Environmental Justice

Environmental justice seeks to assess the fairness of the distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Of primary concern are the negative effects of nearby activities that generate pollution or risk in some form and that have health or nuisance impacts on people who live or work in the neighborhood. Most research and public policy dealing with environmental justice seeks to determine whether low-income or minority populations are disproportionately and negatively impacted by polluting activities.

Primarily since the 1970s, a number of research projects in the United States have investigated whether or not a systematic inverse relationship exists between pollution exposure and income or racial minority populations. Many of these studies examined the population characteristics of areas in the vicinity of solid waste transfer stations and disposal sites.

Criticisms of many of these investigations concern their (a) dealing with population areas larger than the likely spatial extent of the negative spillovers, (b) employing inadequately defined control areas to assess if disadvantaged people were disproportionately impacted, (c) depending too heavily on case studies with limited external validity, and (d) not addressing whether nearby sources of pollution or risk did indeed have negative health or nuisance effects on neighboring populations.

Other studies employing sound research designs have demonstrated that in some geographic areas, low-income and minority groups in the population do live closer to some kinds of environmental hazards than other groups. For example, a national study in the mid-20th century used a comprehensive listing of waste storage and disposal facilities and census tract data for a 20-year period, comparing tracts with and without hazardous sites. In general, the findings were that surrounding these sites were primarily working-class neighborhoods with mostly white populations extensively employed in manufacturing. However, this was more the case in northern urban areas than in the southeastern portion of the United States, where neighboring tracts had larger black populations.

The most reliable studies account for market forces and land use controls, using census tracts in the same urban area but without waste sites as the basis for comparison. Although even these largely fail to establish the public health effects of this proximity, they do point out what needs to be considered to have a reliable empirical basis for assessing the distributional implications of local decisions and thus for public policy.

Public policy applications of findings from sound environmental justice research focus not only on remediation and mitigation of existing conditions but also on current and future decisions that can impact environmental quality. This is the primary purpose of Executive Order 12898: Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority and Low-Income Populations, signed by President Clinton in 1994.

This order directs each federal agency to adopt, as part of its mission, responsibility for evaluating and mitigating “disproportionately high adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations in the United States.” This order also requires both informing these populations about these likely health and nuisance impacts and involving them in assessing these impacts and in developing ways to minimize or mitigate them.

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