Executive Order 12898 and social, economic, and sociopolitical factors influencing Toxic Release Inventory facility location in EPA Region 6: A multi-scale spatial assessment of environmental justice.

摘要

Toxic Release Inventory facilities are among the many environmental hazards shown to create environmental inequities in the United States. This project examined four factors associated with Toxic Release Inventory, specifically, manufacturing facility location at multiple spatial scales using spatial analysis techniques (i.e., O-ring statistic and geographically weighted regression (GWR)). The first project in this study examined the influence of Executive Order 12898 on the spatial distribution of Toxic Release Inventory facilities and whether the influence or ideologies of environmental agency administrators, the Presidential, and Congress (political climate) played a role in the placement of facilities post-enactment in EPA Region 6. The results suggest that neither EO 12898 nor political climate influence facility location uniformly and that county and local level factors may be of importance. The second study examined three competing environmental inequity hypotheses. Discrimination, economic, and sociopolitical factors from environmental inequity literature were used to assess statewide effects at the local (census block) level in Oklahoma. Discrimination factors explained a greater proportion of the variability; however, the model including factors from all three models was superior. The third portion of this work combined the results and concepts from the first study with a real life situation to create a case-based teaching unit. The case study used environmental justice policy and environmental law in the context of protecting a small, Native American group in northern Oklahoma from persistent exposure to carbon black, a known carcinogen. The case study was designed to fill a gap in environmental justice curriculum materials and provide a resource for instructors to teach students about environmental justice concepts, Executive Order 12898 and existing environmental laws in environmental studies, sociology, and political science courses. This work contributes to environmental justice literature by evaluating efforts to achieve environmental justice, recognizing the role of the state in producing environmental justice outcomes, advancing our understanding of the spatial scale(s) of environmental justice, incorporating new methodology (from ecology) to address environmental justice research methodological concerns, examining trends in the socio-ecological landscape, and adding to curriculum materials on environmental justice.