Is Inequality Bad for the Environment and Bad for Your Health?

Inequality is bad for the environment and bad for public health. That’s the conclusion of a recent study of the United States by biologist Andrew Klemer, environmental scientist Paul Templet of Louisiana State University, resource economist Cleve Willis, and the present author.¹

Using data from the 50 states, we investigated the relationship between inequality, environmental policies, environmental quality, and public health. Minnesota, the most egalitarian state, ranked seventh in the country in the strength of its environmental policies, eleventh in environmental quality, and had the fourth lowest premature death rate. By contrast, Mississippi, the most inegalitarian state, ranked 46th in environmental policy, 42nd in environmental quality, and 49th in its premature death rate (see the table for complete rankings of the states).

Who and How Much? The distribution and magnitude of environmental costs

Activists in the environmental justice movement have drawn attention to the fact that low-income communities and people of color face disproportionate environmental risks in the United States. In other words, political and economic inequalities shape the distribution of environmental costs. Numerous studies have documented, for example, that hazardous waste facilities tend to be concentrated in low-income communities, especially those with large percentages of African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.² In metropolitan Los Angeles, neighborhoods where toxic waste storage and disposal facilities were built between 1970 and 1990 were home to 60% higher proportions of Latinos and AfricanAmericans than neighborhoods where such facilities were not sited.³ In 1994, the growing public outcry against such environmental injustices prompted President Bill Clinton to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to identify and remedy any disproportionate health and environmental impacts of their policies on low-income and minority populations.

Our study of the 50 states provides evidence that inequality has a significant impact not only on who bears environmental costs, but also on their total magnitude. If states with greater inequality have worse environmental quality overall, then inequality harms not only disadvantaged communities, but also the quality of life and public health state-wide.

The reasons for the correlation between inequality and environmental degradation are not hard to fathom. Polluters profit by reaping what co-author Paul Templet, Louisiana’s former Secretary of Environmental Quality, terms a “pollution subsidy”: the money that firms save when they avoid the costs of environmental protection. Consumers of goods and services produced by these firms may benefit, too, if some of the pollution subsidy is passed along to them in the form of lower prices. High-income people typically receive the lion’s share of both types of benefits, as producers and consumers, for the simple reasons that they both get more of the profits and consume more goods and services than the average person. Low income people, on the other hand, often bear the heaviest environmental costs, as the environmental justice movement has documented.

The balance of power between those who benefit from environmental degradation and those who pay the price helps to determine the size of the pollution subsidy, and the amount of environmental degradation in a given place and time. When disparities are modest, communities are better able to defend themselves from having pollution dumped on them by others. It’s not surprising, then, that in a state like Minnesota, where power disparities are relatively small, environmental quality is better than in a state like Mississippi, where disparities are large and the powerful can impose pollution on others more easily.

Measuring inequality

To measure inequality in the distribution of power at the state level, we used data on voter participation, education, tax fairness, and Medicaid access. We reckoned that all four of these variables have something in common:higher levels reflect a more equal distribution of power, and lower levels a more unequal distribution. Lowincome people are generally less likely to vote than high-income people, so higher voter turnouts imply that low-income people have greater voice in the electoral process. Educational attainment—the percentage of adults who at a minimum have graduated from high school—is important because of the links between information and power. Tax fairness and access to health care through the Medicaid program indicate the degree of inequality on the revenue and expenditure sides of state fiscal policy, respectively. Rankings of power inequality in the 50 states, based on the statistical common element in these four variables, are reported in the first column of the table.

To explore the roots of inequality, we looked at its relationship to income distribution, race, and ethnicity. States with more unequal distributions of power typically have wider income inequality and larger percentages of African-Americans and Latinos in their populations, suggesting that disparities based on class, race, and ethnicity all play an important role in generating unequal distributions of power in the United States. The southern states generally have the most inequality, as can be seen in the table, but the relationships among these variables persist within specific regions, too.

Inequality and the environment

To assess the impact of inequality on the environment, we obtained state-wise rankings of environmental policies and environmental quality from the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies. We used an environmental policy index based on 77 indicators of the strength of state environmental policies in areas such as toxic waste management, air pollution, water quality, recycling, landfills, agriculture, energy, and transportation. This ranking, reported in the second column of the table, indicates that California has the strongest environmental policies in the nation, and Arkansas the weakest.

The environmental quality indexis based on 167 different indicators, including measures of air pollution, water pollution, energy use, transportation efficiency, toxic chemical releases, hazardous and solid waste production, agricultural pollution, and the conditions of forests and fisheries. According to this ranking, reported in the third column of the table, Vermont leads the nation in environmental quality, while Indiana ranks last.

Environmental policies are significantly correlated with inequality: states like Minnesota and Maine, with more equal distributions of power, tend to have stronger environmental policies than states like Mississippi and Alabama, with more unequal distributions of power. Environmental policies also tend to be stronger in states with a larger share of manufacturing in their economy, more people living in urban areas, and higher population densities.

Environmental quality in turn is determined to a significant extent by environmental policies. Manufacturing and urbanization are associated with worse environmental quality, but as one would expect, states with stronger regulatory policies tend to have cleaner environments.

The environment and public health

To examine the public-health impacts of environmental quality, we looked at statelevel data on the premature death rate, the infant mortality rate, and a composite public-health index. State rankings for the premature death rate are reported in the final column of the table.

Environmental quality has a significant impact on all three measures of public health: states with worse environmental quality tend to have higher premature death rates, higher infant mortality rates, and lower scores on the public-health index. Inequality also has adverse health impacts above and beyond those attributable to poorer environmental quality, a finding consistent with recent research suggesting that the psychological and social dimensions of inequality significantly increase the incidence of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.⁴

Implications

The environmental justice movement has championed the idea that the environment is a social justice issue: advocates for low-income people and people of color are increasingly paying serious attention to the environment, recognizing that their communities often bear the heaviest costs of pollution and environmental hazards.

The relationship between inequality and the total magnitude of environmental degradation implies that the reverse is true, too: social justice is an environmental issue. If inequality systematically contributes to environmental destruction, then efforts to achieve a more democratic distribution of power—including right-to-know laws, public participation in decision-making, and local accountability—are crucial to safeguard both the environment and public health. Just as social justice and civil rights activists have begun to tackle environmental issues, so too the environmental movement must pay serious attention to the inequalities of power, and to the disparities of income, race, and ethnicity that divide American society into environmental haves and have-nots.

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