Sociological Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Genesis and Prospects

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Sociological Perspectives on Environmental
Justice Genesis and Prospects

• From Theory to Method Exploratory Workshop,
  Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC,
  October 29 Nov. 1, 2003

• Keith Warriner, Department of Sociology,
  University of Waterloo
• Alice Nabalamba, Health Statistics Division,
  Statistics Canada

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Implementation and Structure

• Generative Works
• Freeman (1972)
• Bullard (1983) 1990, 2000
• General Accounting Office (1983)
• United Church of Christ (1987)
• Mohai and Bryant (1992)
• Environmental Racism
• Social Justice Movement
• labour/workplace/poor/racial
  minorities/immigrants/aboriginal peoples/women
• Democratic transformations
• Productive Justice (Faber, 2002)

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• This movement, in hundreds of local and regional
  organizations, is typically led by women, working
  class people, and people of color. Many,
  particularly the women, have never been involved
  in any political issue before and have been
  galvanized primarily by concern for their
  childrens safety Although these leaders become
  involved because of a single issue or problem,
  they quickly recognize the interconnections with
  the other injustices they face daily. They
  realize that the route of their problem is the
  lack of organized political power, deteriorating
  neighborhood conditions, poverty and race .As a
  result these leaders now build bridges with civil
  rights and labor organizations, housing groups
  and those fighting for adequate health care for
  all.As they battle with various bureaucracies to
  resolve the crisis that brought them together,
  they begin to identify links among the issues and
  build an even broader coalition for change
  .These new alliances and cooperative work can
  achieve real democracy. (Gibbs, 1993 ix-x)

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Prominent Themes

• Environmental Equity Human Rights
• Distrust of the Status Quo
• Social Restructuring
• Tensions with Mainstream Environmentalism
• The Democratic Project
• Public Health Model

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Broad Theoretical Perspectives

• Economic/Market Dynamics
• Transaction costs Transportation Land/Property
  Opposition/Litigation (NIMBY)
• Socio-Political
• Path of Least Resistance
• Unintentional Selection
• Intentional Targeting
• Discrimination
• Environmental Racism

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Unanswered Questions Environmental Injustice or
Environmental Racism?

• With the exception of some subregional patterns
  reported by Anderson and others (1994), no
  consistent national level patterns of
  disproportionate distribution by race were found.
  The most significant relationships were found in
  the unemployment and industrial variables. Other
  than the countervailing findings, the most
  noteworthy contributions of this research was in
  showing that the appearance of the problem
  depends on how the study area was defined
  (Bowen, 2002 10)

• Contrarily, a handful of scholars have argued
  that race is less salient than class in hazardous
  facility siting. Others say that market dynamics
  explain away any allegations of environmental
  racism (see Anderton et al., 1994 Been, 1993).
  Yet the overwhelming majority (emphasis added) of
  Environmental Justice (EJ) studies by social
  scientists, legal scholars, government agencies,
  and nonprofit organizations corroborate the broad
  environmental racism thesis. (Pellow, Weinberg
  Schnaiberg, 2002 425)

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Accepted Wisdom

• Evidence of environmental injustice in racial
  minority and low income communities, plus.
• Spread to new communities (Krieg, 1995, 1998),
  but.
• Inability to demonstrate causal process and
  limitations to further answers based on current
  methods.

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Recommendations

• Conceptual
• Class and SES
• Units of analysis
• Process over outcomes
• Exposure over proximity
• Focus on health outcomes
• Theories
• Risk Society
• Social Constructionism

• Methodological
• Longitudinal designs
• Record linking
• Historical
• National level data
• Replication
• Measures
• Pollution sources
• Confounders (smoking, alcohol, obesity,
  cormobidities, etc.)
• Reliability Validity
• Analytical
• Mixed models structural equation modelling
  event history analysis, correspondence analysis
• Complex sampling errors
• GIS

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