Vốn xã hội, hợp lý và bất bình đẳng: Phân bổ rủi ro sức khỏe môi trường ở Đông Nam Hoa Kỳ

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2003 Social capital, rationality, and inequality : the distribution of environmental health risks in the Southeastern United States Sammy Joseph Zahran Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Zahran, Sammy Joseph, "Social capital, rationality, and inequality : the distribution of environmental health risks in the Southeastern United States., University of Tennessee, 2003.edu/utk_graddiss/5214 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact trace@utk. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Sammy Joseph Zahran entitled "Social capital, rationality, and inequality : the distribution of environmental health risks in the Southeastern United States." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Sociology.

Hastings, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Sammy Joseph Zahran entitled "Social Capital, Rationality, and Inequality:. The Distribution of Environmental Health Risks in the Southeastern United States." I have examined the final paper copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Sociology. We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: SOCIAL CAPITAL, RATIONALITY, AND INEQUALITY: THE DISTRIBUTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH RISKS IN THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED FOR THE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEGREE THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE SAMMY JOSEPH ZAHRAN DECEMBER 2003 I COPYRIGHT© 2003 BY SAMMY ZAHRAN.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my father Karim Zahran, my friend Glenn Coffey, and my graduate school love Lisa Ann Zilney. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Though authored by a doctoral candidate, and approved by the Graduate Council as a work of their doing, the dissertation is fundamentally a collective endeavor. Here, I thank the collective.

First and foremost, I thank my dissertation advisor, Dr. This work would not have been possible had it not been for his intellectual guidance, logistical support, and moral kindness. Hastings instilled in me the confidence and will to complete this project. So many hours were spent in his office solving analytic puzzles and discussing philosophies of life.

On matters of epistemology, ontology, and the mechanics of social science, Dr. Hastings stands above all. I am thankful especially for his friendship and genuine interest in my welfare. Special thanks goes to Dr.

So much of this dissertation is inspired by her scholarship in environmental sociology: Her theoretical work in this area indelibly colors most everything I write. Robert Gorman and Dr. Robert Jones, I thank for serving on my committee, and giving their valuable time and intellectual energies to make this work stronger. Special gratitude is extended to Dr.

Jonathan Shefner for taking active interest in my professional development, and providing research opportunities to hone my skills as a social scientist. The following professors I acknowledge as important to my academic development: Dr. William Robinson, Dr. Asafa Jalata, Dr.·tom Hood, Dr.

Robert Perrin, Dr. Paul Blanchard, Dr. Klaus Heberle, and Dr. I would like to express appreciation to the Cole-Franklin Committee for providing financial support for completion of this dissertation.

Thanks also to Dr. John Michael Oakes, Eleanor Reed, the U_S Geological Survey, and the National Center for Charitable Statistics for providing data. All members of the University of Tennessee's Sociology Department staff merit my thanks, with special mention going to Betty Lou Widener and Sandy Coward. Betty Lou and Sandy helped with daunting paperwork and bureaucratic minutiae.

I am also indebted to the Sociology Department for providing scholarship monies, teaching and research opportunities. Special thanks goes to my friend Dr. John provided intellectual support and words of encouragement, lifted my spirit in dark hours, and opened his home as I neared the finish line. I am most thankful for nights we shared watching epic prizefights and talking endlessly about domestic and world affairs.

Friends and graduate school peers also deserve mention. They made the arduous graduate school experience enjoyable. In particular, I would like to thank the following people for camaraderie and shared laughter: Amy Page, Ann Carroll, Azlan Tajuddin, Heith Copes, Kent Kerley, Kyle Goldberg, Laura iv Zilney, Marc Parent, Michael Odorico, Patrick Williams, Ryan Graham, and Sean Huss. Special thanks to good friends Charles Wright, Cory Blad, David Steele, and Regina Russell for their tolerance, loyalty, and intellectual curiosity that made for great debate and discussions of the heart.

Completion of this project depended so greatly on the patience, kindness of heart, and moral support of my friend Dr. Through his brilliant humor and good nature, Glenn eased the sting of alienation and self-doubt one encounters during this project. This dissertation also benefited immeasurably from his legal expertise and ability to clear the intellectual brush. In the last two months of · this work, Glenn provided me not only a place to stay, but also a home.

He restored my faith in the academic profession and helped me recognize that human relationships matter most. Special thanks goes to my father, Karim Zahran, who instilled in me the values of education, service to community, and betterment of life. My father provided financial and emotional support and lived this project as if it were his own. I am grateful to have been raised by a man of such dignity, self-respect, and wisdom.

May I live to his standard and pass his words and example to children of my own. I acknowledge my mother, Amal Zahran, for her love of family and drive to make her children achieve. A debt of gratitude goes to my brothers Jack and Peter Zahran for offering words of encouragement during the darkest hours, listening patiently as I rambled about this research, and noting inconsistencies in my reasoning. I am proud of the men they have become, and look forward to years of friendship and brotherhood.

My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Lisa Anne Zilney- my graduate school love. From Canada, we left for the United States to achieve common dreams. Her love, humanity, beauty, and intellect sustained me for 1 O years.

So much of this dissertation is hers. From conception to execution of this research project, Lisa provided invaluable counsel. Her instinct for a good idea is unmatched. By her work ethic, kindness, insight, and extraordinary patience, she inspired me to reach higher than I could alone.

I feel blessed to have known her company for so long. I love her and our companion animals - Sly, Levi, and Huxley - deeply. She will forever inhabit my heart and mind. May she find happiness and achieve the fulfillment of her dreams.

V ABSTRACT This doctoral dissertation examines the distribution of environmentally risky technologies in the Southeastern United States. The empirical target is commercial treatment, storage, and disposal (TSD) installations of hazardous waste. Two questions motivate the investigation: where are hazardous waste installations located, and why? These installations handle substances that increase rates of mortality and serious irreversible illness, and pose a significant hazard to human health and the environment. Scholars maintain the hazardous waste stream in the United States has a grisly logic- it is distributed on the population unevenly, with poor communities of color burdened disproportionately.

The dissertation tests four hypotheses distilled from four theories of human organization of space for risky technologies. The first hypothesis, economic rationality, examines the distribution of TSD installations from the standpoint of commercial operators. TSD installation operators insist they select commercially suitable locations not areas with historically disadvantaged populations. The second hypothesis, scientific rationality, examines the distribution problem from the standpoint of EPA geologists, hydrologists and engineers, that insist siting decisions are based on clearly articulated scientific criteria.

The third hypothesis, community social capital, analyzes the geographic unevenness of environmental health risks as a function of the variable capacity of communities to resist the placement of a facility in their neighborhood by levels of trust, cohesion, and reciprocity that obtain. The fourth hypothesis, race and class inequality, examines the claim that inequitable siting of hazardous waste installations is an outcropping of direct and indirect institutional discrimination. The dataset is a match of records on fully operational treatment, storage and disposal facilities and large quantity generators of hazardous waste from the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, population and housing data at the census tract level from the US Census Bureau, non-profit organization data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics and the People of Color Environmental Groups Directory, and seismic hazard and hydrologic data from the US Geological Survey. Bivariate and multivariate statistical results suggest that siting outcomes are predictable by the distribution of social capital assets, the racial composition of a community, the seismological unsuitability a land use, and TSD installation proximity to adequately skilled labor and hazardous materials for processing.

The concentration of large quantity generator activity and the percentage of African-Americans in a neighborhood prevail as the most consistent and powerful predictors of TSD installation siting at regional and sub-regional levels, and across different spatial measures of environmental health risk. Uneven distribution of environmental burdens by race violates the promise of President Clinton's Executive Order 12898, mandating fair treatment of all people in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. The dissertation ends with a risk allocation scheme to solve the systemic Prisoners' Dilemma of concentrated environmental burden and diffuse environmental benefit. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION AND STATEMENT OF PROBLEM Introduction 1 Sizing the Hazardous Waste Problem 1 Statement of Dissertation Problem and Hypotheses 8 Political Economic Roots of the Hazardous Waste Problem 9 The First Contradiction of Capitalism 10 The Second Contradiction of Capitalism 12 Contributions and Relevancy of the Study 16 Organization of Study 18 Chapter II: REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE 20 Introduction 20 Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facility Cross-sectional Studies 20 Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facility Longitudinal Studies 35 Summary of the Evidence 45 CHAPTER 111: HYPOTHESES, DATA SOURCES AND VARIABLE OPERATIONS 50 Introduction 50 Theories and Hypotheses of TSDF Location 50 Economic Rationality Hypothesis 51 Scientific Rationality Hypothesis 52 Social Capital Hypotheses 54.

Racial and Class Inequity Hypothesis 57 Why Study the Southeastern United States? 59 Data Sources and Construction of the Dataset 67 Data on Commercial Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facilities, 1998 68 Large Quantity Generators of Hazardous Waste, 1992 70 US Census Bureau Population and Housing Data, 1990 71 National Center for Charitable Statistics Core Data, 1990 74 People of Color Environmental Groups Directory, 1996 76 US Geological Survey Seismic Hazard Data and Grid Values, 1990 77 US Geological Survey Hydrologic Unit Code Data, 1990 78 · Unit of Analysis 79 Statistical Tests and Methods 82 CHAPTER IV: STATISTICAL RESULTS 84 Introduction 84 Univariate Statistics and Basic Description 84 Differences in Means and Independent Samples t-Tests 91 Bivariate Results for EPA Region IV 93 Bivariate Results for Sub-Regions 102 Summary of t-Test Results 116 Methodological Preliminaries for Regression Analysis 119 Binary Logistic Regression Results for EPA Region IV 120 Binary Logistic Regression Results for the South and Deep South 129 Summary of Logistic Regression Results 138 vii PAGE CHAPTERV: DISCUSSION, SUMMARY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY 141 Introduction 141 Summary and Discussion 141 Environmental Justice Policy 144 Maximizing Environmental Equity: A Risk Allocation Proposal 144 BIBLIOGRAPHY 150 APPENDIX 169 VITA 183 viii LIST OFT ABLES TABLE PAGE 1.