Downey Liam
University of Colorado.
Soc Forces. 2006 Dec 1;85(2):771-796. doi: 10.1353/sof.2007.0003.
This study uses industrial pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and tract-level demographic data from the 2000 U.S. census to determine whether environmental racial inequality existed in the Detroit metropolitan area in the year 2000. This study differs from prior environmental inequality research in two important ways. First, it offers a positive rationale for using hazard proximity indicators. Second, it uses a distance decay modeling technique to estimate hazard proximity. This technique weights each hazard's estimated negative effect by distance such that the estimated negative effect declines continuously as distance from the hazard increases, thus providing more accurate estimates of proximity-based environmental risk than can be obtained using other variable construction techniques currently found in the literature. Using this technique, I find that Detroit's black neighborhoods were disproportionately burdened by TRI facility activity in 2000 and that neighborhood racial composition had a strong independent effect on neighborhood proximity to TRI activity.
本研究使用了美国环境保护局有毒物质排放清单（TRI）中的工业污染数据以及2000年美国人口普查的街区层面人口统计数据，以确定2000年底特律大都市区是否存在环境种族不平等现象。本研究在两个重要方面与先前的环境不平等研究有所不同。第一，它为使用危害 proximity指标提供了一个积极的理论依据。第二，它使用距离衰减建模技术来估计危害 proximity。该技术根据距离对每个危害的估计负面影响进行加权，使得估计的负面影响随着与危害距离的增加而持续下降，因此与目前文献中使用的其他变量构建技术相比，能提供更准确的基于 proximity的环境风险估计。使用该技术，我发现2000年底特律的黑人社区承受了TRI设施活动不成比例的负担，并且社区种族构成对社区与TRI活动的 proximity有很强的独立影响。
