Recent advances in sociological appreciation of risk have culminated in the concept of riskscapes, which describe how the social, political, biophysical, and technological drivers of risk are embedded within different spaces in ways that can reinforce systemic inequities. The U.S. military has long been recognized as an important structural and institutional contributor to environmental problems and therefore potentially riskscapes. However, the regional environmental injustice consequences of military presence have received little attention. To address this need, here we construct a regionalized military riskscapes modeling strategy that focuses on understanding environmental riskscapes across regional contexts. Using multilevel models with random intercepts, our exploratory analysis reveals differences in racial and ethnic environmental health exposure associated with proximity to military facilities across the 10 administrative regions used by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, we find that the relative contributions to local air pollution profiles arising from military and non-military sources likely differ by region, as do consequent environmental justice concerns. For example, in the Midwest, Central Mountain, and West/Southwest regions neighborhoods with more Latinx residents experience intensified air pollution inequalities associated with proximity to military installations. Neighborhoods with more Black residents in the Midwest reported greater environmental health risk from air toxics associated with nearby military facilities. These results underscore the usefulness of viewing the environmental consequences of domestic military facilities and their activities as regionally specific and spatially contingent. We further suggest that scholars studying environmental inequalities relating to military and other sources of pollution should consider how regional processes contextualize the existence and persistence of environmental injustice.

Environmental justice and health research demonstrate unequal exposure to environmental hazards at the neighborhood-level. We use an innovative method—eco-intersectional multilevel (EIM) modeling—to assess intersectional inequalities in industrial air toxics exposure across US census tracts in 2014. Results reveal stark inequalities in exposure across analytic strata, with a 45-fold difference in average exposure between most and least exposed. Low SES, multiply marginalized (high % Black, high % female-headed households) urban communities experienced highest risk. These inequalities were not described by additive effects alone, necessitating the use of interaction terms. We advance a critical intersectional approach to evaluating environmental injustices.

Communities of color and poor neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to more air pollution—a pattern known as environmental injustices. Environmental injustices increase susceptibility to negative health outcomes among residents in affected communities. The structural mechanisms distributing environmental injustices in the USA are understudied. Bridging the literatures on the social determinants of health and environmental justice highlights the importance of the environmental conditions for health inequalities and sheds light on the institutional mechanisms driving environmental health inequalities. Employing a critical quantitative methods approach, we use data from an innovative state racism index to argue that systematic racialized inequalities in areas from housing to employment increase outdoor airborne environmental health risks in neighborhoods. Results of a multilevel analysis in over 65,000 census tracts demonstrate that tracts in states with higher levels of state-level Black–white gaps report greater environmental health risk exposure to outdoor air pollution. The state racism index explains four-to-ten percent of county- and state-level variation in carcinogenic risk and noncarcinogenic respiratory system risks from outdoor air toxics. The findings suggest that the disproportional exposure across communities is tied to systematic inequalities in environmental regulation and other structural elements such as housing and incarceration. Structural racism is an environmental justice issue.

The negative environmental, health, and social effects arising from U.S. military action in communities both domestically and abroad suggest that the military represents an understudied institutional source of environmental injustice. Moreover, scholars and activists have long argued that the state is an active or a tacit contributor to environmental inequality, thus providing an opportunity to link U.S. military activity with approaches to the state developed under critical environmental justice. We build on these literatures to ask: Does the presence of domestic military facilities significantly increase carcinogenic risks from air toxics? And do communities of color face additional military-associated carcinogenic risks? Multilevel analyses reveal that locales in closer proximity to a military facility and those exposed to greater military technological intensity, independent of each other, experience significantly higher carcinogenic risk from air toxics. We find that proximity to military facilities tends to intensify racial and ethnic environmental inequalities in exposure to airborne toxics, but in different ways for Latinx and Black populations. These results highlight the role of the state in perpetuating racial and environmental expendability as reflected in critical environmental justice and represent an important expansion of nationwide environmental justice studies on contributors to environmental inequality.

State reactions to Black Lives Matter demonstrations include heavily militarized domestic police responses and the deployment of the National Guard. These events place emphasis on understanding the U.S. military as an institution and militarization as a process; as well as their corresponding environmental justice (EJ) consequences. In this study, we integrate critical race theory, decolonial thought, carceral geography, and military and environmental sociology to theorize the military and militarization as potentially important and overlooked sources of environmental injustice that ought to concern scholars and activists. We use an interdisciplinary framework to highlight: the historical role of the military in the creation and maintenance of racialized and colonized difference, how the U.S. militarization is connected to localized and national overpolicing and environmental harm, and how the environmental risks of warfare may be transferred from combat zones to civilian EJ communities and sites, both domestically and abroad. We stress that the production of colonized and racialized space—and the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and other bodies of color—happens within the context of militarization as a process and the U.S. military as an institution so future critical analysis should look to these levels. Our goal is to urge scholars and activists to recognize the military as a potentially significant contributor to environmental injustice and outline avenues for future study.

Environmental justice scholarship argues state power perpetrates environmental inequalities, but less is known about the U.S. Military’s impact on local urban environmental inequalities. To evaluate the role of the military in contributing to environmental health disparities, I draw on the case study of Las Vegas, Nevada, a southwestern city with active military sites. The analysis uses environmental health, demographic, and Geographic Information System (GIS) data from federal and county agencies. Findings from spatial error models support environmental inequality and treadmill of destruction hypotheses by demonstrating that census tracts in closer proximity to military areas have greater estimated cancer risk from air toxics. Census tracts with a higher percent of poor and Latinx residents, independent of their proximity to military areas, have an additional increase in exposure to air pollution. The case study of Las Vegas offers important lessons of environmental injustice on Latinx environmental health vulnerability and military sites in urban areas.

Drawing on the traditions of environmental justice, intersectionality, and social determinants of health, and using data from the EPA’s NATA 2014 estimates of cancer risk from air toxics, we demonstrate a novel quantitative approach to evaluate intersectional environmental health risks to communities: Eco-Intersectional Multilevel (EIM) modeling. Results from previous case studies were found to generalize to national-level patterns, with multiply marginalized tracts with a high percent of Black and Latinx residents, high percent female-headed households, lower educational attainment, and metro location experiencing the highest risk. Overall, environmental health inequalities in cancer risk from air toxics are: (1) experienced intersectionally at the community-level, (2) significant in magnitude, and (3) socially patterned across numerous intersecting axes of marginalization, including axes rarely evaluated such as gendered family structure. EIM provides an innovative approach that will enable explicit consideration of structural/institutional social processes in the social production of intersectional and geospatial inequalities.

In this article, we assess whether unionization of national workforces influences growth in national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita. Political-economic theories in environmental sociology propose that labor unions have the potential to affect environmental conditions. Yet, few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of unionization on environmental outcomes using cross-national data. We estimate multilevel regression models using data on OECD member nations from 1970 to 2014. Results from our analysis indicate that unionization, measured as the percentage of workers who are union members, is negatively associated with CO2 emissions per capita, even when controlling for labor conditions. This finding suggests that unionization may promote environmental protection at the national level.

Theoretical frameworks in environmental inequality suggest that affluent, white, and educated communities have a greater ability to control local environmental change. With a focus on neighborhood-level land development, the authors evaluate this proposition considering the spatial shifts that are reshaping metropolitan areas across the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With coverage for 52,473 metropolitan census tracts, the authors integrate sociodemographic variables from governmental sources with longitudinal data on developed land area from the National Land Cover Database, 2001–2011. Controlling for a host of other factors, results from spatial regression models with fixed effects show that new land development is negatively associated with affluence and educational attainment. Situating the notion of environmental privilege in a historical context, we propose that, with the “back to the city” movement, these groups are moving back into the urban core, which is already relatively built-out and thus has a lower rate of new land development.

A total of 16 percent of hourly workers and 36 percent of workers paid on some other basis experience unstable work schedules due to irregular, on-call, rotating, or split shifts, which negatively impact workers’ ability to manage family responsibilities, finances, and health. Primarily drawing on data from in-depth interviews conducted in Oregon in 2016, this study expands research on how workers navigate through “bad jobs” by exploring the ways in which they respond in an attempt to manage the individual impacts of precarious work arrangements. We found that workers respond to unpredictable scheduling in four ways: they acquiesce, self-advocate, quit, or directly oppose employers. Our findings highlight the “impossible choices” workers face as they negotiate prevalent, unpredictable work conditions, juggle work-life obligations, and struggle to remain employed. We conclude with fair week, work policy recommendations. (equal co-auhtors)