Setting environmental justice in space and place: Acute and chronic airborne toxic releases in the southeastern United States

This paper compares the spatial distribution and character of two categories of risk-chronic toxic releases (small-scale, long-term exposures) and acute releases (large-scale, short-term events)-for the southeastern United States from 1987-1990. Our purpose is to identify whether lower-income minority counties are disproportionately at risk from these airborne releases of extremely hazardous substances. We found a fairly uniform distribution of chronic releases across the region, whereas the acute releases exhibited a more clustered pattern in the Carolinas, Florida, and Alabama. A correlation analysis failed to indicate any association between the racial composition of the county and the frequency of airborne toxic releases, yet wealth indicators were positively associated with the frequency of releases, When examining these in more detail, a principal components analysis yielded a hierarchy of toxic counties: (1) high-exposure urban counties, (2) high-exposure African American counties, (3) low-release counties, (4) high-acute-release counties. A further refinement of the analysis identified subgroupings of counties, but again we failed to find conclusive evidence of inequalities. Instead, we conclude that for the Southeast, there are a multitude of processes at work in producing the differential toxic releases reflected in the southern riskscape. More research is needed on the underlying sociospatial processes that give rise to the production of hazardousness of places and their populations.