In many respects, the literature on environmental justice and policy has reached its second wave, focusing on broad issues of policy and conceptualization building on the conclusions of the first wave, the empirical examination establishing that there are significant actual racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences in environmental risks. Edwardo Lao Rhodes, who worked for a year in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Office of Environmental Justice, takes a step back into the first wave of research, reassessing the evidence concerning the extent of racial and class differences, and offering what he calls a “new paradigm” for analyzing whether such differences exist in specific places. Perhaps the best way to summarize this book is to say that it advocates the need for greater emphasis on environmental justice, but for different reasons than those articulated previously.

The book begins with a series of chapters examining an out-line of the history of the concept of environmental justice (by which he largely means environmental equity), and the evolution of both “mainstream environmental organizations” and the environmental justice movement. This section concludes with a brief (and mild) critique of the EPA in its handling of environmental justice issues. The purpose of these chapters is to make the case that issues of environmental justice are of great public policy importance, but that the traditional or mainstream ways of thinking about such issues is based on a variety of incorrect analytical assumptions.

The book then turns its attention to a section called “Policy Analysis of Environmental Justice.” Here, the discussion turns to a series of assertions about what constitutes public policy analysis, starting with the contention that policy analysis is the progeny of “modern economics,” an idea with which much of the conceptual literature on policy analysis might take issue. It then provides a brief, but sweeping, critique of analytic approaches taken in existing empirical studies of environmental justice, that is, studies that purport to find race differences, per se, in environmental risk or exposure to hazardous substances. The author's argument is that before one can draw broad inferences about environmental justice (and presumably act on these inferences), one must examine such issues across populations, geographic areas, time, and environmental risks. For example, Rhodes states that in “ignoring issues of proper measurement units—whether to use counties, zip codes, or census tract or block units—it becomes too much of a leap of faith to conclude on the basis of a single factor's characteristics that environmental-justice problems do or do not exist in a community or across a region” (p. 142). Without extensive discussion, this seems like a curious assertion, in the sense that if people in heavily African American census tracts, for example, actually do experience significantly greater exposure to, say, environmental lead than people in less heavily African American census tracts, then there is no reason not to draw a relevant environmental justice inference. Indeed, there may not be a need to establish that people who live in heavily African American census tracts are also disproportionately exposed to other environmental risks before drawing inferences, or advocating policy responses, to the problem of potential exposure to environmental lead.

The core of this section, however, is the expression of Rhodes's effort to promote “data envelopment analysis,” or DEA, as an appropriate alternative analytic method for analyzing environmental justice issues. DEA represents a multivariate data analytic technique that allows researchers to essentially combine multiple dependent variables (or “potential environmental risk factors”) into a single measure. In other words, it promises to be able to allow analysis of a combination of environmental variables, such as the quality of the air, proximity to hazardous waste sites, and presumably other variables, at the same time. As a result, it provides a potential means for assessing the relative influence of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status on this combination of risk factors in ways not possible with traditional, single dependent variable, multivariate statistics.

The book's third and final section focuses on a case study of an effort to site a hazardous-material disposal facility in Noxubee County, Mississippi, and prescribes new directions for environmental policy. The case study does not apply any particular analytic techniques, but rather simply documents the complexity of the decision-making processes associated with efforts to site this facility. The prescriptions consist mainly of recommendations to get federal bureaucrats to be more attuned to problems of inequity in environmental risks, to provide greater community access to environmental information, and make federal and state regulations more flexible in order to respond to specific local environmental inequities.

What is perhaps most perplexing about this book is that it addresses many of the issues almost in an academic vacuum. Instead of attempting to develop his arguments as extensions or corrections to existing literature, Rhodes often seems to be unaware of such literature. For example, in the discussion and critique of the mainstream environmental and environmental justice movements, there is no reference to such works as Christopher Foreman's The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice (1998), Bunyan Bryant's edited volume Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions (1995), or other scholarly works that have examined this very issue. In his discussion of what constitutes public policy analysis, Rhodes seems content to make assertions about what policy analysis is (and by inference what it is not) without any reference to literatures that might support or refute these assertions. In his case study of the hazardous-materials disposal facility siting, there is virtually no reference to any of the extensive literatures on this issue, the not-in-my-backyard syndrome, or any of a host of related issues. This is not to say that Environmental Justice in America is altogether unsuccessful. It implicitly acknowledges the unease in dealing with issues of equity and justice found in many approaches to environmental policy and risk analysis. For anyone wishing to learn about how those who are formally trained in and practice economic approaches to environmental policy analysis might approach the issue of environmental justice, this book is important reading.