Lab 2: Environmental Justice in Lexington, Massachusetts

The EPA defines environmental justice as: "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."

Description of the Lab:

This study was to determine environmental justice and non-environmental justice areas and populations in Lexington based on data from Mass GIS. The map provided shows environmental justice and non-environmental justice areas, as well as toxic waste sites that are within 2000 meters of these areas.

Figure 1:

How it was done:
First, data of environmental justice populations was obtained from Mass GIS. Next, in ArcMap, the layers provided from the data obtained were added. The area of the town was first calculated. Next, the Environmental Justice layer was used, and “clipped” to the town; this clip allowed me to analyze how many areas of environmental justice populations there were in the town, as well as the total area. The geometry of the layer was converted to square kilometers. Next, I hand-selected the 2000m area around the town that featured the toxic sites by simply drawing a square around toxic sites within the town as well as surrounding the town. Next, a “buffer” was created for the environmental justice areas within 2000 meters of the town. This buffer allowed me to analyze and compute the total number of environmental justice areas within 2000m of toxic sites in the town of Lexington, as well as non-environmental justice areas.

Table 1:

Location (Town, EJ, Non-EJ, etc.)	Area (sq km)
Town	43.092
EJ Area	25.72
Non-EJ Area	17.37
EJ within 2000m buffer	20.00
Non-EJ within 2000m buffer	11.08

Table 2:

Location (Town, EJ, Non-EJ, etc.)	Percentages
EJ Area	59.70%
Non-EJ Area	40.30%
EJ within 2000m buffer	77.8%
Non-EJ within 2000m buffer	63.79%

*For each of these tables, EJ stands for Environmental Justice.

Results, Conclusions, and Caveats:

Based on Table 1, there is a larger area of environmental justice than there is for non-environmental justice. The total area in Lexington is 43.092 sq. km. Out of the total area, 25.72 sq. km. are environmental justice, an overall 59.70%. The remaining 17.37 sq. km. of the town is non-environmental justice, and roughly 40.30%. Within 2000m of toxic sites, 77.8% of environmental justice areas are present, and 63.79% of non-environmental justice areas.

The results conclude that there overall are more environmental justice populations than there are for non-environmental justice. The data shows that a large percentage of the environmental justice areas occur within 2000m of toxic sites, and there are more environmental justice sites than there is non-environmental justice. There can be further research to study rivers and waterways to determine if there are any volatile chemicals present; and these studies in the water can help identify if there are any environmental justice populations or non-environmental justice populations affected by the contaminated water. When mapping this data, it would also be useful to determine how these cities compare to those directly surrounding them, or comparing them to other towns with similar demographic attributes.