Adam Green
Abstract:
Those who benefit from environmentally degrading activities do not typically bear the costs of the damage. Those who must live in ecologically disturbed and polluted areas are often disadvantaged in economic and justice systems. Environmental Justice (EJ) research in the past 40 years has consistently shown that minority communities in the US are at a significantly higher risk of exposure to hazardous substances from nearby factories and waste facilities. A prominent political economy hypothesis posits that social and economic inequality causes environmental degradation. In a society with high inequality, the people who live near the pollution and bear the costs of environmental degradation are going to have less power to prevent or limit the degrading activity relative to the ones who profit from the degradation. In this relationship, we would expect higher inequality to lead to greater environmental degradation. In this paper, we test these relationships at the Census tract and metropolitan levels in Ohio. We use a combination of GIS, logistic regression, and multilevel logistic regression to examine the relationship of demographic data (race, education, age, income, etc.), inequality, and segregation using the American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau and the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) from the EPA.