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Socio-demographic Inequalities in Environmental Exposures

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International Handbook of Population and Environment

Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Population ((IHOP,volume 10))

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Abstract

Contemporary social scientific research emphasizes that populations commonly interact with their environments not as monolithic entities but, instead, through stratified social systems that result in unequal socio-demographic access and exposure to different types of transformed nature. This piece reviews the study of those systemic inequities through a survey of major areas of ongoing research, ending with potential directions for future investigation. A running theme throughout is how the twin forces of urbanization and industrialization not only continue to change the natural world of which we are all part but also conjoin with ongoing forces of racial oppression and economic exploitation to refract that shared fate into highly unequal exposures to hazards of growing scale, scope and intensity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Kraft Hall, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    James R. Elliott

  2. Department of Sociology, 126 Stubbs Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Kevin T. Smiley

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    Lori M. Hunter

  2. Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Clark Gray

  3. Campus Condorcet, National Institute for Demographic Studies, Aubervilliers Cedex, France

    Jacques Véron

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Elliott, J.R., Smiley, K.T. (2022). Socio-demographic Inequalities in Environmental Exposures. In: Hunter, L.M., Gray, C., Véron, J. (eds) International Handbook of Population and Environment. International Handbooks of Population, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76433-3_22

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