Jenny Hager/The Image Worksby exposure to environmental pollutants. Many studies
have examined how environmental pollutants interact with
other socioeconomic factors to cause health problems. It
is challenging to show to what extent a polluted environ-
ment is responsible for the disproportionate health prob-
lems of poor and minority communities. For example, a
1997 study of residents in San Francisco’s polluted Bayview
Hunters Point area found that hospitalization rates for
chronic illnesses were the highest in the state. Researchers
failed, however, to link these illnesses to an increased expo-
sure to toxic pollutants, in part because an illness caused
by exposure to pollution is clinically identical to the same
illness that is caused by factors other than pollution.
In addition to their increased exposure to pollution,
low-income communities may not receive equal benefits
from federal cleanup programs. Several studies have re-
ported that toxic waste sites in white communities were
cleaned up faster and more thoroughly than those in
Latino and African-American communities.
Cases in the 1990s like the Houston incinerators and
the Bayview Hunters Point illnesses led then President
Clinton to sign an executive order requiring that all- Define environmental justice.
I
n the early 1970s, the Board of National
Ministries of the American Baptist Churches
coined the term eco-justice to link social and
environmental ethics. At the local level, eco-
justice encompasses environmental inequities faced by low-
income minority communities. Many studies indicate that
low-income communities and/or communities of color are
more likely than others to have chemical plants, hazardous
waste facilities, sanitary landfills, sewage treatment plants,
and incinerators (}ÕÀiÊ Ó°n). A 1990 study at Clark
Atlanta University, for example, found that six of Houston’s
eight incinerators were located in predominantly black
neighborhoods. Such communities often have limited in-
volvement in the political process and may not even be
aware of their exposure to increased levels of pollutants.
Because people in low-income communities fre-
quently lack access to sufficient health care, they may not
be treated adequately for exposure to environmental con-
taminants. The high incidence of asthma in many minority
communities, for example, may be caused or e xacerbated
Environmental Justice
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
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Poor minority neighborhoods often have the
most polluted and degraded environments.
Photographed in Kingsport, Tennessee.