Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: How consequential is racial inequality in environmental conditions?A Southern California study estimating lifetime cancer risk from air toxins shows, for example, that risk declines as income rises, but is still around 50 percent higher at all income levels for African Americans, Latinos and Asians.And lead poisoning, commonly triggered by conditions in older housing, is five times more common among Black children than white children. Disaster Vulnerability and Environmental JusticeThe social dynamics that underlie the disproportionate environmental hazards faced by low-income communities and minorities also play out in the arena of disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery.In a sense, environmental justice is about slow-motion disasters-and disasters reveal environmental injustice in a fast-forward mode.Both revolve around the axes of disparities of wealth and power.Lack of wealth heightens the risks that individuals and communities face for three reasons.First, it translates into a lack of purchasing power to secure private alternatives to public provision of a clean and safe environment for all.Second, it translates into less ability to withstand shocks (such as health bills and property damage) that wealth would cushion.Third, it translates through the "shadow prices" of costbenefit analysis into public policies that place a lower priority on protecting "less valuable" people and their assets.In the aftermath of Katrina, there is an added risk that transfers could turn New Orleans into a little more than a theme park for affluent tourists.In the vicious circle of disaster vulnerability, those with less wealth face greater risks, and when disaster strikes, their wealth is further sapped.But risk is not just about money: even middleclass African Americans, Latinos, and Asians face elevated environmental risks.This reflects systematic differences in power and the legacy of racial discrimination.Power also shows up in private decisions by firms choosing where to site hazards and how much to invest in environmental protection: their choices are constrained not only by government regulations, but also by informal governance exercised by mobilized communities, civil society, and the press (see Pargal et al. 1997;Boyce 2004).In both public and private arenas, then, power disparities drive outcome disparities-and the resulting patterns reflect race and ethnicity as well as wealth. 1 Why? Land, Markets, and PowerThe power explanation suggests that low-income people and communities of color are systematically disadvantaged in the political decision-making process.This argument can incorporate the other explanations: what seems to be rational land use, after
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1590628015