ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the environmental justice movement's origins and illustrates, primarily through case studies, a relationship between environmental disparities of various types, communities of color, and low-income communities. The earliest pieces focused on a dispute in Afton, North Carolina, over the sitting of a soil dump contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in a largely African American community. Normative and prescriptive studies stress means to ameliorate a disproportionate, race- and class-based distribution of environmental hazards. For example, one strand in this literature provides guidance to grassroots organizations by explaining how they can achieve environmental justice within the current political system. Quantitative outcome equity studies, which have produced the majority of the quantitative environmental justice studies, test whether persons of color and the poor are disproportionately exposed to environmental harms in terms of either correlation or regression analysis using a cross-sectional design.
