Which came first, people or pollution? A review of theory and evidence from longitudinal environmental justice studies

Aconsiderable number of quantitative analyses have been conducted in the past several decades that demonstrate the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of awide variety of environmental hazards. The vastmajority of these have been cross-sectional, snapshot studies employing data on hazardous facilities and population characteristics at only one point in time. Although some limited hypotheses can be testedwith cross-sectional data, fully understanding how present-day disparities come about requires longitudinal analyses that examine the demographic characteristics of sites at the time of facility siting and track demographic changes after siting. Relatively few such studies exist and those that do exist have often led to confusing and contradictory findings. In this paper we review the theoretical arguments,methods, findings, and conclusions drawn from existing longitudinal environmental justice studies. Our goal is tomake sense of this literature and to identify the direction future research should take in order to resolve confusion and arrive at a clearer understanding of the processes and contributory factors bywhich present-day racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental hazards have come about. Such understandings also serve as an important step in identifying appropriate and effective societal responses to ameliorate environmental disparities. Environmental justice has become firmly established in the academic literature. In the past two decades, hundreds of journal articles and books have been published on this topic across multiple disciplines. Systematic reviews of quantitative studies confirm the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of a wide variety of pollution and environmental hazards (Mohai and Bryant 1992, Lester et al 2001, Ringquist 2005). At the same time, fears about the health consequences and other quality of life impacts along with concerns about the justice implications of disproportionate environmental burdens have spawned a social movement and considerable public policy efforts around this issue (Taylor 2000, Brulle and Pellow 2006, Bullard et al 2011). The existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental burdens has led to searches for explanations of why and how these disparities have come about. Understanding the causes of such disparities has not only been of interest to academics but also to policy makers who seek solutions to environmental injustices. A variety of theoretical explanations of the causes of environmental disparities have been offered that take into account economic, sociopolitical, and racialdiscriminatory factors. These are discussed more fully below. An important step toward understanding the causes of environmental disparities is to establish the general processes by which the disparities occur. It is understood that these disparities may have come about in one of two ways: (1) at the time of siting, hazardous waste sites, polluting industrial facilities, and other locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) have been disproportionately placed near where minorities and poor people live; or (2) demographic changes after siting have led to increasing concentration of minorities and the poor around these sites (Oakes et al 1996, Been and Gupta 1997, Pastor et al 2001, Mohai OPEN ACCESS