Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
16.1
Introduction
Members of the United Church of Christ (UCC) had been
involved in the Warren County protests. In 1987, the UCC's
Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) published a national-level
study of the racial composition of communities hosting haz-
ardous waste sites which found widespread racial inequity in
their distribution (CRJ, 1987). Several other academic studies
soon followed (e.g. Bullard, 1990; Mohai and Bryant, 1992; Hird,
1993) providing additional, though often mixed, evidence of the
relationship between race and environmental hazards. Reflect-
ing the increasing awareness of environmental justice issues, in
1993 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established
the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC).
This was followed by Executive Order 12 898, signed by Presi-
dent William J. Clinton in 1994 (Clinton, 1994), which instructs
federal agencies to adopt environmental policies regarding the
siting of hazardous facilities and environmental decision-making
that do not discriminate based on race.
Terminology concerning issues in environmental justice has
been sharply contested. The term 'environmental racism' pre-
dominated following the 1982 Warren County protests, and
connotes the relationship between environmental risk and the
intentional racial discrimination that was the focus of the civil
rights movement. However, this term was criticized for implying
thepresenceofintentionalracial discrimination when merely
the association between environmental hazards and minorities
may be identified. The term 'environmental equity' was coined
to address this issue, where racial disparities in the burden of
environmental risk are said to provide evidence of environmen-
tal inequity. The term 'environmental justice' is typically used
to describe the activist movement or the academic field which
concern themselves with issues of the relationship between race
and environmental hazards. Remote sensing and GIS technolo-
gies can be used to analyze the spatial relationship between
the spatial distributions of certain socioeconomic characteris-
tics and environmental amenities and risks. Thus, they are key
tools in environmental equity analyses, and inform the field of
environmental justice.
The most common quantitative approach to analyzing envi-
ronmental equity involves gathering data on the location or
spatial distribution of a particular type of environmental hazard,
as well as spatial data on socioeconomic characteristics, often
acquired from census data. Statistical analysis, often employing a
form of regression where a measure of the degree of hazard com-
poses the dependent variable, is then used to test for associations
between the degree of hazard and various socioeconomic charac-
teristics, typically while controlling for other non-socioeconomic
factors that one theorizes influence the location of the hazard.
A wide variety of research at the national and metropolitan
scope in the United States has demonstrated substantial environ-
mental inequity regarding a variety of hazards associated with
industrial activity, including hazardous waste facilities (treatment
storage and disposal facilities - TSDFs) (Goldman and Fitton,
1994), facilities releasing toxins to the environment that are listed
in the EPAs Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) database (Mennis,
2005), and superfund sites (O'Neil, 2007). Other researchers
have found racial inequity in the distribution of other types of
hazards, such as ambient air pollution (Jerrett
et al
., 2001), those
associated with transportation (Duthie, Cervenka and Walker,
2007), and industrial agriculture (Taquino, Parisi and Gill, 2002).
It should be noted that a number of studies have also found no
evidence, or inconclusive evidence, of widespread inequity in
various types of environmental hazards (Atlas, 2002; Hird, 1993;
Environmental justice concerns the rights of all persons to live in
a clean and safe environment and to have the ability to participate
in environmental decision-making in their community (Bullard,
1996; Liu, 2001; EPA, 2003). The issue of environmental justice
has gained increasingly widespread attention from government,
industry, and academic sectors over the past two decades as civil
rights groups have begun to recognize that racial inequality in the
distribution of environmental risk can, indeed, be considered a
civil rights issue. Analogously, political activists concerned with
environmental issues have recognized that issues of race, class,
and discrimination are intimately connected to environmental
policy (Bullard, 1990).
The issue of environmental justice is inherently spatial in
nature. One of the central questions of environmental jus-
tice research concerns describing, and understanding the causal
mechanisms behind, the spatial coincidence among patterns of
environmental hazards and demographic characteristics. Because
satellite remote sensing provides valuable information on the
spatial distribution of environmental characteristics, as well as
population, remote sensing can play a valuable role in envi-
ronmental justice research. Likewise, geographic information
systems (GIS), as the primary software tool for handling spatial
data, plays a key role in integrating remotely sensed and other
spatial data, and in quantifying and analyzing spatial patterns of
environmental hazards and amenities, as well as demographic
character.
The objective of this chapter is to describe the role of environ-
mental remote sensing andGIS in environmental justice research.
The following section serves as an introduction to the central
principles and issues in environmental justice research. The next
section addresses the primary ways in which remote sensing is
used in environmental justice research. The role of GIS in inte-
grating remotely sensed and other spatial data for environmental
justice analysis is described in the following section. The chapter
concludes with an environmental justice case study focusing on
environmental amenities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
16.2
Environmental justice
research
Recent academic interest in environmental justice is often traced
to a series of catalyzing events in the early and middle 1980s (see
McGurty, 2007). In 1982, African American residents of Warren
County, North Carolina protested about the siting of a landfill
built to hold polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated soil,
claiming that the siting of the landfill in an African American
community was a violation of civil rights. The protests drew the
attention of the national news media as well as the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
who initiated legal action to prevent the development of the
landfill. Although the landfill was developed, these events spurred
the US General Accounting Office (GAO), the research armof the
US Congress, to investigate racial disparities in environmental
hazards, which found that three out of the four largest hazardous
waste treatment facilities in the Southeast United States were
located in minority communities (GAO, 1983).
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