Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles: Race, Class and the Environment

In the United States, few issues are more socially divisive than the location of hazardous waste facilities and other environmentally harmful enterprises. Do the negative impacts os such polluters fall disproportionately on African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans? This volume discusses how political, economic, social, and cultural factors in low-income neighbourhoods and how, as a result, low-income groups suffer disproportionately from the regressive impacts of environmental policy. David E. Camacho’s collection of essays examines the value-laden choices behind the public policy that determines placement of commercial environmental hazards, points to the underrepresentation of people of colour in the policymaking process, and discusses the lack of public advocates representing low-income neighbourhood and communities. This book combines empirical evidence and case studies -from the failure to provide basic services to the colonias in El Paso County, Texas, to the race for water in Nevada - and covers in great detail the environmental dangers posed to minority communities, including the largely unexamined communities of Native Americans. The contributors call for co-operation between national environmental interest groups and local grassroots activism. more effective incentives and disincentives for polluters, and the adoption by policymakers of an alternative,rather than privileged, perspectives that is more sensitive to the causes and consequences of environmental inequities. This book is a collection for those interested in the environment, public policy, and civil rights as well as for students and scholars of political science, race and ethnicity, and urban and regional planning.