其他摘要:The notion of equity in the distribution of environmental risk and hazards has emerged as a pressing social and scientific issue over the last decade. Growing concerns regarding the disproportionate exposure of minorities and economically disadvantaged groups to technological hazards have led to the rise of the environmental justice movement (Cole and Foster, 2001), formulation of public policy at the federal (Clinton, 1994) and state (Hart, 1995) level., and a flurry of empirical studies seeking to provide evidence of inequities in the distribution of hazards and risk. In order to determine if the principles of environmental justice have been violated, numerous case studies have analyzed the geographic association between the location of hazardous pollution sources and the racial or economic status of the surrounding population, at the national, regional, and local scale (see reviews by Cutter, 1995; Liu, 2000; Bowen, 2002).