Skip to main content

Air-Toxic Clusters Revisited: Intersectional Environmental Inequalities and Indigenous Deprivation in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regions

Race and Social Problems volume 11, pages 161–184 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

The research on quantitative intersectional environmental inequality outcomes examines how the spatial concentration of individuals occupying multiply marginalized social identities is associated with unequal exposure to environmental hazards. One recent exemplar study analyzed racialized and “intercategorical” environmental inequality outcomes in cancer-causing air pollution exposures for Whites, Blacks, Latinxs, and Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs) at the census tract level in the continental United States. That study found that—net of region, urban-industrial context, and other intercategorical variables—a variable representing elevated concentrations of economically deprived and foreign-born Latinxs, Latina single-mother families, and primarily Spanish-speaking households was the most consistent intercategorical predictor of tract exposure to spatial clusters of carcinogenic air pollution in 2005. The present study reproduces that nationwide analysis while being the first to include disadvantaged Indigenous peoples in the examination of intercategorical environmental inequality outcomes in the continental United States and for the ten U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regions. Logistic regression analyses indicate that the spatial concentration of disadvantaged Indigenous peoples was not a significant nationwide predictor of tract exposure to the carcinogenic air pollution clusters. However, the regional analyses revealed eight new patterns of intercategorical environmental inequality outcomes across the U.S. EPA regions, and the spatial concentration of disadvantaged Indigenous peoples was a significant positive predictor of tract exposure to carcinogenic air pollution clusters in the Mid-Atlantic region. These findings have implications for future environmental justice research, policy, and activism.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price includes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Notes

  1. Their analysis was quite rigorous, uncovering national and regional patterns of racialized environmental inequalities at and above the $25,000-income threshold (see Zwickl et al. 2014. pp. 497–502). Their results pertaining to racialized environmental inequalities at the lower-income ranges are most relevant to the present study.

  2. I analyzed the 2000 U.S. Census-based detailed data on racial and tribal identification. I found that the largest share of specified tribal identities was Lumbee (N = 154 of 788 American Indians or Alaska Natives; 19.54 percent) in 40 of the 46 Baltimore metro tracts that had above average levels of Indigenous deprivation in 2000 and were contained in Baltimore metro’s 2005 macro-scale air-toxic LCR cluster.

References

  • Anderton, D. L., Anderson, A. B., Oakes, J. M., & Fraser, M. R. (1994). Environmental equity: The demographics of dumping. Demography, 31(2), 229–248.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anselin, L. (1995). Local indicators of spatial association—LISA. Geographical Analysis, 27(2), 93–115.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apelberg, B. J., Buckley, T. J., & White, R. H. (2005). Socioeconomic and racial disparities in cancer risk from air toxics in Maryland. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113(6), 693–699.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ard, K. (2015). Trends in exposure to industrial air toxins for different racial and socioeconomic groups: A spatial and temporal examination of environmental inequality in the U.S. from 1995 to 2004. Social Science Research, 53, 375–390.

    Google Scholar 

  • BAIC. (2018). About us webpage. Retrieved April 14, 2018 from http://www.baicmuseum.org/aboutus.htm.

  • Bambra, C., Cairns, J. M., Kasim, A., Smith, J., Robertson, S., Copeland, A., et al. (2015). This divided land: An examination of regional inequalities in exposure to brownfield land and the association with morbidity and mortality in England. Health & Place, 34, 257–269.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beamish, T. D., & Luebbers, A. J. (2009). Alliance building across social movements: Bridging difference in a peace and justice coalition. Social Problems, 56(4), 647–676.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boone, C. G. (2002). An assessment and explanation of environmental inequity in Baltimore. Urban Geography, 23(6), 581–595.

    Google Scholar 

  • Castillo, J. M., Jivraj, S., & Fat, L. N. (2017). The regional geography of alcohol consumption in England: Comparing drinking frequency and binge drinking. Health & Place, 43, 33–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, W. (2013). The Changs next door to the Díazes: Remapping race in suburban California. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Choo, H. Y., & Ferree, M. M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of social inequalities. Sociological Theory, 28(2), 129–149.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke, A. Y., & McCall, L. (2013). Intersectionality and social explanation in social science research. Du Bois Review, 10(2), 349–363.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–167.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1279.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cutter, S. L., Boruff, B. J., & Shirley, W. L. (2003). Social vulnerability to environmental hazards. Social Science Quarterly, 84(2), 242–261.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, J. J., Roscigno, V. J., & Wilson, G. (2016). American Indian poverty in the contemporary United States. Sociological Forum, 31(1), 5–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • de Castro, M. C., & Singer, B. H. (2006). Controlling the false discovery rate: A new application to account for multiple and dependent tests in local statistics of spatial association. Geographical Analysis, 38(2), 180–208.

    Google Scholar 

  • deFur, P. L., Evans, G. W., Cohen Hubal, E. A., Kyle, A. D., Morello-Frosch, R. A., & Williams, D. R. (2007). Vulnerability as a function of individual and group resources in cumulative risk assessment. Environmental Health Perspectives, 115(5), 817–824.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeMaris, A. (1995). A tutorial in logistic regression. Journal of Marriage and Family, 57(4), 956–968.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennis, B. (2017). EPA environmental justice leader resigns, amid White House plans to dismantle program. Washington Post, March 9. Retrieved August 6, 2017 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/09/epas-environmental-justice-leader-steps-down-amid-white-house-plans-to-dismantle-program.

  • Downey, L. (2005). Single mother families and industrial pollution in metropolitan America. Sociological Spectrum, 25(6), 651–675.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downey, L. (2006). Environmental inequality in metropolitan America in 2000. Sociological Spectrum, 26(1), 21–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downey, L. (2007). US metropolitan-area variation in environmental inequality outcomes. Urban Studies, 44(5/6), 953–977.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downey, L., Crowder, K., & Kemp, R. J. (2017). Family structure, residential mobility, and environmental inequality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(2), 535–555.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downey, L., Dubois, S., Hawkins, B., & Walker, M. (2008). Environmental inequality in metropolitan America. Organization & Environment, 21(3), 270–294.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downey, L., & Hawkins, B. (2008). Single-mother families and air pollution: A national study. Social Science Quarterly, 89(2), 523–536.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ducre, A. K. (2018). The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 22–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eilperin, J., Mooney, C., & Mufson, S. (2017). New EPA documents reveal even deeper proposed cuts to staff and programs. Washington Post, March 31. Retrieved August 6, 2017 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/31/new-epa-documents-reveal-even-deeper-proposed-cuts-to-staff-and-programs.

  • Farley, R., & Frey, W. H. (1994). Changes in segregation of Whites from Blacks during the 1980 s: Small steps toward a more integrated society. American Sociological Review, 59(1), 23–45.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fenelon, J. V. (2016). Critique of Glenn on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(2), 237–242.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folch, D. C., Arribas-Bel, D., Koschinsky, J., & Spielman, S. E. (2016). Spatial variation in the quality of American Community Survey estimates. Demography, 53, 1535–1554.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fotheringham, A. S., Charlton, M., & Brunsdon, C. (2002). Geographically weighted regression: The analysis of spatially varying relationships. Hoboken: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuller, S. (2018). Using American Community Survey estimates and margins of error. Webinar presentation from the Decennial Statistical Studies Division, U.S. Census Bureau, April 18, Washington, DC. Retrieved February 3, 2019 from https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/20180418_MOE_Webinar_Transcript.pdf.

  • Gee, G. C., & Payne-Sturges, D. C. (2004). Environmental health disparities: A framework integrating psychosocial and environmental concepts. Environmental Health Perspectives, 112(17), 1645–1653.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geronimus, A. T. (1996). Black/white differences in the relationship of maternal age to birthweight: A population-based test of the weathering hypothesis. Social Science and Medicine, 42, 589–597.

    Google Scholar 

  • Getis, A. & Ord, J. K. (2000). Seemingly independent tests: Addressing the problem of multiple simultaneous and dependent tests. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Regional Science Association, February 29, Kauai, Hawaii.

  • Gilbert, A., & Chakraborty, J. (2011). Using geographically weighted regression for environmental justice analysis: Cumulative cancer risks from air toxics in Florida. Social Science Research, 40, 273–286.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilmore, R. W. (2002). Race and globalization. In R. J. Johnston, P. J. Taylor, & M. J. Watts (Eds.), Geographies of global change (pp. 261–274). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Golash-Boza, T. (2016). A critical and comprehensive sociological theory of race and racism. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(2), 129–141.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, D. T. (2002). The racial state. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grady, S. C., & Wadhwa, V. (2015). Today and tomorrow: Reflections on health and medical geography. Social Science and Medicine, 133, 212–2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grineski, S. E., Collins, T. W., & Morales, D. X. (2017). Asian Americans and disproportionate exposure to carcinogenic hazardous air pollutants: A national study. Social Science and Medicine, 185, 71–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grineski, S. E., Collins, T. W., & Olvera, H. A. (2015). Local variability in the impacts of residential particulate matter and pest exposure on children’s wheezing severity: A geographically weighted regression analysis of environmental health justice. Population and Environment, 37, 22–43.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grineski, S. E., Morales, D. X., Collins, T., Hernandez, E., & Fuentes, A. (2018). The burden of carcinogenic air toxics among Asian Americans in four US metro areas. Population and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-018-0308-4.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, J. L. (2016). Bureaucrats’ tacit understandings and social movement policy implementation: Unpacking the deviation of agency environmental justice programs from EJ movement priorities. Social Problems, 63, 534–553.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, J. L. (2017). “We do ecology, not sociology”: Interactions among bureaucrats and the undermining of regulatory agencies’ environmental justice efforts. Environmental Sociology, 3(3), 197–212.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill Collins, P. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill Collins, P. ([2000] 2009). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.

  • Homer, C., Huang, C., Yang, L., Wylie, B., & Coan, M. (2004). Development of a 2001 national land cover database for the United States. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 70(7), 829–840.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hooks, G. (1994). Regional processes in the hegemonic nation: Political, economic, and military influences on the use of geographic space. American Sociological Review, 59(5), 746–772.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hooks, G., & Smith, C. L. (2004). The treadmill of destruction: National sacrifice areas and Native Americans. American Sociological Review, 69(4), 558–575.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoover, E. (2018). Environmental reproductive justice: Intersections in an American Indian community impacted by environmental contamination. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 8–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hunter, S., & Waterman, R. W. (1992). Determining an agency’s regulatory style: How does the EPA water office enforce the law? Western Political Quarterly, 45(2), 403–417.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs, M. R. (2019). Resisting and reifying racialization among urban American Indians. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(4), 570–588.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jephcote, C., & Chen, H. B. (2012). Environmental injustices of children’s exposure to air pollution from road-transport within the model British multicultural city of Leicester: 2000–09. Science of the Total Environment, 414, 140–151.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, G., & Zeng, L. (2001). Logistic regression in rare events data. Political Analysis, 9, 137–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Konisky, D. M. (2015). Introduction. In D. M. Konisky (Ed.), Failed promises: Evaluating the federal government’s response to environmental justice (pp. 1–28). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kurtz, H. E. (2009). Acknowledging the racial state: An agenda for environmental justice research. Antipode, 41(4), 684–704.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landy, M. K., Roberts, M. J., & Thomas, S. R. ([1990] 1994). The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the wrong questions from Nixon to Clinton. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Lee, B. A., Reardon, S. F., Firebaugh, G., Farrell, C. R., Matthews, S. A., & O’Sullivan, D. (2008). Beyond the census tract: Patterns and determinants of racial segregation at multiple geographic scales. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 766–791.

    Google Scholar 

  • Li, J. (2002). State fragmentation: Toward a theoretical understanding of the territorial power of the state. Sociological Theory, 20(2), 139–156.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liévanos, R. S. (2015). Race, deprivation, and immigrant isolation: The spatial demography of air-toxic clusters in the continental United States. Social Science Research, 54, 50–67.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liévanos, R. S. (2017). Sociospatial dimensions of water injustice: The distribution of surface water toxic releases in California’s Bay-Delta. Sociological Perspectives, 60(3), 575–599.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liévanos, R. S. (2018a). Retooling CalEnviroScreen: Cumulative pollution burden and race-based environmental health vulnerabilities in California. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(4), 762.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liévanos, R. S. (2018b). Impaired water hazard zones: Mapping intersecting environmental health vulnerabilities and polluter disproportionality. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7(11), 433.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liévanos, R. S., & Horne, C. (2017). Unequal resilience: The duration of electricity outages. Energy Policy, 108, 201–211.

    Google Scholar 

  • List, J. A. (1999). Have air pollutant emissions converged among U.S. regions? Evidence from unit root tests. Southern Economic Journal, 66(1), 144–155.

    Google Scholar 

  • Logan, J. R. & Molotch, H. L. ([1987] 2007). Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Logan, J. R., & Zhang, C. (2010). Global neighborhoods: New pathways to diversity and separation. American Journal of Sociology, 115(4), 1069–1109.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makofsky, A. (1982). Struggling to maintain identity: Lumbee Indians in Baltimore. Anthropological Quarterly, 55(2), 74–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makofsky, A., & Makofsky, D. (1973). Class consciousness and culture: Class identifications in the Lumbee Indian community of Baltimore. Anthropological Quarterly, 46(4), 261–277.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malin, S. A., & Ryder, S. S. (2018). Developing deeply intersectional environmental justice scholarship. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 1–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mann, T. J. (2017). Eternal night: Ecosocialism and the specific ecological threat of Trumpism. Environmental Justice, 10(3), 63–67.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs, 30, 1771–1800.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mennis, J. L., & Jordan, L. (2005). The distribution of environmental equity: Exploring spatial nonstationarity in multivariate models of air toxic releases. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 249–268.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mervis, J., & the Science News Staff. (2017). Congress trumps president in backing science: Legislators ignore Trump’s call for cuts and give NIH, NASA research big increases. Science, 356(6337), 470–471.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mintz, J. A. ([1995] 2012). Enforcement at the EPA: High stakes and hard choices. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  • Mohai, P., Pellow, D., & Roberts, J. T. (2009). Environmental justice. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 34, 405–430.

    Google Scholar 

  • Molina, N. (2006). Fit to be citizens? Public health and race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morello-Frosch, R., & Jesdale, B. M. (2006). Separate and unequal: Residential segregation and estimated cancer risk associated with ambient air toxics in U.S. metropolitan areas. Environmental Health Perspectives, 114(3), 386–393.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mosher, C. (2001). Predicting drug arrest rates: Conflict and social disorganization perspectives. Crime & Delinquency, 47(1), 84–104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakano Glenn, E. (2002). Unequal freedom: How race and gender shaped American citizenship and labor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakano Glenn, E. (2015). Settler colonialism as structure: A framework for comparative studies of U.S. race and gender formation. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 52–72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norgaard, K. M., Reed, R., & Bacon, J. M. (2018). How environmental decline restructures Indigenous gender practices: What happens to Karuk masculinity when there are no Fish? Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 4(1), 98–113.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oberdalhoff, K. A. (2000). Native American program: Addressing the cultural and academic needs of Baltimore’s urban Indian students. Practicing Anthropology, 22(3), 16–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ogunwole, S. U. (2010). The American Indian and Alaska Native population: 2000. Census 2000 Brief. Washington, DC: DIANE Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ord, J. K., & Getis, A. (1995). Local spatial autocorrelation statistics: Distributional issues and an application. Geographical Analysis, 27(4), 286–306.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pellow, D. N. (2016). Toward a critical environmental justice studies: Black Lives Matter as an environmental justice challenge. Du Bois Review, 13(2), 221–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perlin, S. A., Woodrow Setzer, R., Creason, J., & Sexton, K. (1995). Distribution of industrial air emissions by income and race in the United States: An approach using the toxic release inventory. Environmental Science and Technology, 29(1), 69–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pulido, L. (2006). Black, brown, yellow & left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Register, Federal. (1995). Notice of proposed recision of OMB circular A-105 “Standard Federal Regions”. Federal Register, 60(55), 15171–15172.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ringquist, E. J. (1993). Environmental protection at the state level: Politics and progress in controlling pollution. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruiz-Muñoz, D., Marcè Gotsens, G. P., & Rodríguez-Sanz, M. (2012). Regional inequalities in the use of contraception in Spain: A multilevel approach. Health & Place, 18, 408–414.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scheberle, D. (2004). Federalism and environmental policy. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sellers, C., Dillon, L., Ohayon, J. L., Shapiro, N., Sullivan, M., Amoss, C., Bocking, S., Brown, P., De la Rosa, V., Harrison, J., Johns, S., Kulik, K., Lave, R., Murphy, M., Piper, L., Richter, L., Wylie, S., & EDGI. (2017). The EPA under siege: Trump’s assault in history and testimony. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative. Retrieved August 1, 2017 from http://100days.envirodatagov.org/epa-under-siege.html.

  • Shaikh, S. L., & Loomis, J. B. (1999). An investigation into the presence and causes of environmental inequity in Denver, Colorado. The Social Science Journal, 36(1), 77–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sigman, H. (2003). Letting states do the dirty work: State responsibility for federal environmental regulation. National Tax Journal, 56(1), 107–122.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, C. L. (2007). Economic deprivation and environmental inequality in postindustrial Detroit: A comparison of landfill and Superfund site locations. Organization & Environment, 20(1), 25–43.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spielman, S. E., & Folch, D. C. (2015). Reducing uncertainty in the American Community Survey through data-driven regionalization. PLoS ONE, 10(2), e0115626. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115626.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steinman, E. (2012). Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: Forms of domination, strategies of transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 117(4), 1073–1130.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steinman, E. W. (2016). Decolonization not inclusion: Indigenous resistance to American settler colonialism. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(2), 219–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stinchcombe, A. (1965). Social structure and organizations. In J. G. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizations (pp. 142–193). New York: Rand McNally.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sun, S., Chen, J., Johannesson, M., Kind, P., Xu, L., Zhang, Y., et al. (2011). Regional differences in health status in China: Population health-related quality of life results from the National Health Services Survey 2008. Health & Place, 17, 671–680.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tobler, W. R. (1970). A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region. Economic Geography, 46, 234–240.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. EPA. (2011). National-scale air toxics assessments. Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Retrieved June 22, 2011 from http://www.epa.gov/nata/.

  • Census, U. S. (2002). Technical documentation: Census 2000 summary file 3. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

    Google Scholar 

  • U.S. General Accounting Office. (2000). Environmental protection: More consistency needed among EPA regions in approach to enforcement. GAO/RCED-00–108. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

  • USGS. (1999). Major roads of the United States. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Retrieved February, 8 2012, from http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html.

  • USGS. (2011). NLCD 2001 land cover version 2.0. Sioux Falls, SD: U.S. Geological Survey.

  • Vickery, J., & Hunter, L. M. (2016). Native Americans: Where in environmental justice research? Society & Natural Resources, 29(1), 36–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waldron, I. (2018). Re-thinking waste: Mapping racial geographies of violence on the colonial landscape. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 36–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang, J., Lee, K., & Kwan, M.-P. (2018). Environmental influences on leisure-time physical inactivity in the U.S.: An exploration of spatial non-stationarity. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7(4), 143.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, H. L., Matheson, F. I., Moineddin, R., Dunn, J. R., & Glazier, R. H. (2011). Neighborhood deprivation and regional inequalities in self-reported health among Canadians: Are we equally at risk? Health & Place, 17, 361–369.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitford, A. B. (2007). Decentralized policy implementation. Political Research Quarterly, 60(1), 17–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner-city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zou, B., Peng, F., Wan, N., Mamady, K., & Wilson, G. J. (2014). Spatial cluster detection of air pollution exposure inequities across the United States. PLoS ONE, 9(3), e91917.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zwickl, K., Ash, M., & Boyce, J. K. (2014). Regional variation in environmental inequality: Industrial air toxics exposure in U.S. cities. Ecological Economics, 107, 494–509.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study was partially funded by the Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Program in the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs at the University of Oregon. I am grateful to Laura Pulido, Kari Norgaard, Toni Calasanti, Vincent Roscigno, and anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on previous drafts of this article. The author is solely responsible for any remaining errors or omissions in the article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, 640 Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, 1291 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403-1291, USA

    Raoul S. Liévanos

Authors
  1. Raoul S. Liévanos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raoul S. Liévanos.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 10.

Table 10 Number (N) and percent (%) of tracts in the continental United States with nonmissing data for poverty and racialized poverty estimates drawn from the 2008–2012 American Community Survey (ACS), conditional on meeting medium reliability coefficient of variation (CV) criteria
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Liévanos, R.S. Air-Toxic Clusters Revisited: Intersectional Environmental Inequalities and Indigenous Deprivation in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regions. Race Soc Probl 11, 161–184 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09260-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09260-5

Keywords

  • Regional racial formation
  • Indigenous peoples
  • Intersectionality
  • Environmental inequality
  • Environmental justice
  • Carcinogenic air pollution
  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency