Social Capital and Industrial Air Pollution in Metropolitan America

ABSTRACT

Large disparities in industrial air pollution exist between metropolitan areas in the United States, but we have little measurable sense of what shapes this inequality. Using data on industrial air pollution and social capital organizations, I show how metropolitan areas higher in “connected” social capital – where members have social ties that extend to other organizations in a metropolitan area – are associated with less pollution. Conversely, metropolitan areas higher in “isolated” social capital – where members’ social ties are comparably insular – are associated with greater pollution. Implications center on how community connectedness links with environmental inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment and technology
• community and urban sociology
• racial and ethnic minorities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. EJ organizations, for instance, are focused on broader notions of justice that emphasize structural problems of environmental inequality beyond that of a given neighborhood (Cole and Foster 2001; Taylor 2014).

2. Social capital research may also include labor unions in the category of isolated organizations (e.g. Paxton 2007). In this paper, they were not included because of concerns about spurious relationships between industrial air pollution and labor unions given that both are linked to heavy manufacturing. Models paralleling those in Table 3 that include labor unions as part of the isolated organizations measure have similar results to those presented in this article.

3. To test for a multiplicative effect of these two variables, I computed a model (not shown) of metropolitan covariates with no cross-level interactions that included an interaction between the density of isolated organizations and the density of connected organizations. While the main effect of each measure remained strong, the effect size of the interaction was comparatively small. This indicates that the differential effect evidenced in Model 2 in Table 3 is not offset by a multiplicative effect of the moderate positive correlation between the two variables.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center [Computational Environmental Justice Analysis]; Social Science Research Institute, Rice University [1].

Notes on contributors

Kevin T. Smiley

Kevin T. Smiley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he is also a core faculty member in the Research and Education in Energy, Environment, and Water (RENEW) Institute. Smiley’s research is at the intersection of environmental and urban issues with a focus on social inequality. He is the co-author of Market Cities, People Cities (NYU Press, 2018).