Browsing by Subject "Environmental justice"

As one of the windiest places in the world, it is no surprise that companies have flocked to Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow neck of land connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Primarily foreign corporations have installed more than1500 wind turbines in less than ten years' time. While wind energy appears an ethereal, amorphous, and limitless resource, the wind can only become electricity through turbines that require vast tracts of land. The question of land ownership — a historical flashpoint in the region — has amplified tensions between residents, straining the already frayed web of social relations that have long bound this indigenous Zapotec community to one another.

Many of the indigenous Zapotec residents are thrilled these once bothersome winds are becoming productive — as profits, job security, and perhaps their shot at progress. Landowners are among the most ardent supporters of wind energy development, tending their livestock in the morning, leveraging their land in exchange for more favorable lease agreements with executives in the afternoon. Opponents of the industry liken their boosters to an earlier colonial power, asking, "What are we going to eat if you turn everything into gold?" – depicting wind energy as merely the latest in a long history of dispossessions. For them, the wind has always been productive, an actor in their everyday lives: it awakens the fruits of the sea, sustaining fishermen and feeding their families; it causes illness and destroys property, and it conjures residents to recall the joys of living in this place. What Istmeños are aware of are the stark geopolitical realities that have brought wind turbines to their doorstep.

In a moment when Mexico's oil reserves are dwindling and the state searches for alternative revenues, the case of wind energy development on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec complicates the utopian narrative that industry and government advocates recount regarding the so-called win-win possibilities for green energy development across the global South. What happens when the wind is transformed from its unruly natural state into a natural resource? Far from an isolated case, this dissertation draws upon broader theories of power, both electrical and economic, to show how individuals, institutions, and experts are laying claim to nature's force. Neither the fable of green techno-optimism nor a return to some mythical nature adequately explains the messiness of the everyday realities I observed. Based on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the generative possibilities of the wind, reconfiguring social relations through technological change. Ultimately, however, it is the imponderability of the natural world, its scale and power, and the very real consequences that efforts to mitigate global climate change are having in one particular place that I hope to convey in this work.

Riceboro is a small, rural, and predominantly African-American community in coastal Liberty County, Georgia. With two resident manufacturing industries producing over 75% over the county’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) emissions, Riceboro is plagued by public health concerns, and residents have raised questions about environmental and social equity. This master’s project explores several components critical to characterizing, documenting and resolving possible environmental injustice.

A key component in environmental justice case studies is the qualification of the sociopolitical context in which both the impacted community and the environmental risk factor(s) arose. In completing the picture of environmental justice issues, social sciences frame biological and natural scientific inquiry. A community’s specific history is critical to the accurate assessment and understanding of environmental justice issues. Not only can such a study help mitigate immediate environmental concerns, but it also enables a community help articulate its own identity and inform the policy process. As environmental management involves the management of people, such sociological perspective is critical to advancing essential elements of environmental justice.

This case-study uses anthropological, historical and sociological methods to characterize Riceboro and Liberty County, Georgia, in socio-historical terms and to trace the evolution of local political and economic systems within the context the of the American South’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization in the mid-20th century. The project further analyzes the existing environmental concerns to verify suspected environmental inequity, examines the paradigm in which it arose, and suggests policies for the fostering of environmental justice in the community. The findings may be used in tandem with other lines of scientific inquiry to develop policies for alleviating adverse conditions and circumventing future environmental injustice. Finally, this project provides a working model for similar socio-historical surveys for application in environmental justice assessments.

Publicly-available TRI emissions, health and census data reveal high risk factors in Liberty County are unequally distributed across ethnic and income levels. Further, as Riceboro has been a demographically and cultural stable community for over 200 years, patterns of economic, social and political behaviors including risk aversion and political passivity are entrenched and need careful consideration in initiating successful environmental justice policies.

This dissertation is comprised of three research papers that entail implications for public policy. The first two papers are related to environmental policy, and specifically air pollution. The marginal willingness to pay to reduce air pollution is often estimated from the expenditures consumers undertake to avoid exposure to changes in air quality. Consumer awareness of air quality changes is commonly assumed even though limited attention causes decision-making in many settings to vary with the salience of features entering the utility function. The first paper (``Defensive Expenditures, Salience, and Limited Attention'') studies how defensive expenditures vary with the salience of air quality information while controlling for air quality, itself. It uses a 10-year panel data of defensive expenditures, comprised of masks and air-filter purchases from California. Salience is measured in three different ways. First, internet search intensity data from Google is used as a proxy for salience. Second, appearances of tweets about air pollution to Twitter users are used to measure salience. Finally, exogenous media shocks because of California fires are used as a proxy for pollution salience. Individuals are shown to exhibit inattention to air quality, causing estimates to understate willingness to pay for air quality improvements by 20\%.

The second paper (``Air Pollution and Averting Behavior Disparities: Evidence from NYC Transportation'') addresses the inequality in the burdens of air pollution. Exposure to air pollution is a function of averting behaviors that are likely to vary by income due to heterogeneous ability to pay and marginal utility of income. Consequently, poor and minorities may be relatively more exposed to pollution than other demographic groups even conditional on ambient concentrations. Using data on New York City taxi ridership and use of city bicycles, the paper identifies heterogeneous changes in transportation mode decisions across income groups in response to air pollution, exposure to which varies by mode. It shows that (1) high air pollution causes bike ridership to decrease and commute-related taxi trips to increase. (2) The increase in taxi trips is more pronounced in high income neighborhoods than in low income areas. These results suggest that transportation modes that involve higher exposure to air pollution are less desirable when air quality is low and that the utilization of alternative transportation modes to avert air pollution exposure is unequal across income groups.

The third paper (``Do Mask Mandates Work to Contain the Spread of COVID-19?'', with Qingran Li) is related to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disruptions, and studies the effects of mask mandates. With struggling economies and high unemployment rates, policy makers are seeking means to reopen the economy safely. In the absence of vaccines, discussions about mask mandates among non-pharmaceutical interventions emerged, and research is needed for informed, evidence based policy. The paper uses COVID-19 cases data, mobility data, and mask mandates data at the county level for all counties in the United States. It provides evidence that masks reduce cases, and cases conditional on the mobility of residents. The results show that while mobility marginally increases COVID cases, this marginal increase is reduced by 82\% when there is a public mask mandate. The paper also uses the synthetic control method for comparison, and finds causal evidence that mask mandates reduce COVID-19 cases. These findings have direct implications for disease control, and suggest that a mask mandate policy can reduce infection risks, when combined with economic reopening policies.

This dissertation is an empirical study of the livestock industry and its environmental impacts on residents. Concentrated animal feeding operations, abbreviated as CAFOs, are livestock production facilities where large numbers of animals are raised in confined spaces. Although the hog and poultry industries provide jobs and economic benefits, they also produce significant air pollution, contaminate waterways, and affect people's quality of life. North Carolina (NC) is currently the third largest hog producing state in the nation and also hosts a high concentration of poultry farms. Most of the animal farms are located in the eastern area of the state, which is also the area where many low-income people and people of color (POC) reside.

Because of environmental pollution produced by CAFOs, local real estate markets could be affected. Chapter 4 examines how having CAFOs nearby could affect housing price. In this co-authored paper, we utilize housing transaction data from CoreLogic and study the impacts of CAFOs on housing price. We consider co-location of hogs and poultry and separately examine the impacts for houses on private wells and community water systems as water contamination is channeled as an important exposure route. Results show significant housing price reductions for nearby housing properties. The costs increase disproportionately for really large CAFO exposure and are even larger for the houses with private wells. We find that being exposed to the highest levels of exposure to hogs could cause housing price decreases ranging from 13% to 50% for houses with private wells, while only a 13% to 27% price decrease for community-water-dependent houses, depending on the distance between CAFOs and the residential property.

In NC, most of the farms are located in the eastern region, where many communities of color and low-income populations live, and such high concentration raises environmental justice concerns. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between race and income and exposure to CAFOs. In this co-authored paper, we collect information on both hog and poultry farms, use novel micro-data from InfoUSA, and investigate how exposure varies by both income and race. We find POC are more likely to be exposed to both hogs and poultry. Results show strong evidence of high exposure for low-income Hispanic households, compared to white households. Higher income helps reduce the exposure gap for Hispanics, but does not similarly help Black residents, suggesting such uneven exposure patterns are more related to race other than class.

Climate change brings another challenge to CAFOs. During the past two hurricane events in NC, Hurricane Matthew (2016) and Hurricane Florence (2018), CAFOs caused large damages to local communities and contaminated neighborhood drinking water sources. In my job market paper, I first use individual demographic data from InfoUSA to examine household's out-migration behaviors after floods. Results suggest floods make people move out, especially for those with CAFOs around or with private wells. Besides out-migration behaviors, this study also examines how household race and income composition change after floods. Results show more lower-income and POC households move into flooded areas, especially places near animal farms, after floods. Such migration patterns highlight equity concerns under climate change and in the future hurricane events.

Critical race scholarship of the past 20 years offers a robust foundation for interrogating connections between race, place, and environment, and their constitutive impacts on the lived experiences of people of color, particularly black and brown peoples. Less explored are the intersections of race and legal jurisdiction in the production of place inequities. Current scholarship from local government law, geography, environmental justice, and related disciplines suggests understanding the structure and process of municipalities may clarify how local jurisdiction shapes racial inequities in the built environment. This dissertation assesses the efficacy of the municipality as a political institution for equitable, community-sustaining, local development, particularly for black communities. Focused primarily in North Carolina, I assess three interrelated questions: First, I ask whether black and Latinx communities receive the same built environmental benefits from municipal incorporation as white communities. Second, I turn to two black towns in North Carolina to assess the extent to which black communities can rely on independent municipal incorporation to fulfill their aspirations for autonomy and resilient placemaking, focusing specifically on the development of the towns’ local water systems. Third, I consider the efficacy of black community-based institutions in North Carolina and Alabama to provide alternative forms of governance to address structural underdevelopment of black communities, perpetuated by often hostile, white-controlled governments.

Abstract

This dissertation is a case study of processes of inequality in disaster response in neighborhoods recently devastated by natural disaster. The context is New York City beginning from the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy on October 29, 2012. Specifically, this is a multilevel, multi-process comparative examination of emergent racial and class inequality (1) between two storm-impacted neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula and Brooklyn, and (2) two adjacent neighborhoods within The Rockaways. The fulcrum of the study is to understand a cumulative process by which racial minority and urban poor residents residing in cities fare worse after a disaster relative to their white and non-poor neighbors. To examine this question, over the course of two years this study collected data through interviews with 120 respondents who are residents, community leaders, field-site managers, workers and volunteers from various disaster relief entities (FEMA, New York State agencies, a large NGO, and local NPOs including small and Large Churches) working and living in these post-disaster contexts.

The first part of the analysis traces how the spatial organization, practice and culture of federal and state institutional actors privilege white and middle class residents over minorities and the poor. For this analysis, I comparatively analyze the process of response building through agency and organizational ties across Canarsie in Brooklyn and Westville and Eastville in "The Rockaways." The aspects of response that I compare primarily focus on decisions, actions, beliefs and expectations of management of these relief centers run by FEMA, Churches and local state governmental agencies in the respective neighborhoods. These managers are "on the ground" field site managers for the various centers.

Drilling down from the institutional to the social network environment, a significant part of this research focuses on relational-level comparisons of resident-responder interactions and informational and resource exchanges in and around warming and distributional centers of one central large NGO and one central local NPO located in Westville and Eastville, on the Rockaway Peninsula. This part of the study uses the setting of a natural disaster to examine how and why poor and minority residents living in proximity to affluent and white residents are less inclined to convert social network opportunities into social capital. Although these neighborhoods receive similar types of aid through a large NGO and FEMA, the combination of racial and class characteristics of these neighborhoods and their residents influence the relational dynamics of response, with race and class consequences in receiving disaster assistance.

The main conclusions from this research are (1) at the institutional network level, organizational social capital through organization agglomeration, hosting and coalition building led to a "nucleus of relief" in communities endowed with spatial privilege and the presence of large churches. (2) At the social network level, while all residents generate and benefit from crisis capital, which has short term benefits, whites are better positioned to create social capital which has long-term benefits, despite desegregation of interactional space.

Together these findings challenge current explanations of minority network disadvantage which emphasize macro-level segregation and deficient networks. The findings of this research in fact suggest that despite opportunities for "mixing," inequalities emerge through racialized interactions that inhibit translation and development of new social ties into lasting resources among low-income minorities who are living and surviving in the same areas as whites. The findings also contribute to the disaster literature by showing how race infiltrates institutional and spatial aspects of response that are different from arguments of prejudicial discrimination or merely poor coordination. The emphasis on structural racialization processes is also a much needed consideration in disaster research which tends to focus on quantifying disaster outcomes by racial characteristics of individuals or community demographic composition.