ABSTRACT
Environmental justice, with its emphasis on public health, social inequality, and environmental degradation, provides a framework for public policy debates about the impact of discrimination on the environmental health of diverse communities in the United States. Indeed, activists, academics, and some decision makers argue that biases within environmental policy making and the regulatory process, combined with discriminatory market forces, result in disproportionate exposures to hazardous pollution among the poor and communities of color. The environmental justice framework also raises the challenging question of whether disparities in exposures to environmental hazards may play an important, yet poorly understood, role in the complex and persistent patterns of disparate health status among the poor and people of color in the United States (Ecob and Davey, 1999; Kawachi and Marmot, 1998; Krieger, et al., 1993; Syme S, Berkman, 1976).
