Analyzing the Military’s Role in Producing Air Toxics Disparities in the United States: A Critical Environmental Justice Approach

Abstract

The negative environmental, health, and social effects arising from U.S. military action in communities both domestically and abroad suggest that the military represents an understudied institutional source of environmental injustice. Moreover, scholars and activists have long argued that the state is an active or a tacit contributor to environmental inequality, thus providing an opportunity to link U.S. military activity with approaches to the state developed under critical environmental justice. We build on these literatures to ask: Does the presence of domestic military facilities significantly increase carcinogenic risks from air toxics? And do communities of color face additional military-associated carcinogenic risks? Multilevel analyses reveal that locales in closer proximity to a military facility and those exposed to greater military technological intensity, independent of each other, experience significantly higher carcinogenic risk from air toxics. We find that proximity to military facilities tends to intensify racial and ethnic environmental inequalities in exposure to airborne toxics, but in different ways for Latinx and Black populations. These results highlight the role of the state in perpetuating racial and environmental expendability as reflected in critical environmental justice and represent an important expansion of nationwide environmental justice studies on contributors to environmental inequality.

A regional approach to militarized riskscapes: An environmental justice analysis of military proximity and air pollution in United States Environmental Protection Agency's regions

“…To start at a baseline, we will first review the series of models without interactions shown in Table 2 and Figure 3. This revealed a nationwide patterning of significantly unequal estimated cancer risk from air toxics for census tracts with greater percentages of Black and Latinx residents, supporting the results of earlier nationwide analyses of air toxics and environmental inequality (e.g., Downey, 1998;Ard, 2015;Liévanos, 2015Liévanos, , 2019; see also Alvarez et al, 2022). Similarly reflective of existing research (e.g., Grineski et al, 2017Grineski et al, , 2019Liévanos, 2015Liévanos, , 2019, we also found significantly greater estimated cancer risk from air toxics for tracts with greater percentages of Asian and Pacific Islander residents.…”

“…The dramatic and intensive nature of warfare is commensurate with its impacts to environmental health, and subsequently, human health. However, subtler forms of risk and pollution spatially distant from test sites and battlefields nevertheless are important to understanding the full extent of military pollution (Alvarez et al, 2021(Alvarez et al, , 2022. From increased unexploded ordnances on Native lands (Hooks & Smith, 2004) to increased air toxics exposure for communities with more Latinx and Black residents near domestic military sites (Alvarez et al, 2022) and polluting surface and ground water via firefighting foam (US GAO, 2018), some means in which domestic military activity contributes to the deterioration of environmental health have been documented.…”

“…The dramatic nature of warfare, therefore, should not occlude analysis of the destructiveness of war preparation (Downey, 2015), which may take place in the everyday practices of domestic military sites with health consequences for military personnel, their families, and civilians who live or work on or near these sites. While prior studies consider environmental risk from domestic military facilities on national scale (Alvarez et al, 2022), here we assess regional variations in relationships between proximity to facilities, neighborhood composition, and air toxics cancer risk.…”

“…Our primary aim is to analyze whether regionalized military riskscapes exist across the domestic landscape, with a particular interest in illuminating their patterns and contours. We use multi-level models with random intercepts to explore whether relationships between proximity to military facilities and exposure to carcinogenic air toxins on the census tract level (Alvarez et al, 2022) are homogenous or heterogenous across the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 10 administrative regions. In each region, we explore the associations among the proximity of military facilities, the intensity of use of those facilities, and the presence of carcinogenic air toxins (whether they were released by military or non-military sources).…”

“…One recent development is risk-transfer militarism, which observes that as technology advances and certain elements of military action occur remotely, some hazards associated with warfare increasingly manifest away from combatants at the front lines and nearer to civilian and other populations at great distance from battlefields (Alvarez et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2013). A corollary of this development is greater interest in whether and how proximity to military bases in the United States implicates differential exposure to environmental harm-including air pollutionfor military personnel and their families who live on or near bases, as well as nearby civilian populations (Alvarez et al, 2021(Alvarez et al, , 2022.…”