ABSTRACT
Environmental justice is a recently coined term used to convey the idea of distributional equity in the quality of the setting in which people work and live, and especially that all people should be treated fairly and involved in the process of designing, applying and enforcing environmental regulations (Bullard 1995; Rhodes 2005). Early use of the term in the US emerged from a study that found a high association between race, income, and environmental risk (CEQ 1971). A number of earlier investigations found that a disproportionate number of hazardous facilities were located near low-income and minority populations (Bowman 1997; EJRC 2002; Hofrichter 1993). A church-sponsored study that examined the race and income of communities near several hundred listed hazardous waste sites helped to raise environmental justice as a public issue (UCC 1987).
