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The South Central Farm (SCF) in Los Angeles was a 14-acre urban farm in one of the highest concentrations of impoverished residents in the county. It was destroyed in July 2006. This article analyzes its epic as a landscape of resistance to discriminatory legal and planning practices. It then presents its creation and maintenance as an issue of environmental justice, and argues that there was a substantive rationale on the basis of environmental justice and planning ethics that should have provided sufficient grounds for the city to prevent its dismantling. Based on qualitative case study methodology, the study contributes to the formulation of creation and preservation rationales for community gardens and other “commons” threatened by eventual dismantlement in capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA's National Air Toxics Assessment(NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then consider the distribution of these risks using both simple comparisons and a multivariate model in which we control for income, land use, and other explanatory factors, as well as spatial correlation. We find large racial disparities in California's“riskscape” as well as inequalities by other factors and suggest several implications for environmental and land use policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]