Environmental Inequalities: Literature Review and Proposals for New Directions in Research and Theory

Abstract

The first battles that led to the formation of the Environmental Justice movement also produced the first studies of race and exposure to toxins. Subsequently, demographers, geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians and legal scholars have all contributed to an ever-expanding body of studies. We review the most important works that have been published in the 1990s, focusing especially on studies of waste sites, studies of toxic industrial emissions and, finally, on local histories that have begun to show in detail how environmental inequalities develop over time. We explore the ways that the close association between movement and research produced both gains and losses for that research. The political power and moral force of the movement gave the research effort great impetus, but it also defined the research agenda in ways that steered inquiry away from certain potentially important topics or themes. We end the paper with brief discussions of two of these neglected topics: first, investigating where economic elites and their exclusive residential communities are situated geographically in relation to toxic hazards; second, setting environmental inequality in global and historical contexts and theorizing it as one facet or moment of the larger social inequalities that have characterized modern society from its inception.