From the inbox, an email reminder about a new issue of a new journal, Environmental Justice.  They thought I’d be interested in these two articles:

An Environmental Justice Analysis: Superfund Sites and Surrounding Communities in Illinois

Angela R. Maranville, Tih-Fen Ting, Yang Zhang. Environmental Justice. June 2009, 2(2): 49-58. doi:10.1089/env.2008.0547.

Abstract:  Since the inception of the environmental justice movement in the late 1980s, studies have been conducted at national, regional, state, and local levels. However, environmental justice within the state of Illinois is largely unresearched. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining whether the presence of a Superfund site affects the surrounding communities in the state of Illinois with the intent to aid future siting decisions of hazardous sites and the amelioration of current sites. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used to create buffer zones of one-, two-, and five-miles surrounding current Illinois Superfund sites. We then used these neighborhoods of the same size to analyze the current economic and racial demographics of Illinois communities that contain Superfund sites. Specifically, variables considered as indicators of environmental injustice were analyzed, including race, median household income, and homeownership. Our results support prior research that suggested race, rather than class, was the major indicator of environmental inequality. Additionally, as the distance from the Superfund site increases, the number of communities with socio-demographic disparities decreases. Our conclusions provide important theoretical implications for environmental justice research by distinguishing the racial factor from other socioeconomic factors (e.g., income and homeownership) and by identifying the socio-demographic characteristics associated with distance from a Superfund site.

I haven’t scrutinized the article, but I can confirm that I cannot make much sense of the abstract.  “This article [examines] whether the presence of a Superfund site affects the surrounding communities in the state of Illinois with the intent to aid future siting decisions of hazardous sites and the amelioration of current sites.”  Huh?

Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear Plants

Mary Alldred, Kristin Shrader-Frechette. Environmental Justice. June 2009, 2(2): 85-96. doi:10.1089/env.2008.0544.

Abstract:  The mining, fuel enrichment-fabrication, and waste-management stages of the US commercial nuclear-fuel cycle have been documented as involving environmental injustices affecting, respectively, indigenous uranium miners, nuclear workers, and minorities and poor people living near radioactive-waste storage facilities. After surveying these three environmental-injustice problems, the article asks whether US nuclear-reactor siting also involves environmental injustice. For instance, because high percentages of minorities and poor people live near the proposed Vogtle reactors in Georgia, would siting new reactors at the Vogtle facility involve environmental injustice? If so, would this case be an isolated instance of environmental injustice, or is the apparent Georgia inequity generally representative of environmental injustice associated with nuclear-reactor siting throughout the US? Providing a preliminary answer to these questions, the article uses census data, paired t-tests, and z-tests to compare each state’s percentages of minorities and poor people to the percentages living in zip codes and census tracts having commercial reactors. Although further studies are needed to fully evaluate apparent environmental injustices, preliminary results indicate that, while reactor-siting-related environmental injustice is not obvious at the census-tract level (perhaps because census tracts are designed to be demographically homogenous), zipcode-scale data suggest reactor-related environmental injustice may threaten poor people (p<0.001), at least in the southeastern United States.