Racial/Ethnic Group Attitudes Toward Environmental Protection in California: Is “Environmentalism” Still a White Phenomenon?

Abstract

One view of minority opinion on environmental issues suggests that minority voters are focused on less esoteric concerns such as education, jobs, and crime. An alternative argument is that minorities, many of whom live proximate to the sources of pollution and environmental degradation, are actually more concerned. Focusing here on Latinos, we argue that minority concern about environmental issues is endogenous to the nature of the issue and has changed over time. Specifically, we suggest that increasing environmental awareness among minorities has led Latinos to become more sensitive to environmental issues than their white counter-parts over time, but that this difference is manifest only on issues of proximate concern to Latinos and not on more abstract environmental principles. Pooling Field Polls in California across a 21-year span, we model support for various pro-environment positions among Latino, African-American, and non-Hispanic white respondents. We find considerable empirical support for the dynamics of growing minority environmental concern among Latinos, but only weak evidence for a similar trend among African-Americans.