dominant strategy (Finkel & Golding, 1994).
The EPA is mandated to enforce the nation’s environmental laws and regulations equally across the board (Collins, 2005). It is also required to protect all persons who live in the United States, not just individuals or groups who can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and experts. Environmental protection is a right, not a privilege reserved for a few who can “vote with their feet” and escape or fend off environmental stressors (Bullard, 2005, p. 20). Companies operating industrial facilities are required to obtain permits from state and sometimes federal environmental agencies and conform to local land-use regulations. However, even when operated according to accepted specifications, industrial facilities can adversely impact nearby residents when leaks, explosions, and accidents occur. Indeed, industrial facilities in some cases have posed serious safety risks to health, property, and quality of life (Baibergenova et al., 2003; Bullard et al., 2008; Edelstein, 2004; Elliot et al., 1993; Fielder et al., 2000; Gerschwind et al., 1992; Nelson et al., 1992; Vrijheid et al., 2002). As a result of these threats, public opposition to industrial facility siting has been nearly universal, especially for high-profile facilities such as incinerators and landfills (Bullard et al., 2008).
The 1990s saw a record number of communities of color “racially profiled” or targeted for polluting operations. Communities all across the country resisted, but most were still vulnerable to industrial facility siting because of their limited financial, scientific, technical, and legal resources (Cole & Foster, 2000; Lerner, 2010; Taylor, 1998). People-of-color environmental justice organizations and networks were still small and underfunded, and only a handful had paid staff. Generally, communities with the greatest needs have the least resources and organization capacity to effectively fend off environmental assaults.
In 1992, the National Law Journal uncovered glaring inequities in the way the EPA enforced its laws related to hazardous waste cleanup (Lavelle & Coyle, 1992). The authors wrote: “There is a racial divide in the way the U.S. government cleans up toxic waste sites and punishes polluters. White communities see faster action, better results and stiffer penalties than communities where blacks, Hispanics and other minorities live. This unequal protection often occurs whether the community is wealthy or poor” (pp. S1–S2). These findings supplement the findings of earlier studies and reinforce what many grassroots leaders have been saying all along: People of color differentially are impacted by industrial pollution, and they also can expect different treatment from the government.
New Technology, Research to Action, Policy, and Organizing Tools: 2000s
The 2000s ushered in new technological advances that offered tremendous benefits to the environmental justice movement and frontline communities. A record number of grassroots leaders from low-wealth and people-of-color communities were able to gain access to new computing and communication technology and the Internet, which enabled them to better connect with their constituencies and allies. New funding opportunities from private foundations allowed more grassroots community groups and their leaders to have access to cell phones, geographic information systems (GIS) and other spatial mapping tools, community-based participatory research (CBPR) (see Chapter 6), and multi-stakeholder networks, including community-university partnerships and collaborations.
A 2002 study, Air of Injustice: African Americans and Power Plant Pollution, found that more than 68 percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, the distance within which the maximum effects of the smokestack plume are expected to occur, compared with 56 percent of white Americans (Clean the Air et al., 2002). In September 2005, the Associated Press (AP) released results from its analysis of an EPA research project showing that African Americans were 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger (Pace, 2005). The study revealed that in 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest health danger. Hispanics in 12 states and Asians in seven states were also more likely to breathe dirty air than whites in some regions of the United States. The AP found that residents of at-risk neighborhoods were generally poorer and less educated, and unemployment rates in those districts were nearly 20 percent higher than the national average. The 2007 study Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987–2007 found that people of color make up the majority (56 percent) of those living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities (Bullard et al., 2008).
This study reveals that where facilities are clustered together, people of color make up 69 percent of these neighborhoods. This pattern underscores the cumulative impact from discriminatory zoning and land-use practices. People of color were also overrepresented in populations living within a one-mile radius (44 percent) and a three-mile radius (46 percent) of the nation’s 1,388 Superfund sites.
A 2008 study by University of Colorado researchers on race, income, and environmental inequality in the United States concluded that African Americans experience such a high air-pollution burden that black households with incomes of $50,000 to $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are, on average, more polluted than neighborhoods of white households with incomes less than $10,000 (Downey & Hawkins, 2008). In effect, research indicates that environmental inequality for African Americans could not be reduced to a “poverty thing.” That same year, Hoerner and Robinson (2008), in their study of differential impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations, found that 43 percent of African Americans live in urban “heat islands,” compared to only 20 percent of whites. Nationally, African Americans have a 5.3 percent higher prevalence of heat-related mortality than whites, and 64 percent of this disparity is traced to disparities in the prevalence of home air conditioning.
In 2011, a team of Duke University researchers also found significant air pollution burden borne by people of color compared to whites (Miranda et al., 2011). They found that
non-Hispanic blacks in the United States suffer worse air quality across multiple metrics, geographic scales, and multiple pollution metrics. Hispanics also suffer worse air quality with respect to particulate matter, but not necessarily so for ozone. It also appears that environmental justice concerns are more prominent along race/ethnicity lines, rather than measures of poverty. (Miranda et al., 2011, p. 1755)
In ranking the 75 worst polluting coal-fired power plants in the United States, a NAACP (2012) study, Coal Blooded: Putting Profits before People, found that four million people live within three miles of these plants. Two million people live within three miles of one of the top 12 “dirtiest” coal-fired power plants. Approximately 76 percent of these residents are people of color and the average per-capita income is $14,626, compared with the national average of $21,587. People of color are severely overrepresented in communities that host the “dirty dozen” coal power plants since they made up only 37 percent of the U.S. population in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).
A Coming Clean (2012) report, Who’s in Danger? A Demographic Analysis of Chemical Disaster Vulnerability Zones, found that fence-line residents who live closest to the facilities have average home values 33 percent below the national average and average incomes 22 percent below the national average. The percentage of blacks in the fence-line zones is 75 percent greater than for the United States as a whole, and the percentage of Latinos is 60 percent greater. The percentage of adults in the fence-line zones with less than a high school diploma is 46 percent greater than for the United States as a whole, but the percentage with a college or other post–high school degree is 27 percent lower; and the poverty rate in the fence-line zones is 50 percent higher than for the United States as a whole.
Oil trains also pose special risk to people of color, who often live on the “wrong side of the tracks.” The nation’s oil trains are more likely to run through communities of color and expose their residents to elevated risks from explosion and derailment “blast zones.” The blast zone is everything within a mile of tracks used
