HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
OLD KING COAL
economic benefits such projects
might offer; and in any case have
the means to relocate to fairer,
and in all likelihood, more expensive pastures should an environmental insult prove too much.
Slide down the income scale,
and you’ll eventually start running into folks like Booker Gipson,
who lives on a tiny Social Security payment and whatever he
can muster at the stockyards for
his few head of cattle — less than
$10,000 even in a good year.
“If they treat me well and give
me enough of the green stuff, well
then I can get up and go,” Gipson
says, when asked if he’d sell his
property if he could. “As it is, we
can’t afford to move.”
On the flip side, potential polluters tend to favor — and surely
follow — paths of least resistance.
Such paths, almost by definition, more often lead to the door
of folks like Gipson than to, say, a
wealthy suburb of Montgomery.
An analysis by researchers from
the University of Colorado, and
published in 2008 in the journal
Sociological Perspectives, made
the income connection quite clear.
Although the results were not predictive of pollution exposures, the
researchers were able to combine
broad pollution data gleaned from
EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory
with Census-tract demographic
Light
industry
buoys
the local
economy,
but the
area has
seen
better
times.
data on race and income. The
study revealed an unmistakable
link between declining incomes
and increasing odds of living in an
area of higher toxic concentration.
Even more telling: the results
varied significantly by race, even
when income was the same. The
average black household with an
income below $10,000, the researchers noted, “lives in a neighborhood with a toxic concentration value that is significantly
different from — and 1.51 times
as great as — the average white
household in the same category.”
Those findings came as no sur-