Equity and the Environment: Volume 15

To date, the limited level of attention devoted to equity issues has perhaps been clearest in work done outside of the social sciences, but in our view, even social science work on environmental issues has devoted too little attention to the importance of equity and inequality. In an chapter that proved particularly influential in spelling out approaches for analyzing relationships between society and environment, for example, Dunlap and Catton (1983); see also Dunlap (1993) noted the importance of recognizing three “analytically distinguishable functions” of the biophysical environment, reflecting the fact that humans tend to use the environment as (1) a dwelling place, (2) a source of supplies, and (3) a repository for wastes. The typology has been influential in part because it is so simple and so useful. In addition, as noted in later work by Dunlap (1993) and Dunlap and Catton (2002), for example, one factor behind rising awareness of environmental problems, particularly in the context of the social problems literature, is that these three functions tend to be incompatible with one another. In present-day homes, for example, we tend to separate bathrooms from bedrooms from eating places, and more broadly, across many of the world's cultures, the pressure to devote more and more of the finite space available to one such function – for example, waste disposal – is in fact increasingly running into competing demands to use the same spaces for resource supplies or living spaces.

This article takes an autobiographical approach in describing the evolution of the equity and environmental justice debate. The intent is not only to provide a historical approach in identifying the emerging research and policy questions, but also to describe the author's own scholarly growth in studying them.

This chapter chronicles some of the early years of the author growing up in the racially segregated South Alabama and its influence on his thinking about race, environment, social equity, and government responsibility and his journey to becoming an environmental sociologist, scholar, and activist. Using an environmental justice paradigm, he uncovers the underlying assumptions that contribute to and produce unequal protection. The environmental justice paradigm provides a useful framework for examining and explaining the spatial relation between the health of marginalized populations and their built and natural environment, and government response to natural and man-made disasters in African American communities. Clearly, people of color communities have borne a disproportionate burden and have received differential treatment from government in its response to health threats such as childhood lead poisoning, toxic waste and contamination, industrial accidents, hurricanes, floods and related weather-related disasters, and a host of other man-made disasters. The chapter brings to the surface the ethical and political questions of “who gets what, why, and how much” and why some communities get left behind before and after disasters strike.

There is growing interest in diversity in the environmental field. The issue has become more pertinent as country undergoes noticeable demographic changes. Researchers have been interested in diversity for sometime too. This chapter traces the evolution of research on diversity and the environment. It discusses the results of new studies examining students' attitudes toward their work in environmental organizations as well as their salary expectations. The chapter also analyzes the demographic characteristics of the leadership of environmental institutions as well as their hiring and recruiting practices.

This chapter examines relationships between gender equity and environmental concerns as expressed through two different views of ecofeminism, those of a natural scientist and a social scientist. Personal experiences are recorded and analyzed to show similarities and differences in life and career trajectories, in part influenced by ecofeminist thought. In tracing this impact, we observed that much of the current philosophical and social science framework is less applicable to a natural science perspective. Natural systems repeat and nest at varieties of scales; thus the connectivity within any system parallels, reflects, mirrors the connectivity of other systems. These parallel systems can be nested in fractal-like natural worlds, where connections within are reflected between, and the patterns of the system are replicated in each. Thus, when we look across the range of interconnected systems, the axes are not intersecting at all, but simply reflective parallels. Such may be the case with the axes of oppression emphasized by many ecofeminists. We thus propose an extension to ecofeminist thinking – the notion of system reflectivity that encompasses, but is broader than, the idea of simultaneously operating axes of oppression.

The urban heat island is an unintended consequence of humans building upon rural and native landscapes. We hypothesized that variations in vegetation and land use patterns across an urbanizing regional landscape would produce a temperature distribution that was spatially heterogeneous and correlated with the social characteristics of urban neighborhoods. Using biophysical and social data scaled to conform to US census geography, we found that affluent whites were more likely to live in vegetated and less climatically stressed neighborhoods than low-income Latinos in Phoenix, Arizona. Affluent neighborhoods had cooler summer temperatures that reduced exposure to outdoor heat-related health risks, especially during a heat wave period. In addition to being warmer, poorer neighborhoods lacked critical resources in their physical and social environments to help them cope with extreme heat. Increased average temperatures due to climate change are expected to exacerbate the impacts of urban heat islands.

Environmental and social problems are tightly linked in coupled social–ecological systems in the Arctic. This chapter will discuss the importance of equity as a factor in the adaptive capacity of a region undergoing relatively rapid climate change and simultaneous land-use change (petroleum development) in the northwest Russian Arctic. Relative to North America, attempts to implement some kind of economic or legal equity with regard to massive industrial development are token at best. Unfortunately, in the current situation, legal rights to land and resources are neither likely to materialize nor, even if they did, to facilitate adaptive capacity on the part of Nenets herders. As such, herders lack power over important decisions pertaining to the manner in which development proceeds on their traditional territories.

Russia's northern lands have been developed along starkly different lines than those of Europe and North America. Yet the limited literature of resilience in northern social–ecological systems is derived almost exclusively from North American experiences with co-management. Recent work on the Yamal Peninsula indicates that even with a sustained commitment to active engagement, only incremental change is expected. Western-style legislative campaigns and overnight blanket solutions are far less likely to bear fruit and may, in fact, be counterproductive. The prescriptive approaches from four different analyses of the Yamal situation are compared, with special attention devoted to their respective assessments of resilience. Fortunately, the retention of youth within the nomadic population of tundra Nenets appears to be high, providing a positive indicator of overall resilience in this particular social–ecological system.

To date, many environmental policy discussions consider inequalities between groups (typically by comparing the average or aggregate resource use of one group to another group), but most ignore disproportionalities within groups. Disproportionality, as discussed in a small but growing body of work, refers to resource use that is highly unequal among members of the same group, and is characterized by a positively skewed distribution, where a small number of resource users create far more environmental harm than “typical” group members. Focusing on aggregated or average impacts effectively treats all members of a group as interchangeable, missing the few “outliers” that actually tend to be responsible for a large fraction of overall resource use. This chapter offers reasons why we should or should not expect disproportional production of environmental impacts (from both mathematical and sociological perspectives), looks at empirical evidence of disproportionality, and offers a framework for detecting disproportionality and assessing just how much difference the outliers make. I find that in cases where the within-group distribution of resource use is highly disproportionate (characterized by extreme outliers), targeting reduction efforts at the disproportionate polluters can offer opportunities to decrease environmental degradation substantially, at a relatively low cost.

By respecting nature's limits and investing in nature's wealth, we can protect and enhance the environment's ability to sustain human well-being. But how humans interact with nature is intimately tied to how we interact with each other. Those who are relatively powerful and wealthy typically gain disproportionate benefits from the economic activities that degrade the environment, while those who are relatively powerless and poor typically bear disproportionate costs. All else equal, wider political and economic inequalities tend to result in higher levels of environmental harm. For this reason, efforts to safeguard the natural environment must go hand-in-hand with efforts to achieve more equitable distributions of power and wealth in human societies. Globalization – the growing integration of markets and governance worldwide – today poses new challenges and new opportunities for both of these goals.