Environmental Inequality Formation Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice

Environmental Inequality Formation

Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice

DAVID N. PELLOW University a/Colorado at Boulder

There are a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the literature on environmental justice and environmental inequalities in need of refinement. Using data from the recycling industry, the author proposes an environmental inequality formation (ElF) perspective to address these issues. The ElF perspective synthesizes three major points that are largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: (a) the importance of process and history, (b) the role of multiple stakeholder relationships, and (c) a life-cycle approacn to the study of hazards. The ElF model captures sociological dynamics in ways that suggest that environmental racism and inequalities originate and emerge in a much mort complex process than previously considered. Theory building in this area of researcli will aid scholars in understanding the mechanisms that produce environmental inequalities as WtU as their socioettvironmental consequences.

The purpose of this article is to address a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in existing research on environmental justice or envi ronmental inequalities. I will present several problematic trends in this literature and propose a remedy in the form of a model I term an environmental inequality formation (EIF) perspective. I will illustrate the model's utility with data from my research on the recycling industry.

THE NEED FOR BASIC DEFINITIONS

Most scholars who use the terms environmental justice or environmental racism do so with little attention to how to define these concepts, and they often use them interchangeably. Even fewer scholars use or properly define terms like environmental injustice and environmental inequality. My first task in this arti cle is to operationalize or define these terms so that we may have a shared

Author's Note. I would like to thank Fred Buttel, Bill Freudenburg, Wendy Espeland, Gary Alan Fine, Albert Hunter; Aldon Morris, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Allan Schnaiberg, Ira Silver; Andy Szass, Dorceta Taylor; and Adam Weinberg for their inspiration and comments on various incarnations of this article An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Ameri can Sociological Association in San Francisco.

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understanding of the basic sociological concepts we use so casually in these dis courses. A rare effort to define these terms occurs in Bunyan Bryant's (1995) book Environmental Justice. He defines environmental racism as follows:

It is an extension of racism. It refers to those institutional rules, regulations, and policies of government or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain com munities for least desirable land uses, resulting in the disproportionate exposure of toxic and hazardous waste on communities based upon prescribed biological char acteristics. Environmental racism is the unequal protection against toxic and haz a_;.dous waste exposure and the systematic exclusion of people of color from deci sions affecting their communities. (p. 6)

Environmental racism is an example of an environmental injustice (an envi ronmental injustice occurs when a particular social group-not necessarily a raciallethnic group-is burdened with environmental hazards). From a social movement perspective, environmental racism is what activists are fighting against. But what are they fighting jar? That brings us to environmental justice. Again, Bryant's (1995) clarity is useful here:

Environmental justice (EJ) ... refers to those cultural norms and values, rules, regulations, behaviors, policies, and decisions to support sustainable communities where people can interact with confidence that the environment is safe, nurturing, and productive. Environmental justice is served when people can realize their highest potential .... EJ is supported by decent paying safe jobs; quality schools and recreation; decent housing and adequate health care; democratic decision making and personal empowerment; and communities free of violence, drugs, and poverty. These are communities where both cultural and biological diversity are respected and highly revered and where distributed justice prevails. (p. 6)

Whereas the term environmental racism focuses on the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on communities of color, environmental jus tice is focused on ameliorating potentially life-threatening conditions or on improving the overall quality oflife for the poor and/or people of color. Environ mental racism is based on problem identification; environmental justice is based on problem solving (Bryant, 1995, p. 6). Thus, environmental justice seeks both "justice as fairness," and justice as "mutual respect ... owed to human beings as moral persons" (Rawls, 1971, p. 511).

There is a third term that, unfortunately, is used less frequently-environmental inequality. Environmental.inequality focuses on broader dimensions of the inter section between environmental quality and social hierarchies. Environmental inequality addresses more structural questions that focus on social inequality (the unequal distribution of power and resources in society) and environmental burdens. That is, unlike environmental racism, for example, environmental in equalities include any form of environmental hazard that burdens a particular social group. In this article, I argue that, in order to achieve greater theoretical sophistication and policy relevance, environmental justice research must move

Pellow I ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY FORMATION 583

toward a deeper understanding of environmental inequality. Thus far, however, the environmental justice literature has principally focused on the racially une qual outcomes of environmental decision making. In the next section, I present a case study to illustrate the pitfalls and promises of environmental justice research.

ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY FORMATION: A CASE STUDY

Patricia James is an African American woman working in a recycling plant operated by Waste Management Inc. (WMI) in Chicago. At the plant, James and her coworkers were routinely exposed to occupational hazards. She argued that her manager "has this philosophy about recycling, but he has no philosophy about humans!" Many workers I interviewed informed me that, while sorting through garbage and recyclable waste on the job, they were accidentally stuck by used hypodermic needles; had to frequently handle medical waste; were sprayed with battery acid, paint thinner, inks, and dyes; and were exposed to dead human and animal bodies on a periodic basis. Moreover, management's treatment of employees included, to quote one manager, "keeping our foot in the worker's ass," forced overtime with shifts of up to 20 hours per day, failure to pay employees, and arbitrary firings. Workers continually resisted management on the shop floor. Resistance most often took the form of muted character assassi nation of management. One day, however, workers rioted at the plant, throwing chairs through the factory windows and halting production. Despite these efforts, workers were ultimately forced to choose between a dangerous job and their health.

How could this have happened, particularly in the recycling industry, a sector that many of us might imagine would exhibit some environmental, if not social, responsibility? Was it simply a case of corporations exploiting low-wage Afri can American workers? Although the corporation is definitely responsible for creating these deplorable working conditions, the history of recycling in Chi cago suggests that the process whereby WMI's recycling center was built is more complex.

In 1995, the city of Chicago embarked on a large-scale municipal recycling program that became known as the "Blue bag." Although many curbside recy cling programs are characterized by source-separated recyc1ables put into bins for pick up by recycling (not municipal-waste) trucks, this program was differ ent. Through the Blue bag program, WMI and the city had the residents place their recyclables in blue plastic bags that were then collected along with trash in the same garbage trucks. The trucks then dumped their loads at material recy cling and recovery facilities (MRRFs)-operated by WMI-where the bags were removed from the garbage and their contents separated manually. Recycla ble materials found in garbage (non-blue) bags were also pulled out for


processing. Because the material to be sorted included both recyclables and household waste, it often contained hazardous substances. The manual sorting of trash and recyc1ables was performed by dozens of African American workers standing along large conveyor belts in an MRRF the size of several football fields.

The Blue bag was introduced for several reasons, the first being because of the role of environmental organizations. The environmental movement saw a huge upswing during the 1980s and 1990s as hundreds of communities success fully resisted the siting of landfills and incinerators (Szasz, 1994). This massive resistance to traditional solid-waste-management practices precipitated what politicians and industry officials called "the landfill crisis." Many observers mistakenly read this crisis to mean that landfill capacity was declining. In fact, however, the "crisis" was largely attributable to the increased political difficulty in siting these dumps (Gould, Schnaiberg, & Weinberg, 1996).1 Chicago was no exception. In 1984, a strong environmental movement campaign produced a moratorium on building new landfills and forced the city to seek new waste dis posal options.

The city also needed a system that would bring it into compliance with new local and state recycling laws, which had also been pushed by local environ mental organizations. illinois law required that Chicago have a recycling plan that would achieve a 15% recycling rate by 1994 anda25% rate by 1996. Chica go's recycling ordinance, which was proposed by several local environmental organizations, required that, by 1993, all low-density dwellings have regular recycling service.

Finally, there was a case being considered by the u.s. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that ruled that Chicago's incinerator ash constituted hazard ous waste. This meant that the tons of waste produced every day at Chicago's Northwest Incinerator (the city's principal waste management system since 1971) were now subject to regulation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and hence expensive to dispose of. The city was therefore in viola tion of this law because, by burying the ash in landfills, it was not properly dis posing of these materials. Furthermore, this waste was now judged to be hazard ous to human health. The city responded by proposing a $150 million retrofit of the incinerator that would produce cleaner waste. Seizing this opportunity, a coalition of environmental, faith-based, public interest, and social justice organizations, called West Siders for a Safe and Toxic-free Environment (WASTE), challenged the city's efforts to keep the incinerator open by arguing that, on social, economic, and ecological grounds, recycling was a sounder option. WASTE paid for advertising space in local newspapers that featured a picture of two children who lived near the incinerator with the caption "Their heads are full of dreams but their brains are full of lead." The notice also advo cated alternatives to the waste incinerator, including a comprehensive urban recycling system. WASTE eventually mobilized a large number of supporters and succeeded in closing down the city's main incinerator. Recycling advocates,

Pellow / ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY FORMATION 585

environmentalists, and alderpersons had been calling for a comprehensive waste management plan for years and this seemed like as good a time as any.

The second influence on the city's decision to adopt a new recycling system was. th~ availability o~ a willing corporate partner. When the city agreed to shut the InCI~erator d0w.n, Industry stepped into support recycling. Unfortunately for the environmentalists who were still celebrating their victory over the North west incinerator, WMI was awarded the municipal recycling contract. WMI was actually the parent company ofthe firm that had operated the city's incinerator an~ was in this w~y m~intaining control over waste disposal in the city. Anne Irving, the executive director of a local public interest organization described how the political connections between the administration and the firm blocked any consideration of other, nonprofit, firms in the bidding process:

There was a deal made behind closed doors-that this would be the new program. I~'s ea~y to. see how this happened, in a sense. They [WMI] also have a close rela tionship With the Daley family. Mayor Daley's brother sits on the board of Whee l~b:ator Technologies [owner of the closed Northwest incinerator], which is a sub sldl.ary of W~I [and he] receives afairly hefty $40,000 a year stipend for doing ba~lc.~ly nothll:g. And you know, WMlhas been sponsoring a lot of city-greening aC~lVlt1eS and thmg~ of that nature. Ithinkthe most telling thing about the relation sh_rp between the city andWMl was that the city chose this program. (Interview With Anne Irving, 1995)

I~ving described t~e bi?ding process as an example of "bald-faced power playing by a corporation WIth a monopoly." She hinted that the city's request for proposals was written with WMI in mind. Her charge stems from her observa tio~s that (~) WM~ is headquartered in the Chicago metropolitan area and plays an influential rol~ mlocal politics; (b) the brother of Mayor Richard M. Daley is on the board of directors of a WMIsubsidiary, Wheelabrator Technologies; and (c) Wheelabrator was the owner of the Northwest incinerator in Chicago, which was recently shut down, necessitating a compensatory waste-management sys tem. Whatever the cause, there were several community-based recycling centers that were not even considered for the contract. This would not be the first time WMI had been accused of dirty deeds. in fact, they have had to contend with mo~e lawsuits charg~ng bribery, death threats to politicians, illegal dumping, and environmental racism than any other waste firm ("Waste Management Accused," 1997).

The third ~ajor reason for the choice of a large-scale recycling program was the need for job creation. Chicago's city council was eager to explore the pros

. pect of new recycling centers in a city that was facing a continuous exodus of jobs for its working-class residents. Many local neighborhood and environ mental justice groups have had along history of organizing around this issue as well. Chica?o's job drai~ rivals that of most U.S. cities, with many of its large manufactunng sectors gomg under or moving out. Since the 1970s, factories and


many of the city's neighborhoods have experienced large-scale "deindustriali zation" (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982) and White flight, leaving the urban core "hollowed out." In the 16-year period from 1947 to 1963, Chicago lost 122,000 jobs (an 18% decline). There was a small gain between 1963 and 1967, but in the next IS-year period, from 1967 to 1982, the decline accelerated and amounted to 250,000 jobs (a 46% decline) (Squires, Bennett, McCourt, & Nyden, 1987). Things continued to worsen because, by 1987, Chicago had lost 326,000 or 60% of its manufacturing jobs over this 20-year period (Wilson, 1996, pp. 29-30). The mayor's administration was interested in virtually any new economic devel opment schemes that could reverse this trend. As one city official declared, "We estimate that the recycling industry can support at least 1,000 jobs in the city at a 25% recycling level" (interview with anonymous city official, 1996). WMI's new recycling program was expected to create approximately 400 jobs. More and more, recycling was shaping up to be the next "win-win" urban policy for the city.

At the time, WMI was the largest waste hauler in the world. Averaging annual revenues in the neighborhood of$ll billion, WMI had operations on five conti nents. WMI is probably the one corporation most vilified by the environmental justice movement in recent years, stemming from its ownership of thousands of landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste facilities in poor communities and communities of color. What is curious is that several local community-based organizations that had been fighting WMI in Chicago for years decided to sup port the Blue bag program. For example, since 1982, a nationally recognized environmental justice organization, Communities United for Justice (CUJ), had been fighting what it viewed as environmental racism associated with WMI's operations. Specifically, CUJ was up in arms about the location ofWMI's land fill and chemical waste incinerator in African American neighborhoods and even held several public protests against the company. For years, curs diagno sis ofthe problem was "too much pollution and not enough good jobs"-a man tra taken up by the rest of the environmental justice movement as well. When WMI announced that it was finally going to address the "jobs versus the environ ment" dilemma by building a recycling plant that would hire local residents, CUJ and several other organizations lent their support. WMI made an arrange ment with these organizations to recruit and interview local residents, many of whom later went to work for the company. In this way, many environmental jus tice movement organizations ironically have complicity in the reproduction of environmental inequality among workers from their own communities.'

Thus, through a complex history, environmentalists, the state, community groups, and industrialists supported a large-scale recycling program by "col Iaboratively framing" (Pellow, in press) recycling as a policy that would meet each other's needs. Recycling would solve the landfill problem, please the envi ronmental community, make profits for private industry, and provide jobs in some of-the city's depressed areas. This ideology of job creation with


environmental benefits was then appropriated by WMI's management in ways that focused more on production and less on ecological issues.'

RESEARCH ON ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY AND A PROPOSED MODEL

What can we say about this case and how can it contribute to research on envi ronmental inequality? The vast majority of research on environmental justice literature concludes that communities that are working poor and populated by people of color bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards and externalities (Bryant, 1995; Bryant & Mohai, 1992; Bullard, 1990, 1993; Mohai, 1998). These hazards may include polluting industrial facilities and a host of other locally unwanted land uses such as incinerators, landfills, and lead smelters, for example. These facilities are often viewed as doubly hazardous because they expose residents outside the plant gates and workers employed inside the firms to pollution and other toxics. Thus, the majority of the literature on environmental inequality provides descriptive or statistical evidence of the unequal burdens of pollution in society.

As Szasz andMeuser (1997, 1998) and Weinberg (1998) have recently noted, most of the literature on environmental inequalities is focused on the existence of unequal outcomes, but it has not provided much analysis of the mechanisms behind these outcomes.' Hence, we have yet to see much theoretical research that would answer basic questions such as How are environmental inequalities in general and environmental racism in particular produced? and How do they emerge? The answer to these questions might appear to be quite obvious. For example, scholars have argued that environmental inequalities occur when the poor or people of color are dumped on or exposed to hazards because they are less powerful than corporations and the state. This is what I call a "perpetrator-victim scenario" and the following is one such portrayal:

Typically, a corporate producer or waste facility or military production site would locate itself unannounced in a peer, non-white neighborhood. Once the facility was set up the emissions or waste often had detrimental health impacts on the resi dents of the area. Groups of residents got together to discuss their immediate health concerns or worked to detect the source of a particular health threat. They demanded more information on the facility causing the damage, or sought the right to know what was causing their immediate health problems. (Silliman, 1997, p. 113)

Although much of this explanation may be correct, it is overly simplistic and ignores important details, the role of key players, and significant variability across different cases. This simplistic explanation for environmental inequality might easily be used to explain the WMI case that I presented earlier. But a


closer examination, using the ElF perspective, reveals that this case is much more textured.

EIF is a model I am proposing that emphasizes the linkages among three major points, which are (a) the need to redefine environmental inequality as a sociohistorical process rather than simply viewing it as a discrete event (Pulido, 1996a, 1996b; Szasz & Meuser, 1997, 1998; for a discussion of racial inequality from this perspective, see Omi & Winant, 1987), (b) the need to understand that environmental inequality involves multiple stakeholder groups with contradic tory and shifting interests and allegiances rather than simply viewing environ mental inequality as the result of perpetrator-victim scenarios (Hurley, 1995; Walsh, Warland, & Smith, 1997), and (c) viewing the ecology of hazardous pro duction and consumption through a life-cycle analysis (Mol, 1995; President's Council on Sustainable Development [PCSD], 1996) rather than focusing only on one location or site of conflict. A growing number of scholars have begun lay ing the groundwork for understanding many of the dimensions of EIF, namely, issues of agency, multistakeholder relationships, and viewing environmental inequality as a historical process (Hurley, 1995; Krieg, 1995; Pulido, 1996a, 1996b; Szasz & Meuser, 1997, 1998; Walsh etal., 1997). However, these recent studies remain in need of a synthetic theoretical basis for analyzing environ mental inequality'S causes and consequences.

In the next sections, I will illustrate ways in which the EIF model can address these three areas where research on environmental inequality needs development.

THE NEED FOR UNDERSTANDING PROCESS

The EIF-environmental inequality formation-perspective stresses not only understanding how environmental inequalities unfold but also actually defining environmental inequality as a process-hence, my choice of the word formation rather than simply environmental discriminatioti? Reconceptualiz ing environmental inequality as a process changes the whole framework for the ory, methodology, and policy because it is difficult to explain, measure, and develop policy around a process that is not reducible to a discrete set of actions (Pulido, 1996a, 1996b). This requires a transformation in our thinking about what environmental inequality is and where it manifests itself.

To meet this challenge, some researchers are employing research methods that allow us to understand how environmental inequalities emerge. There are many ways that scholars can get at this question. Some researchers have studied how government officials and managers at firms think about and make decisions regarding toxic exposure to residential and worker populations (Hurley, 1995; Walsh et al., 1997; Weinberg, 1997, 1998). Other researchers are also analyzing how residents and workers experience, negotiate, and challenge these exposures


(Hurley, 1995; Pena, 1997; Pulido, Sidawi, & Vos, 1996). Ethnographic and his torical methods have been especially useful at understanding ElF processes.

The fundamental question for scholars of environmental inequality therefore is How are environmental inequalities produced? I argue that ElF occurs when different stakeholders struggle for access to scarce resources within the political economy, and the benefits and costs of those resources become distributed unevenly. That is, those stakeholders who are unable to effectively mobilize resources are most likely to suffer from environmental inequality. Conversely, those stakeholders with the greatest access to scarce resources are able to deprive other stakeholders from that same access. Scarce resources may include clean and safe living, recreational, and working environments. They can also include power, wealth, and status. Thus, the inability to access these resources often means living and working under dangerous conditions, with very little power, wealth, or status. Conversely, those stakehol~ers wi~. the a?ility to access these resources live and work under safer, healthier conditions WIth more power, wealth, and status.

EIF at WMl occurred first, as stakeholders-environmentalists, the state, and neighborhood organizations-used a "collaborative frame" (Pellow, i~ press) t.o construct recycling as a win-win policy for urban Chicago. Community orgaru zations supplied much of the willing labor, environmentalists provided the ideo logical foundation forrecycling, and the state offered financial and political sup port to WMI's Blue bag. This apparent consensus among key stakeholders produced a situation that made it difficult to illuminat~ the p~o?lem of ~ccupa tional hazards in the WMI facility. Second, managenal deCISIOn making pro duced a labor process characterized by mixed-waste processing (i.e., garbage mixed in with recyclables) and coercive relations of production. These were political-economic decisions made by management and the .city that direc~ly affected the nature of environmental hazards in the plant. Third, worker reSIS tance to this largely inhospitable environment included a range of strategies from muted character assassination (i.e., hidden resistance) to outright rebel lion. Resistance often disrupted production schedules and eventually brought attention to the environmental hazards on the job. Finally, the hazards associated with the Blue bag system are part of a continuum, a life cycle, that affects the ecosystem and social system preceding and following the struggles at the recy cling plant.

Thus, environmental inequalities are not always simply imposed unilaterally by one class of people on another. Rather, like all forms of stratification, envi ronmental inequalities are relationships that are constituted through a process of continuous change that involves negotiation and often conflict among multiple stakeholders. Therefore, I include community/worker action and resistance as part of the process whereby environmental inequalities emerge rather than sim ply as a reaction to them. This is where new research can help us ~o betterund~r stand how resistance to environmental hazards can shape environmental m equalities. Although the growing volume of hypothesis-testing research on


environmental inequality are crucial to knowledge building on this topic, these studies rarely consider local agency (i.e., resistance) in hazard siting. Much of the environmental justice research on where the hazards are located pays scant attention to the dynamics around which siting occurs, other than whether 'the community was poor or minority. The focus on the presence or absence offacili lies across neighborhoods also tends to overlook ubiquitous social movement activity and misses the opportunity to develop a valuable database of proposed, pending, and failed siting attempts (for two valuable exceptions to this trend, see Blumberg & Gottlieb, 1989, pp. 155-188, and Walsh et aI., 1997). These data are crucial because much, if not the majority, of environmental justice activism involves preventing hazards from being sited in the first place. As Thomas Glad win (1987) observed, environmental conflicts have shifted "from old to new tar gets, from existing pollution problems to potential environmental impacts, and from 'band aid' remedies to preventive or risk reduction measures" (p.19; cf. Gedicks, 1993)

Drawing on the EIF perspective, we can move beyond a model in which outcomes simply consist of the presence of hazards to one with which we can account for variations in patterns of environmental inequalities. That is, it would be useful to know how environmental inequalities emerge and vary across spa tial dimensions. Some scholars have found different patterns of race and class inequality in environmental facility siting across space (Krieg, 1995), but little is known about what produced these variations. No two environmental inequality struggles are identical. Different stakeholders get access to varying amounts of resources in different conflicts. Thus, environmental inequalities in the recy cling industry are more or less pronounced across firms because workers have lesser or greater power vis-a- vis environmentalists, the state, and private capital. In its present state of development, the research on environmental inequalities does not provide an adequate accounting for why these variations occur.

TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF PROCESS: THINKING HISTORICALLY

Environmental inequalities are continually evolving over time as both haz ards and people shift their spatial location and visibility. Environmental ine qualities are also often subjected to ongoing social constructions by different stakeholders. In the case ofWMI, the hazards shifted from an incinerator's emis sions to the occupational dangers of the recycling center that replaced the incin erator. This hazard shifting occurred when WMI's subsidiary, Wheelabrator Technologies, had to close its incinerator, and WMI then opened the Blue bag recycling centers almost immediately. In this way, WMI was maintaining con trol over waste management in the city of Chicago. This was also a way of socially constructing incinerators as dangerous, whereas recycling centers were


defined as safe. Again, this change in the definition of risk was the result of col laborative framing with other stakeholders. Specifically, the environmental community had a hand in this process. The same environmental organizations that opposed the incinerator lent strong support for a recycling program, which eventually produced environmental inequalities confronting African American workers. Furthermore, in analyzing the history of Chicago's environmental movement, one finds that many environmentalists who helped shut the incinera tor down due to its risk to human health were among the same activists who sup ported incineration's waste-to-energy potential in the 1970s. Contrary to popu lar perception, environmentalists were not always opposed to incinerators. During the 1970s and 1980s, many environmentalists endorsed the growing waste-to-energy incinerator industry as a way of converting trash into a useful form (Gottlieb, 1993, pp. 189-190). Marjorie Jameson, a member of a Chicago based environmental organization that began the WASTE coalition, explained this chapter in her group's history:

. We were with the incinerator people, We thought incinerators might be an OK way to get rid of waste, My group, the Coalition for Appropriate Waste Disposal (CA WD), was with the incinerator people, because at that time the idea ofbuming garbage for energy was kind of an OK idea. (Interview with Marjorie Jameson, 1996)

Environmentalists later reversed their support for incineration in large part because activists in communities of color and working-class neighborhoods began fighting the industry's efforts to site these facilities in their communities. This irony can lend us a deeper appreciation for environmental inequality as a sociohistorical process that involves shifting allegiances and shifting (i.e., socially constructed) hazards.

Following Szasz and Meuser (1997), once we understand ElF, we can then reinterpret all of history from an environmental inequality perspective. I note that some urban and social historians have already made great strides in this direction. One example is Martin Melosi's (1981) book Garbage in the Cities, which demonstrates that, although many scholars implicitly view environ mental inequality as acontemporary problem, it is not. In ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt, and later in Middle Ages Europe, the unwanted filth of sewage and municipal waste was often, ifnotalways, concentrated in the quarters where the working poor, ethnic minorities, and/or politically disempowered groups were housed. Likewise, the most dangerous and socially undesirable jobs have almost always been held by these same groups throughout time. It is important to under stand that since the dawn of human history environmental inequality has been with us-that it did not begin with the production of toxic waste in the post-World War II era. Similarly, everyday and popular resistance to environ mental inequalities did not begin with the antitoxics and environmental justice


movements of the 1970s and 1980s. As long as there has been environmental inequality, there has been resistance to it, which has also shaped it.

Thus, an EIF perspective allows us to unpack the process by which environ mental inequalities emerge. This is important because without an adequate understanding of how environmental inequalities are produced, our theories about why and how people suffer from them remain inadequate. Furthermore, without improved models of environmental inequality, we fail to aid social movement actors and policy makers who might seek to remedy these problems.

MULTISTAKEHOLDER REALITY

An understanding of the ElF process would be incomplete without paying attention to the role of multiple stakeholder interests, relationships, and con flicts. Stakeholders in environmental conflicts often include social movement organizations, private sector firms, the state, residents, and workers. Each stake holder's interests and actions are complex, may often appear contradictory, and can shift over time.

Attention to multistakeholder activity is important because it moves us beyond the dyadic models of environmental inequality that are so preva lent-what I call the perpetrator-victim scenarios-to a model in which envi r.: nrnental inequality involves and affects many actors, institutions, and organi- 2, .tions, that is, stakeholders. For example, the classic perpetrator-victim ~' .nario is that a corporate polluter dumps on a community that has relatively Ii· de power to prevent this injustice. However, when one studies environmental ir.equality from a multistakeholder perspective, it becomes clear that environ n.cntal inequalities are not always simply imposed unilaterally by one stake h .lder on another. Rather, like all forms of inequality, environmental inequali ti is emerge through a process of ongoing change that involves negotiation and conflict among many stakeholders. In the case of the WMI recycling plant, envi ronmentalists, community groups, residents, and the city government all played a ole in attracting the new facility to the area. These stakeholder groups eollabo L .ively framed recycling as a policy that would address solid-waste problems w.iile creating employment opportunities. Such a policy appears to lie at the intersection of each group's interests." Producers wish to maintain access to natural resources for inputs into production, environmentalists seek to reform or slow down production processes that pollute, community groups desire job creation for local residents, and the state wishes to balance these often conflict ing needs while maintaining its own authority and legitimacy. Recycling is a policy that each of these groups had an interest in supporting, despite the myriad hazards workers faced. Thus, the one stakeholder group left out of the initial negotiations was labor. This was in large part because WMI planned to hire a nonunion workforce. Hence, no organized labor groups were involved.


However, once the plant was sited, worker resistance to managerial coercion and occupational hazards on the shop floor produced a dynamic that shaped environmental inequalities inside and outside the plant. For example, one group of workers wrote letters to the press, which included the following description of labor conditions:

Several people have been stuck by discarded hypodermic needles. Air quality is bad. Others ... have been injured by battery acid, muscle strains, lower back pain, pinched nerves, contusion, various types of trauma including emotional or psy chological from witnessing deadbodies, parts of animal carcasses, live and dead rats, etc. And let's not forget the supervisors' bogus tactics .... [We have been] threatened to be fired by voicing your opinion .... Being talked to loud in front of other people. Not being able to take a day off even if you are sick or a family mem ber dies. (WMI Workers, 1996)

Both major newspapers in Chicago covered the story and created a public relations crisis for the company. Other employees and WMI managers contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) directly to file complaints. On July 11, 1996, 8 months after the Blue bag program came online, OSHA fined WMI $10,500 for several labor violations. Although the penalty was not substantial, the fact that OSHA-by many accounts an immobile bureaucracy-actually inspected the sites is notable. A year later, OSHA repre sentatives made a follow-up visit to the WMI facility and found that WMI engaged in the "willful violation" of previous orders to comply with regulations, including a law requiring employers in solid-waste firms to inoculate their employees with the Hepatitis B vaccine. The penalty this time was more sub stantial at a total of $112,500. WMI claims to have made "significant changes" in its program since that time.

Other WMI employees used less visible forms of resistance to express their dissatisfaction with the job conditions. One of the forms this hidden resistance (Scott, 1990) took was the silent refusal to touch materials on the recycling con veyor belt that were perceived as "too nasty" or "dangerous." This refusal to sort out certain types of trash frequently made managers angry because it had a direct,negative impact on the plant's productivity, as a WMI worker named Seela explained.

Seela: Well if something [a pile of garbage] was too high Ijust let it go. Plain and sim ple. That's what everybody else was doing. They were like 'Hey, if you can't see nothing just back away fromit and let it pass.'

Author: But would that end up messing up the process? Seela: Yeah 'cause then the manager would come up on the line and be all really

bitchy seeing that so much went down thatwasn't supposed to go down. He would. be talkin' all crazy. (Interview with Seela, 1996)


Thus, even those stakeholders with relatively little power, as compared with WMI, played a role in shaping environmental inequality in this case. Workers shaped environmental inequality when they were able to change the degree to which they were exposed to hazards and therefore alter some of the conditions under which they work. By periodically choosing when to expose themselves to potentially hazardous materials, Seela and her coworkers changed some of the shop-floor conditions under which they might otherwise have to work. This "sol diering" among the working class has been documented elsewhere (Burawoy, 1979) and is among the repertoire of "everyday resistance" tactics African Americans have used at least as far back as the labor process under slavery in the United States (Genovese, 1974, p. 597).

This agency dimension also requires us to rethink environmental inequality from the perspective of would-be victims, targets, or survivors. Normally, we view environmental inequality as an act or acts against a group of people and their environment, and then oftentimes the people react to the socioenvironmen tal injustice to seek redress, justice, or equity. Thus, many scholarly accounts of environmental inequality are problematic because they present the target popu lations of environmental inequality as simply passive, reactive, or invisible (Been, 1994; United Church of Christ, 1987).7 The EIF perspective, on the other hand, is a model wherein many stakeholders are viewed in their full complexity, and would-be victims become active agents in resisting and shaping environ mental inequalities as they emerge.

Other stakeholders in this case include the city of Chicago and WMI's man agement. Their actions also deserve some analysis from a stakeholder perspec tive. Some scholars argue that the state exercises a great deal of autonomy and acts on its own behalf (Evans, Rueschemeyer, & Skocpol, 1985). But as the economies of the world have become more interdependent and the power of transnational corporations has increased, this "state autonomy" view has been challenged. Specifically, many scholars argue that the state often acts as an "ambassador" to industry and exercises its power more often on behalf of corpo rations than for the citizenry (Gould et aI., 1996; Mander & Goldsmith, 1996). But we should never assume that government and corporations are always allied, although this is often the case. In fact, government and corporations are often at odds with each other and are frequently internally divided. In the case of WMI's recycling facility, while the city of Chicago was allied with WMI, OSHA and the Department of Justice have locked horns with the city and WMI over worker safety violations. Additionally, several outspoken alderpersons on Chi cago's city council have publicly criticized the Blue bag program as a failure. These examples indicate that different branches of the "state" were in conflict with each other over this issue. Furthermore, because many WMI workers and managers have acted as whistleblowers against the company, WMI has had to address its own internal divisions over the Blue bag program. Ironically, it was these voices of dissent emerging from within WMI that first focused attention on the environmental inequalities embedded in the company's recycling program.


In t?is way, m~~be~s of the very organization accused of committing acts of environmental injusnes were able to shape those actions in divergent directions.

LIFE-CYCLE ANALYSIS

The third ~nd final area i~ which research on environmental inequality needs dev~lopment IS.the are~ o~hfe-cy,cle analysis. A life-cycle analysis approach to environmenral inequalny IS crucial because it requires scholars to examine the full. cost~ an~ benefi~s-the ecology-of production and consumption. Some SOCIal SCIentists, envrronmental engineers, and policy makers have called for more research in this domain as a way of building a foundation for sustainable deve.lopment in the UnitedBtates (Mol, 1995; PCSD, 1996; Tibbs, 1992). Thus far, little research on environmental inequality has focused on life-cycle analysis largely because we are focuse~ on "additions" (Schnaiberg, 1980), or pollution, rather than on resource extraction and consumption. This emphasis on the "end of t~e pipe" reflects a bias toward the urban, the local, or at best, the continental United States, while the rest of the planet experiences both additions and with drawals of resources produced and consumed in U.S. cities. Because people and ~cosystems are ~ffected at ev~ry point along the production-consumption con tmuum, we are III need of a Me-cycle analysis approach to environmental ine quality ". And,. unlike the ecologically fixated models of life-cycle analysis already.m existence, an EIF approach to life-cycle analysis would involve an accountlll~ of the social, economic, and ecological impacts of production and consumption,

Enviro~mental scholars would do well to expand the level of analysis to fol low pollution or the hazards in question from "cradle to grave." This will allow us to move beyond the single-location emphasis of environmental inequality res:arch .tow.ard a grea:er regional, n~tional, and global methodological reach by soc~al scientrsts, That IS, where possible, we can examine the socioenvironrnen tal Impacts as natural resources are extracted, processed into commodities through production, then distributed, consumed, and disposed of. Of these five steps in the life cycle, researchers have tended to focus only on the fifth-disposal. .

Through the use of life-cycle analysis, we can link the emissions from cars and ~ower plants any:vhere i~ the.United States to the coal fields of Appalachia; the 011 fields of Ogomland, Nigeria; and the uranium mines on Native American lands. In the cas: of WM~, we can link the hazards workers face in the recycling plant to both the Job creation (benefits) and habitat destruction (costs) around the glob: tha: produced the materials used to make postconsumer waste-trees, bauxite, tm, and petroleum, for example. Postconsumer waste is a material that was on.ce extracted from natural resources to produce consumer goods that, upon ~Is~osal, b~come viewed as either an addition (i.e., trash) or another raw material Input (i.e., recycling). Through recycling, trash becomes extracted


again (from the waste stream) and, as a raw material used in recycl~ng, creates more additions and often more jobs. In other words, the raw materials used to produce consumer goods such as paper, cans, and bottles came from forests, mines and oil reserves in this nation and abroad. Furthermore, these resources are often mined through ecologically unsustainable and socially repressive practices. For example, the plastic bottles that African American :v~rkers ~t WMI recycle in Chicago may have been made from petroleum that originated in Ogoniland, Nigeria, where an authoritarian military regi~e, transnati?nal oil companies, and other stakeholders have produced ecological devastation and social discord. So even if the labor conditions in WMI's recycling plant were healthy, the origin of the products processed in the plant renders any claims that recycling practices are "green" or "clean" much more problematic.

The following is an example of how following materials just one step back ward in the life cycle can produce a richer picture of the postconsumer waste dis posal and recycling process. Many WMI employee~ complained ~fbe~ng stuck with syringes and hypodermic needles while working on the sortmg ~me. ~ev eral needle sticks were also noted in the record of one of the OSHA invesnga tions and are of particular concern given the widespread fear among workers of contracting HIV. Although in every major city there are incinerators that are spe cifically designed for the disposal of medica! waste, many MRRFs handle t~ese materials as well. The WMI facilities handled them because they were contained in the household waste that people threw out along with their Blue bags. This meant that, while workers sorted through recyclable waste, they also often han dled medical waste. What is problematic is not just that handling medical waste is dangerous but that, in this case, it is entirely unregulated. Although medical waste is regulated when disposed of in hospitals, the continued restructuring of the health care industry has led to much of this waste finding its way into the postconsumer solid-waste stream. Seabron Morgan, a :VM1 manag~r-turned whistleblower, offered the following institutional analysis of the medical waste

problem in the solid waste stream:

Let's take for example, the medical waste issue alone. When you talk in terms of thewhole medical field it now has changed. Fewer and fewer people are allowed to stay in hospitals, most-practically every-procedure that they can think of that they could put into an outpatient basis, they're doing it. Which mean? tharpeople are taking all kinds of hypodermic needles, colostomy bags, and all this stuffho~e and disposing of it in the garbage. Just say forexample,. all the people ~~o are dia betics-all of the people who are forced out of the hospital because their insurance will not allow them to stay any longer, they feel like they can be better taken care of at horne. Now they're sending in nurses, there's a whole network that they s~~d out to people's houses .... My point is just t?~nk of all the pe.ople who ?ave a legItImate use for hypodermic needles, have a legItImate-a hos~ltal pr~scnbed-u?e for ~ll of these items that are normally disposed of in a hospital setting, (Interview With Seabron Morgan, 1996)


These environmental hazards add a new and disturbing dimension to the lim ited discourse around both the health care and solid-waste crises in this nation. This also underscores the need for alife-cycle analysis of materials processed in the recycling industry.

Until we understand the full ecology of production and consumption, our analyses of environmental inequalities will remain inadequate at best. Perhaps the work of scholars researching in the areas of industrial ecology (Mol, 1995; Tibbs, 1992) and commodity chains (Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994) could be useful in this endeavor.

CONCLUSION

There are a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the literature on environmental justice or environmental inequalities in need of refinement. In this article, I proposed a model I term an environmental inequality formation perspective to address these issues. The ElF perspective stresses the linkage among three major points that have been largely neglected in research on environmental inequality. Firstisthe importance of process and history, second is the role of multiple stakeholder relationships, and third is a life-cycle approach to production and consumption. The EIF model captures sociological dynamics in ways that suggest that environmental racism and environmental inequalities originate and emerge in a much more complex process than previ ously considered. EIF indicates not only that environmental inequality is more complex but that it is much more insidious because it is the mechanism whereby interlocking systems of inequality serve to divide and conquer stakeholders who may be potential allies. EIF therefore reveals the much deeper workings of power in society. Without an.adequate understanding of the mechanisms that produce environmental inequalities, our theories about how and why people suf fer from them are partial at best. Moreover, we fail to provide useful tools for social movement organizations and policy makers who might seek to remedy these injustices through legislation and other means.

Researchers studying environmental justice are now beginning to identify an environmental justice frame or environmental justice paradigm (Capek, 1993; Taylor, 1997, 1998) that extends previous conceptions of environmental-society relationships and provides a theoretical foundation for understanding why peo ple are struggling for environmental justice. Other scholars have begun laying the groundwork for understanding many of the dimensions of ElF-namely, issues of agency, multistakeholder relationships, and viewing environmental inequality as a historical process (Hurley, 1995; Krieg, 1995; Pulido, 1996a, 1996b; Szasz & Meuser, 1997, 1998; Walsh et al., 1997). However, these recent studies remain in need of a synthetic theoretical basis for analyzing environ mental inequality's causes and consequences. The EIF perspective provides a


useful model for theory building in the study of environmental inequality. More over theories of social inequality in general would benefit from a more serious consideration of the role environmental inequalities play in all institutions. For example, it is often the case that where we find disparities in inc~me and. ~uality of life we also find environmental inequalities--envlronmental inequalities are embedded in our social system. Existing research on environmental inequality remains in need of theoretical strength and methodological rigor. Future research should address these needs and build theory grounded firmly in empiri cal reality. It is my hope that the model set forth in this article can contribute toward that end.

NOTES

1. There were in fact several political and economic factors that drove the United States toward a landfill crisis. Many states began refusing to allow garbage to be imported to their landfills (es~ cially from New York City). Also, many serious public health and environmental hazards were being attributed to landfill leachate as early the 1960s, and this problem continued into the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, there were new federal regulations enacted, which threatened to shut down many landfills that failed to meet stricter regulatory guidelines. Finally, industry was successful at block ing or shutting down existing and proposed recycling and reuse initiatives like the Bottle Bill and increased its use of paper and plastic packaging for a wide variety of consumer products. As a conse quence, consumers saw a real increase in their per capita waste generation and disposal. (For a thor

ough history, see Blumberg & Gottlieb, 1989.) 2. Following a common definition of co-optation as "goal displacement" (Selznick, 1949), Com

munities United for Justice was partially co-opted by Waste Management Inc. (WMI). That is, the organization's stated vision includes securing a safe, cleaner environment through s~st~nable eco nomic development. But its immediate goal in this transaction with WMI was to provide Jobs to local residents and to support a recycling system. This is a partial co-optation (i.e., one of two goals was displaced) because, on one hand, the Blue bag program can be credited with providingjobs and re~y cling millions of pounds of solid waste. But on the other hand, this is hardly safe, clean, or sustain-

able production. . .. . 3. There are three core framing tasks that movements must undertake. The first IS diagnostic

framing (Snow & Benford, 1988), the task oflocating the origin of the problem and attributing blame to some source. The second task is prognostic framing (Snow & Benford, 1988), whereby activists specify how the problem or problems should be addressed, induding discussing speci~c ~trategies, tactics, and targets. The third task is to articulate an identity component, whereby actrvists define who they are, usually as " 'we,' typically in opposition to some 'they' who have different interests and values" (Gamson, 1992, p. 57). Diagnostic, prognostic, and identity framing must occur within movements in order to mobilize resources against one or more targets. In this article and elsewhere (Pellow, in press), I propose the term collaborative framing to underscore that, in many instances, movements strategically use nonoppositional frames to gain access to resources,

4. Valuable studies have demonstrated the need for attention to contributing factors such as unjust zoning laws, undemocratic decision-making and planning structures, and disparate enforce ment against polluters (Bryant, 1995; Bullard, 1990; Lavelle & Coyle, 1992). However, no system atic theoretical models have been proposed that might link and explain these phenomena.

5. This is not to minimize the impact of discrimination, because racial discrimination (e.g., envi ronmental racism) is clearly prevalent in this society. Rather, the emphasis on inequality formation is intended to complement the focus on discrimination. Although locating and struggling against acts


of racial discrimination and violence is of great importance, without also recognizing and attacking the underlying structural roots that give rise to and support those attacks, scholarly analyses, policy prescriptions, and social movement strategies will be limited. An analogous example would be to focus only on the problem of domestic violence without paying attention to the underlying problems of gender inequality and patriarchy in society.

6. Although the Blue bag recycling program initially appeared attractive to most stakeholders, when the program went online itbecameclear that all players were losing. Specifically, the city was paying much more for the program than originally projected, recycling rates were abysmally low at around 6% to 8%, and WMI's marketreturns from recycling were low. And, of course, the workers were in the unenviable position oflaboring under unhealthy conditions for low wages.

7. For exceptions, see Hurley (1995), Pulido (1996b), and Walsh, Warland, and Smith (1997). Walsh et al. (1997) reveal that many grassroots "technology movements" successfully defeatincin erators before they are ever built. Pulido (1996b) demonstrates that Chicanos in one southwestern town proactively created a sustainable enterprise that provided economic and ecological benefits to the community, thereby defining their own identity and life circumstances. Hurley (1995) docu ments the "give and take" and the ebbs and flows of progress in the struggle by the Hatcher admini stration, residents, and neighbors of Gary, Indiana, to ensure that U.S. Steel complied with environ mental regulations while remaining economically solvent. An example of shaping the environmental inequality process was the success (and later failures) the coalition achieved in mak ing U.S. Steel change its production practices. Again, my intention here is to propose that scholars synthesize these findings into a more coherent theoretical understanding of environmental inequali ty.

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Environmental Inequality Formation Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice

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