The scientific study of the social distribution of environmental impacts has quickly become an important area of inquiry within environmental sociology. Scholarly interest in this topic—which has been referred to as environmental justice, environmental equity, or environmental racism—does not derive from formal theories of differential environmental impacts, but rather has been inspired by the rapidly evolving environmental justice movement. Sociologists have studied both the social movement itself and the claims of environmental inequity made by the movement's proponents. The study of environmental justice has important implications for other areas of sociology, including stratification, race relations, sociology of health, and the study of social movements.

The Environmental Justice Movement

Origins of the Movement. In the summer of 1978, the state of New York finally acknowledged what the residents of Love Canal had suspected for some time—that some of the 21,000 tons of chemical waste that had...