Environmental Racism

The interest in racial matters in some of your posts suggest that one topic we might investigate this semester is environmental racism -- the disproportionate placement of polluting industries and toxic dumps in predominantly minority areas. The ethics of this is perhaps a tad obvious -- it's wrong on Kantian, Millian, and Aristotelian grounds (though perhaps for somewhat different reasons for each). The economic, political, and social dynamic that perpetuates it, and the growing resistance to it, however, are more than worthy of an ethicist's attention, and it would also be helpful to locate it in other discussions about the environment (for example as in my last post, not dropping local concerns in preference for global ones, but integrating them).