Track: Environmental Management
Environmental Justice In Louisiana's Industrial Corridor
John K. WildgenThe banks of the Mississippi River's meandering path between Baton Rouge and New Orleans (Louisiana, USA) support an extremely large petrochemical complex. Interspersed between the tanks and towers is a heterogeneous mixture of white and black populations at risk from the toxic releases originating in these plants. The racial balance of risks is one of Louisiana's chronically unresolved political problems, and has led to charges of environmental racism. The problem is argued in a vocabulary that borrows words and concepts from chemistry, economics, black studies, political science, sociology, and Marxism. Little advantage has been taken of increasingly available digital maps, spatial data, and spatial modeling techniques that can make planning mitigation of risk easier and fairer. An inventory of cheaply available data suggests a wide variety of spatial approaches. One especially appealing approach explored here borrows from spatial modeling techniques to build a distance-weighted race surface. Traversing this surface, on both sides of the Mississippi, with a least cost-path gives us a one-dimensional model of racial impact that is an intuitively appealing planning tool which is easy to understand and useful for decision and litigation support.
John K. Wildgen
University of New Orleans
Math Bldg Rm. 308
New Orleans, LA 70148
USA
Telephone: 504.280.6521
Fax: 504.280.6272
E-mail: jkwpo@uno.edu