ABSTRACT
Early work in environmental justice focused on the immediate need of analysing the distribution of environmental burdens, such as toxic facilities or landfills, to see if low-income and ethnic/racial minority communities live with a disproportionately high concentration of environmental hazards. Historical approaches provide an important and useful mechanism for understanding the origins, causes, and legacies of present day environmental injustices, both for process and outcome. However, working with historical data has its challenges. Gathering data can be time consuming and labour intensive. In more cases than not, disproportionate burdens for minority communities turned out to be the case and it provided important evidence for environmental justice activists and scholars. This chapter outlines some of the historical methods scholars have used to explicate the landscape of environmental injustices. It focuses on environmental justice work conducted for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, an urban long-term ecological research project sponsored by the US National Science Foundation.
