TITLE:

Environmental Justice

NAME:

Michael Solem

INSTITUTION:
USA

American Association of Geographers, Washington, DC

DESCRIPTION
The birth of the U.S. environmental movement in the 1960s soon
showed that environmental hazards are unevenly distributed. They
disproportionately affect the poor and people of color. Incidents such
as Love Canal, New York (backyard eruptions of buried toxic waste) and
many others helped spur the formation of the Environmental Justice
movement. By the early 1990s, research showed that race was
generally found to be an important determinant of excess risk posed
by hazards including toxic emissions, waste facility siting, and misuse
of pesticides.
In response to this emerging body of research, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clinton Administration endorsed
several guiding principles for future environmental policy and
regulations, including, when it comes to environmental risk, fairness
and equity in treatment of all peoples.
An example of research from this period is an investigation of
environmental justice in Santa Clara County, CA, an area that includes
Silicon Valley1. The location was chosen because of its rapid
transformation from a productive agricultural region to a major center
for electronics manufacturing. The research mapped the distribution of
toxins in relation to the distribution of different populations (Figure 1AD).
1 Dr. Andrew Szasz and Dr, Michael R. Meuser of the University of
California at Santa Cruz

This mapping supported claims that the presence of environmental

toxins was much higher in low income, African American and Hispanic
neighborhoods. However, questions remained about the underlying
causes of the observed patterns. A historical-geographical approach
found that the environmental inequalities were not the result of
intentional siting decisions. Rather, they were the result of rising real
estate costs, unregulated development, and uneven mobility stemming
from racial and ethnic differences in education, occupation, and
income.
In other words, the socially privileged (who are disproportionately
white) benefit from land-use policies and economic opportunities that
enable greater choice and mobility. Low-income and minority
communities are therefore frequently and inadvertently placed at
greater risk of environmental harm. The Santa Clara example, then,
cannot be disentangled from broader issues of racial and income
inequality in America.
DISCUSSION
Maps are essential tools for geographical analysis. By enabling the
visualization of data, maps can reveal informative spatial patterns that
might otherwise go undetected. But geographers know that maps
dont necessarily tell the full story.
In complicated cases of environmental justice, historical geographical
perspectives are vital. One-off studies that examine social and
industrial geographies at a single point in time tell us little about the
processes that generate unequal risks. If we can see a significant
relationship between race and/or class and proximity to toxic materials,
we should not jump to conclusions. It might be wrong, for example, to
conclude that the policy makers intended the inequities to happen.
(This does not mean that policy makers cannot do something to
mitigate the problems in the future)
Since Szasz and Meusers pioneering work, other research has unveiled
deliberate intent to locate toxic sites in minority neighborhoods. There
are also many examples of how the siting of landfills and incinerators
lowered property values which, in turn, attracted low income migrants
seeking more affordable housing.
The 2016, a crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a largely poor and minority
population has suffered from lead in the water supply, has led to a new
round of accusations of environmental racism. This is yet another
latest example of the need for careful geographical interpretation of

the data but also of the historical geographical processes that underpin
this.
The powerful disciplinary knowledge here results in geographical
thinking which refuses to draw conclusions just from surface patterns.
Geographical thinking is always aware of the sometimes subtle
interplay of physical, economic, social and cultural factors that
influence opportunity and mobility .