Sacrifice Zones in Transit: Environmental Justice in US Pipeline Communities

As oil and gas pipelines have continued to proliferate, they have emerged as a contentious environmental justice issue. Yet, despite receiving attention in social movements literature and in popular press, few attempts have... [ view full abstract ]

As oil and gas pipelines have continued to proliferate, they have emerged as a contentious environmental justice issue. Yet, despite receiving attention in social movements literature and in popular press, few attempts have been made to determine whether pipeline-related environmental injustices are systemic or if they are localized in select places. This paper theorizes pipeline placement as an environmental justice issue through the lens of Manuel Castells’ space of flows, spaces of places framework. Using geolocated energy infrastructure data from the Energy Information Administration and demographic data from the American Community Survey, spatial regression analysis is deployed at multiple geographic scales to determine whether pipelines are disproportionately located in environmental injustice-prone counties. After controlling for several geographic variables, the national-level analysis shows that pipeline placement is positively associated with higher proportions of non-white residents and negatively with median home values. Contrary to purely class-based explanations of environmental justice, pipeline placement is negatively associated with poverty. However, results from the national-level hold only to varying degrees when broken down into regions. The author concludes that the placement of oil and gas pipelines across the United States, part of the space of flows, has characteristics of a systemic environmental justice issue, but regional variability informs the exact form in which it manifests locally, or in the space of places.