health through the identification of race- or ethnicity-specific health needs and the provision of in-person stroke prevention screening during two community events (May 2018 and May 2019).MethodsStomp Out Stroke recruitment took place through internet-based channels (websites and social networking). Exclusively through web registration, Stomp Out Stroke participants (aged >18 years) detailed sociodemographic characteristics, family history of stroke, and stroke survivorship. Participant health interests were compared by race or ethnicity using Kruskal-Wallis or chi-square test at an α=.05. A Bonferroni-corrected P value of .0083 was used for multiple comparisons.ResultsStomp Out Stroke registrants (N=1401) were 70% (973/1390) female (median age 45 years) and largely self-identified as members of minority groups: 32.05% (449/1401) Hispanic, 25.62% (359/1401) African American, 13.63% (191/1401) Asian compared with 23.63% (331/1401) non-Hispanic White. Stroke survivors comprised 11.55% (155/1401) of our population. A total of 124 stroke caregivers participated. Approximately 36.81% (493/1339) of participants had a family history of stroke. African American participants were most likely to have Medicare or Medicaid insurance (84/341, 24.6%), whereas Hispanic participants were most likely to be uninsured (127/435, 29.2%). Hispanic participants were more likely than non-Hispanic White participants to obtain health screenings (282/449, 62.8% vs 175/331, 52.9%; P=.03). Asian (105/191, 54.9%) and African American (201/359, 55.9%) participants were more likely to request stroke education than non-Hispanic White (138/331, 41.6%) or Hispanic participants (193/449, 42.9%). African American participants were more likely to seek overall health education than non-Hispanic White participants (166/359, 46.2% vs 108/331, 32.6%; P=.002). Non-Hispanic White participants (48/331, 14.5%) were less likely to speak to health care providers than African American (91/359, 25.3%) or Asian participants (54/191, 28.3%). During the 2018 and 2019 events, 2774 health screenings were completed across 12 hours, averaging four health screenings per minute. These included blood pressure (1031/2774, 37.16%), stroke risk assessment (496/2774, 17.88%), bone density (426/2774, 15.35%), carotid ultrasound (380/2774, 13.69%), BMI (182/2774, 6.56%), serum lipids (157/2774, 5.65%), and hemoglobin A1c (102/2774, 3.67%). Twenty multimedia placements using the Stomp Out Stroke webpage, social media, #stompoutstroke, television, iQ radio, and web-based news reached approximately 849,731 people in the Houston area.ConclusionsUsing a combination of internet-based recruitment, registration, and in-person assessments, Stomp Out Stroke identified race- or ethnicity-specific health care needs and provided appropriate screenings to minority populations at increased risk of urban flooding and stroke. This protocol can be replicated in Southern US Stroke Belt cities with similar flood risks.

Producing landscapes of environmental justice: exploitation of woodlands and wetlands and deep historical geographies of justice on Gotland

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.

Multigenerational immigrant trajectories and children's unequal exposure to fine particulate matter in the US

Fine particulate matter is a serious health threat and exposures are particularly damaging for children. The environmental justice (EJ) literature shows that racial/ethnic minority communities experience disproportionate exposure to particulate pollution in the US. While important, those EJ studies tend to neglect people's complex identities, including their nativity and their families' generational histories of residence in the US. Yet there is growing interest in the intersection of immigrant populations and EJ. Our use of individual-level data enables examination of immigrant generational status by race/ethnicity, which provides insights on the intergenerational persistence of environmental injustice. We pair data on 12,570 US third graders (from 2013 to 2014) collected through the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey with PM2.5 concentrations for the census tracts of their home and school locations. We apply generalized estimating equations to test for intergenerational disparities in exposure and to examine how those disparities vary between racial/ethnic groups. Independent of race/ethnicity, first- and second-generation children have greater PM2.5 exposure than 2.5- and third-generation children. However, generational status disparities in exposures vary based on race/ethnicity. First-generation White children face greater exposure than White children of later generational statuses, with inequalities attenuating by the second generation. In contrast, Hispanic/Latinx children experience no significant drop in exposure until the third generation. Among Asian and Black children, generational status was not a significant determinant of exposure. Results quantify the intergenerational persistence of environmental injustices for persons of color while showing the amelioration of inequalities for Whites after just one generation is born in the US, reflecting another facet of White privilege in the US.

Migrant workers and environmental amenities and infrastructure in urban China: from the lens of environmental justice

ABSTRACT Although the environmental justice literature has extensively examined a number of notable demographic backgrounds (e.g. race/ethnicity, class, gender, age), it is relatively limited in exploring the environmental inequity confronted by groups with different social identities and the associated institutional causes that vary tremendously across national and political-economic contexts. This study argues that the household registration system in China, which creates pronounced institutional discrimination against and unfavorable social characterization of migrant workers, is a critical while often overlooked contributor to environmental injustice in contemporary urban China. We examine the connection between the share of urban population without official permanent registration and local governments’ provision of public environmental amenities and infrastructure. Analyzing panel data on China's 290 cities from 2008 to 2014, we find that cities with a higher percent of temporary population tend to have a significantly lower level of wastewater and solid waste treatment facilities. However, the level of temporary population is not associated with public green space.

Environmental justice research – limitations and future directions using qualitative research methods

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to review some of the existing gaps in the third-generation of critical environmental justice (EJ) research and then propose promising combinations of theoretical concepts by adjoining (EJ) literature with other bodies of work with the use of qualitative research methods.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a critique of the third-generation of critical EJ literature. It demonstrates how the scope of this scholarship, particularly the third world EJ studies, can be expanded further by deploying various combinations of other theories and qualitative research methods.FindingsConceptually, this paper provides insights into the new directions that third world EJ theory can take by drawing from other bodies of work including the developmental state, caste, waste, informal sector and labor studies within its fold. Methodologically, the paper shows why and how qualitative research methods including single and multiple case study, participatory action research and ethnography can assist in developing these new integrations between theories.Research limitations/implicationsThis research calls for the need to conduct studies in each of the new research dimension suggested in this paper in novel empirical spaces. Such studies will enable the practice of EJ and will help to advance the field of EJ scholarship forward.Social implicationsAnalysis of new research combinations with qualitative research methods in new empirical spaces might create scope for practicing EJ in such spaces where various forms of environmental injustices prevail.Originality/valueThis paper identifies gaps in the third-generation of critical EJ research and proposes new research directions by combining other theories and qualitative methods.

Proposed pipelines and environmental justice: Exploring the association between race, socioeconomic status, and pipeline proposals in the United States.

The current natural gas and oil boom in North America requires new pipelines which pose environmental risks from the wellhead to their destinations. The environmental justice literature suggests that minority populations, people with low socio-economic status, and rural communities are disproportionally exposed to risks associated with potentially harmful land uses. Using data from the 2015 five-year American Community Survey and pipeline route data compiled by The FracTracker Alliance, this study tests whether the above assumptions are true for proposed FERC permitted natural gas transmission pipelines in the United States for which planned routes have been made available. Using binary logistic regression, the study provides only limited, and in some cases contradictory, support for these hypotheses. Although a higher share of highly educated residents significantly decreases the likelihood of a pipeline proposal in a census tract, a higher poverty rate also significantly lowers this probability. Only the share of Black and Asian residents is significantly (negatively) associated with pipeline proposals. However, to test whether this holds true for built pipelines, reliable routing data are needed, which are considered confidential in the United States.

For “Peace, Quiet, and Respect”: Race, Policing, and Land Grabbing on Chicago’s South Side

AbstractThe first wave of environmental justice literature tended to define environmental racism as the disparate siting of toxic waste facilities in low‐income areas and communities of colour. More recently, environmental justice scholars have turned to a critical environmental justice framework to explore questions of spatial equity in relation to movements like Black Lives Matter. It is increasingly clear that the state, the built environment, economic development, and race converge in communities who face increased surveillance, divestment, and gentrification. Using Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago as a case study, I draw on qualitative and historical methods to interrogate dominant narratives surrounding policing in urban environments. This paper highlights how Black geographies, as an analytic, highlight the intersection of police brutality and the built environment in Hyde Park. Legacies of urban renewal, now framed as neighbourhood revitalisation, and narratives around criminality and race all influence community police relations in the area. As the University of Chicago expands, so does its police force, and so do conflicts over who can use public spaces and how these spaces are used. I argue that institutions like the University of Chicago rely on the police to racially manage and expand their built environment. I also look to Black Lives Matter as a way to understand police brutality as enmeshed with toxic ecologies. This pairing of activism, ecology and policing allows a more nuanced analysis of the racialised underpinnings of the built environment.

From Transportation Equity to Transportation Justice: Within, Through, and Beyond the State

Transportation policies, plans, and projects all flow through state institutions because of the substantial cost of infrastructure and the need to assess transportation system performance, including equity implications. But environmental justice scholarship interrogates the state’s role in perpetuating injustice. Most research and planning practice related to transportation equity has relied upon state-sponsored analytical methods. Transportation planners and scholars can benefit from critical assessments of these approaches. We propose a shift in focus from transportation equity to a broader consideration of transportation justice that is more closely aligned with models of social change promulgated in the environmental justice literature and by related movements.

Toward ‘good process’ in regulatory reviews: Is Canada’s new system any better than the old?

What are the features of a good regulatory review process? In this paper we identify criteria for ‘good process’ drawn from a combined reading of the environmental justice and process literature. We then apply these criteria to a case study, assessing four versions of Canadian regulatory review: CEAA 1992, CEAA 2012, the 2017 Expert Panel report, and IAA 2019. We aim to make two contributions. First, we propose a set of ‘good process’ criteria that we hope can be widely applied, reflecting on complementarities and tensions that arise from combining two bodies of scholarship. Second, we identify areas where Canadian review processes have improved over time and those where significant work remains to be done. This work seeks to make a constructive intervention at a time when energy and industrial projects around the world face strong challenges in the legal, political and public domains.

Examining the distributional equity of urban tree canopy cover and ecosystem services across United States cities.

Examining the distributional equity of urban tree canopy cover (UTCC) has increasingly become an important interdisciplinary focus of ecologists and social scientists working within the field of environmental justice. However, while UTCC may serve as a useful proxy for the benefits provided by the urban forest, it is ultimately not a direct measure. In this study, we quantified the monetary value of multiple ecosystem services (ESD) provisioned by urban forests across nine U.S. cities. Next, we examined the distributional equity of UTCC and ESD using a number of commonly investigated socioeconomic variables. Based on trends in the literature, we predicted that UTCC and ESD would be positively associated with the variables median income and percent with an undergraduate degree and negatively associated with the variables percent minority, percent poverty, percent without a high school degree, percent renters, median year home built, and population density. We also predicted that there would be differences in the relationships between each response variable (UTCC and ESD) and the suite of socioeconomic predictor variables examined because of differences in how each response variable is derived. We utilized methods promoted within the environmental justice literature, including a multi-city comparative analysis, the incorporation of high-resolution social and environmental datasets, and the use of spatially explicit models. Patterns between the socioeconomic variables and UTCC and ESD did not consistently support our predictions, highlighting that inequities are generally not universal but rather context dependent. Our results also illustrated that although the variables UTCC and ESD had largely similar relationships with the predictor variables, differences did occur between them. Future distributional equity research should move beyond the use of proxies for environmental amenities when possible while making sure to consider that the use of ecosystem service estimates may result in different patterns with socioeconomic variables of interest. Based on our findings, we conclude that understanding and remedying the challenges associated with inequities requires an understanding of the local social-ecological system if larger sustainability goals are to be achieved.

Tiebout Sorting and Environmental Injustice

Various mechanisms could give rise to the correlations between income, race, and pollution documented by the environmental justice literature. Using a detailed county-to-county migration dataset and pollution data from the Toxic Release Inventory, we propose an approach to identify residential sorting by income as a possible source of these correlations. We find that differences in environmental quality between home and destination counties matter for households' migration decisions. We also show that households moving to cleaner counties are richer than households staying back. We interpret those results as evidence of residential sorting in the spirit of Tiebout (1956).

A quantitative systematic review of distributive environmental justice literature: a rich history and the need for an enterprising future

Environmental distributive justice contextually assesses social equities in relation to natural resources. While there is a rich literature on environmental distributive justice, there have been few assessments quantifying the biases and scopes of this literature. We conduct a systematic review of the literature. We find several key biases and summarize the breadth of subjects that have been studied or discussed. We find a very distinct overlap between authorship nationality and study location, which is concerning, as some of the world’s most polluted and inequitable societies are least represented in authorship. Additionally, we find a dominance of quantitative studies. These results are important for understanding both where future research efforts in this area could best be directed, and how the literature could be enriched by diversified approaches. Improving environmental justice studies is critical and important for many people across our global society, which is increasingly shaped by widespread natural resource depletion.

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

The meaning and connotations of the word “justice” as used in environmental justice and much climate justice literature were formed in the US civil rights movement. Its basic narrative is of a brutally oppressed people who took the initiative, defined their own needs, demanded freedom, co-opted the help of higher powers, and plagued their oppressors bravely and increasingly disruptively until the oppressors gave in. These connotations and meaning tend to cling to the word “justice” when used in social-political reform movements of many kinds. Interestingly, today's energy justice literature shows a much wider spectrum of meaning of “justice”. Much of this literature pursues an intellectual quest for the meaning of justice as an abstract imperative, which scholars investigate philosophically and apply to energy-related projects and transitions, to inform policymakers and others of the rights and wrongs of these, albeit often in relation to vulnerable or oppressed peoples. In this essay I trace the roots of the word “justice” in the civil rights movement and its usage in the environmental and climate justice movements, and explore whether energy justice studies could benefit from a greater awareness of this. I also relate this justice narrative to the more basic question, raised by previous authors, of what it means to have moral values and make moral claims.

Reading radical environmental justice through a political ecology lens

Environmental justice (EJ) and political ecology (PE) have grown during recent decades to become leading critical approaches to socio-environmental analyses. The two fields share a history of pluralism and an openness to integrating new theoretical insights. Based on work by political philosophers in the radical justice tradition – such as Fraser, Young and Honneth – a 'radical environmental justice framework' has been established within EJ, focusing on three core elements: distributive justice, recognition and procedural justice. Later, inspired by Sen and Nussbaum, capabilities has been added as a fourth aspect. We have read this radical EJ framework through a PE lens and assess the potential for cross-fertilization between the two fields in relation to these four elements. First, the systematic treatment of distributive justice in the EJ literature provides a conceptualization that may be useful for PE in its specifications of various forms of injustice. Second, recognition is a useful perspective for both EJ and PE, but this aspect also highlights power relations that may need to be decolonized. To contribute to such a process of decolonization we suggest a focus on senses of justice and critical knowledge production. Third, the focus on procedural justice in the radical EJ framework would benefit from engagements with various power theories and discussions of participation that are prominent in the PE literature. Fourth, based on the PE viewpoint, we argue that there are two weaknesses in how capabilities theory tends to be used in the radical EJ literature: communities are discussed as homogenous groups without internal power relations; and actors and structures responsible for environmental injustice tend to be downplayed.

Transforming incinerators into community amenities? The Seoul experience

This article explores the possibility that pairing desirable community amenities with polluting, industrial, or otherwise unwanted sites, such as waste incinerators, may have the potential to mitigate, or even compensate for, some of their negative local impacts. The environmental justice literature shows that polluting sites tend to disproportionately affect low income and disenfranchised communities. Could this be reversed or mitigated by linking positive amenities to polluting sites? The South Korean experiment of building community amenities (recreation centers, pools, gyms, etc.) at waste incinerators may provide answers to this intriguing question. Using the Difference-in-Differences design we found that while incinerators without amenities have substantial negative impacts on local land and real estate markets, we did not observe any such impact in areas with incinerators that have amenity features. Thus, the amenity features of the incinerators (along with enhanced regulatory emissions standards) are mitigating the negative economic impacts of incinerators.

Who is telling whose story? The effectiveness of peer-to-peer approaches as inclusive participatory interventions towards sustainability

Peer-to-peer approaches refer to a participatory style of teaching and learning, which increasingly gain popularity as inclusive and participatory interventions to encourage changes towards more sustainable energy practices. However, this prominence has not been matched by evidence on the effectiveness of such approaches. By investigating the design and implementation of the peer-to-peer project useITsmartly, which centred on the topic of energy efficient and sustainable ICT use, this paper focuses on the effectiveness of this peer-to-peer approach as inclusive participatory intervention. Drawing on the environmental justice literature, it addresses particularly the second-level effectiveness, that is the impact peer-to-peer exercises have on the peer educators themselves in terms of capacity building and empowerment. The paper evaluates the preparation, recruitment, training and multiplication phases of the approach and concludes that it is essential to invest enough time and resources to truly recognize the peer educators and their lifestyles and practices, and enable them to participate in the peer education on their own terms. If not, lack of motivation and skills of the peer educators as well as too much focus on quantitative targets may compromise the actual purpose of the peer-to-peer approach and turn it into a top-down exercise.

Environmental Justice: Establishing Causal Relationships

The environmental justice literature has found that the poor and people of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution. This literature has sparked a broad activist movement and several policy reforms in the United States and internationally. In this article, we review the literature documenting correlations between pollution and demographics and the history of the related movement, focusing on the United States. We then turn to the potential causal mechanisms behind the observed correlations. Given its focus on causal econometric models, we argue that economics has a comparative advantage in evaluating these mechanisms. We consider ( a) profit-maximizing decisions by firms, ( b) Tiebout-like utility-maximizing decisions by households in the presence of income disparities, ( c) Coasean negotiations between both sides, ( d) political economy explanations and governmental failures, and ( e) intergenerational transmission of poverty. Proper identification of the causal mechanisms underlying observed disproportionate exposures is critical to the design of effective policy to remedy them.

The poverty of plastics bans: Environmentalism’s win is a loss for disabled people

Recent proposals in US cities to ban single-use plastic straws have been adopted quickly and met with little resistance. Environmentalists consider this a small but important win for reducing the harmful impact of single-use plastics on our planet overall. Yet there remains a critical mass of people who are systematically left out of the conversation: disabled people. These people are not only overlooked, they are othered for being poor or disabled or both. We argue that while drastically curtailing plastics production, use, and improper disposal is vital, single-use plastics bans, while just for the planet, are not equally just for all humans. Drawing on disability studies and environmental justice literatures, we problematise existing debates surrounding plastics bans, and recast these bans, and their effects, as an unnecessary othering of poor people and disabled people.