Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse

This is a book about the poor and people of color and their struggle to take control of one of the most basic aspects of their lives: the quality of their environment. The authors tell us that we cannot assume that everyone is equally protected from harmful pollutants by laws or regulations. And, while conventional wisdom holds that the supposedly unempowered are also unconcerned about environmental quality issues, these people have found new and less conventional channels, such as the church and neighborhood groups, for advocating for environmental justice. Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards is dedicated to exposing the fact of environmental inequity and its consequences in the face of general neglect by policymakers, social scientists, and the public at large.This collection of sixteen articles, the majority of them written by scholars of color, reviews the differential impacts of environmental insults on people of color, such as the consumption of toxic fish from the Detroit River, fallout from hazardous waste incineration in Louisiana, pesticide exposure among farm workers, and the effects of uranium production in Navajo communities. Further, the authors illuminate the failure of traditional, political, economic, and environmental institutions to address these social and life-threatening conditions and advocate new approaches for creating environmental justice.