UC Davis Environmental Justice Project

Environmental Justice in the Central Valley

Academic Literature Review: Introduction & Methodology

I (Alison Alkon) began this inventory by reading the few, well-known studies of Central Valley environmental justice campaigns. Beyond these few, it became necessary to define environmental justice so that I could find relevant work even if it was not written under an EJ framework. To that end, my colleagues at the EJP and I created these criteria:

• We defined “environmental justice” as issues that pertained to both environmental degradation or natural resource issues and the circumstances of low-income communities and/or communities of color.
• I looked at both research specific to the Central Valley, and to cities, towns and counties within the valley, as well as to research on the state of California relevant to the Central Valley. I omitted research specific to places in California outside the Central Valley.
• I examined research that dealt with policy, law, grassroots organizing, or community based research. I also included public health research whose conclusions might inform these approaches.

I searched for books and articles that would fit these criteria a number of databases. I found the majority of research in JSTOR, but some work came from Sociological Abstracts, Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management, Ethnic Newswatch, Gender Watch, and PAIS. While I attempted to be as interdisciplinary as possible, this search reflects my own training as a sociologist.

I searched these databases for many different keywords. I began searching each database with the terms environmental justice and Central Valley. I also searched for environmental justice and California, and then culled by hand the articles specific to other parts of the state.

Following those searches, I then replaced the phrase environmental justice with specific concerns. These included pesticide, water, toxi*, agriculture, dairy, air pollution, asthma, energy, and fish. The asterix enables the search engine to find words with multiple endings, such as toxin, toxic, etc. I then wrote the summaries of each book or article that appear in this bibliography.

Because much of the best environmental justice research is done by non-academic researchers, I also looked for relevant work on the web pages of non-profit organizations, foundations, and government agencies. I found these organizations through a list compiled by Jonathan London of the Community and University Research and Action Alliance for Justice. From the organizations Jonathan listed, I also followed links to other relevant organizations. In looking through the references these organizations listed, I summarized only those works that were original research, rather than reports of projects. This research inventory as a whole is suggestive, rather than exhaustive. This is particularly true of agency, organization and foundation research which is not compiled into electronic databases.

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