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Urban national parks were designed in the 1970s to bring nature and recreational opportunities to socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the USA. Using the theoretical frame of environmental justice, this paper discusses findings of a recent survey of visitors to Los Angeles' Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area - the United States' largest urban national park. Findings show park visitors were predominantly white, affluent, and lived nearby. People of colour travelled further, were significantly less likely to be return visitors, and were less inclined to use the park for active recreation. Seemingly, this park fails to meet the needs of the disadvantaged urban communities for whom it was created, a problem that may also affect other parks in the United States and potentially parks in other countries. Park planners and managers can take practical steps to increase accessibility to this park for people of colour and low-income earners, and should monitor other parks for patterns of ethno-racially differentiated access and utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban aspects of local food systems, such as farmers' markets, provide an opportunity for city residents to “do” environmentalism within their own home places. What environmentalism is and how to do it, however, vary greatly with the social location of the population involved. This paper investigates the social construction of the environment through participant-observation research at two urban farmers' markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. In one farmers' market, located in a largely affluent and white neighbourhood, locally grown organic food becomes a symbol through which urban eaters can connect to wild nature. This framing provides an urban corollary to the wilderness narrative that dominates the US environmental movement. In another case, located in a low-income area, the farmers' market's largely African-American managers and vendors liken the farmers' market to environmental justice efforts. By constructing the environment as the places where the customers it targets “live, work and play”, this farmers' market emphasises race and inequality, rather than traditional environmental concerns. Both farmers' markets, however, do to some degree engage both ecology and equity in their discourses and actions. Given the importance of meaning-centred tensions to conflicts between the environmental justice and reform environmental movements, my analysis has important implications for the development of a paradigm that attends to both ecological sustainability and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exposure of children to environmental disamenities has emerged as a key policy concern in recent years, with some analysts and activists suggesting that minority children are disproportionately impacted. Utilizing a dataset that combines air toxics at the census tract level with school-based demographic and other information, this article indicates disparate exposures for students of color in California schools and suggests that there may be negative impacts on one measure of academic performance, even after controlling for other factors usually associated with test scores. Policy implications include a special focus on school remediation and strengthening overall efforts to reduce emissions “hot spots.” [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]

Past research on "environmental justice" has often failed to systematically link hazard proximity with quantifiable health risks. The authors employ recent advances in air emissions inventories and modeling techniques to consider a broad range of outdoor air toxics in Southern California and to calculate the potential lifetime cancer risks associated with these pollutants. They find that such risks are attributable mostly to transportation and small-area sources and not the usually targeted large-facility pollution emissions. Multivariate regression suggests that race plays an explanatory role in risk distribution even after controlling for other economic, land-use, and population factors. This pattern suggests the need for innovative emissions reduction efforts as well as specific strategies to alter the spatial and racial character of the environmental "riskscape" in urban centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]