Environmental Justice in California

Daniel Fernandez

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In California, and the United States as a whole, low-income and minority communities have often fallen victim to years of environmental injustice through the constructs of elitism and capitalism. This study seeks to understand the process of city development, using data from over 100 California cities to observe whether cities are responsible for different environmental injustices and what can be done to address those injustices if they are present by analyzing environmental factors such as the number of parks and tree cover percentage to demographic data such as race, median income and unemployment rates to observe any trends between the data and make inferences about environmental injustices at the city scale. There was no significant relationship found between race or median income and percentage of tree cover or number of parks. However, this could be a result of not factoring in population size for each analysis or having a relatively small collection of sample cities. A moderate relationship between unemployment rates and percentage of tree cover was found; with the data indicating that as unemployment rates drop the percentage of tree cover increases.

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