Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.This Working Paper was revised in June 2009.Corporate social responsibility; corporate environmental performance;

Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.Corporate social responsibility; corporate environmental performance; environmental justice; air pollution

Is Environmental Justice Good for White Folks?

This paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial and ethnic disparity in the distribution of the exposure burden. This correlation could arise from causal linkages in either or both directions: the ability to displace pollution onto minorities may lower the effective cost of pollution for industrial firms; and higher average pollution burdens may induce whites to invest more political capital in efforts to influence firms’ siting decisions. Furthermore, we find that in urban areas with higher minority pollution-exposure discrepancies, average exposures tend to be higher for all population subgroups, including whites. In other words, improvements in environmental justice in the United States could benefit not only minorities but also whites.environmental justice; air pollution; industrial toxics; Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators.

Assessing the Jobs-Environment Relationship with Matched Data from US EEOC and US EPA

Using matched facility-level data from the US EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEO-1 database, we assess (1) the trade-off between jobs and environmental quality and (2) the extent to which the distribution of the benefits of employment in industrial production mirrors the distribution of the costs of exposure to hazardous byproducts of industrial activity in the dimension of race and ethnicity. We find no evidence that facilities that create higher pollution risk for surrounding communities provide more jobs in aggregate. The share of pollution risk accruing to ethnic or racial minority groups typically exceeds the share of employment and substantially exceeds the share of good jobs held by members of those groups

Justice in the Air: Tracking Toxic Pollution from America's Industries and Companies to Our States, Cities, and Neighborhoods

This new environmental justice study, (co-authored by PERI’s James Boyce, Michael Ash, & Grace Chang, along with Manuel Pastor, Justin Scoggins, & Jennifer Tran of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California) examines not only who receives the disproportionate share of toxic air releases -- low-income communities and people of color -- but who is releasing them.� � Justice in the Air: Tracking Toxic Pollution from America's Industries and Companies to Our States, Cities, and Neighborhoods uses the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory and Risk Screening Environmental Indicators to explore the demographics of those who are most affected by toxic pollution, and then establishes the corporate ownership of the plants responsible.� � Justice in the Air enhances the data available in PERI’s Toxic 100 Report with a new environmental justice scorecard, ranking the Toxic 100 companies by the share of their health impacts from toxic air pollution that falls upon minority and low-income communities. The authors conclude by recommending four ways the right-to-know and environmental justice movements can use these findings in their efforts to protect the health of vulnerable communities. �

Measuring Environmental Inequality

This study presents alternative measures of environmental inequality in the 50 U.S. states for exposure to industrial air pollution. We examine three methodological issues. First, to what extent are environmental inequality measures sensitive to spatial scale and population weighting? Second, how do sensitivities to different segments of the overall distribution affect rankings by these measures? Third, how do vertical and horizontal (inter-group) inequality measures relate to each other? We find substantive differences in rankings by different measures and conclude that no single indicator is sufficient for addressing the entire range of equity concerns that are relevant to environmental policy; instead multiple measures are needed

The prospect

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-139).The Gateway Arch in St. Louis was meant to commemorate the "opening" of the west and the possibilities of the frontier. Instead, the Arch marks its closure. Sited on the west bank of the Mississippi River, this conspicuous monument has occupied a peripheral, if any, position within architectural discourse. However, by the fact that this object provides a view towards the surrounding landscape, it serves as a central component for considering how conceptualization of the land in the United States has changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or simply said, a vision of the landscape from a productive frontier to the consumptive domain. This thesis investigates the cognitive shifts in landscape visualization first as demonstrated by the national land survey, overland travel journals and pictorial depictions of the nineteenth century. These frontier images are then considered alongside those twentieth century representations that exhibited the completion of a systematized territory of an ideal future. The later representations found resonance in the regulation of actual views from the Gateway Arch. The analysis of these distinct forms of landscape visualization registers the larger changes in the characterization of capital in the United States. The Arch needs to be reconsidered in architectural discourse at large and more specifically through this thesis, as a productive insertion into the study of landscape to capital as it is manifest through visualization by the individual - be it the yeoman farmer or a major corporation. The intangibilities of history, landscape and capital are productively complicated when viewed from the Arch's observation deck. The view exhibited from the Gateway Arch exposes the closure of the landscape as a means to visualize potential and, as a result, closes the space of the frontier more successfully than prior attempts.by Ash James Lettow.S.M

Chlorophyll Bloom Dynamics and Associations with Mesoscale and Submesoscale Features in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

M.S

A Study of Periodontal Hazards of Third Molars

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142112/1/jper0209.pd