Environmental Justice and Government Behavior: A Summary of New Findings

Abstract

For nearly two decades, environmental justice advocates have charged that low-income and minority groups suffer a disproportionate burden from environmental risks associated with exposure to air, water, and land pollution as well as proximity to hazardous waste and other pollution generating facilities. Claims of these inequities have been amplified by a growing social movement that began with widely publicized protests in Warren County, North Carolina, where a predominantly black community mobilized in large numbers to fight the siting of a PCB landfill. Since that time, grassroots organizations have sustained and brought national attention to the environmental justice movement, which is often characterized as a new kind of social campaign embodied by the convergence of civil rights and environmental activism. Government at all levels have taken notice of environmental justice concerns, and responded with a variety of initiatives to these inequities (real and perceived). This policy report briefly summarizes new research that examines an understudied dimension of the environmental justice argument: that government behavior contributes to the alleged inequities.