ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the question at three levels of analysis, including the contiguous forty-eight states, where employ seven measures of environmental harms, 2,080 US counties for which Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data were available, and 410–414 US cities over 50,000 populations for which TRI data were available. It also examines the relationships of several categories of explanatory variables to these environmental hazards. The General Accounting Office (GAO) study revealed that one-fourth of the population in the communities under study had incomes below the poverty level. Finally, many studies have demonstrated that combined economic and racial inequities are associated with the environmental hazards. Environmental justice became a nationally recognized issue in 1982, when a protest in Warren County, North Carolina, resulted in a request for the US GAO to study hazardous waste landfill siting in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4. The chapter also presents an overview of this book.