| This dissertation examines important issues in the field of environmental justice, analyzing aviation noise as an environmental burden. Founded upon the environmental justice and aviation noise literature, this research identifies noise as an environmental burden that causes harm, analyzes aviation noise in the Phoenix metropolitan area to explore environmental justice issues, uses appropriate methods to avoid concerns associated with prior environmental justice research methodologies, identifies key contributions to the scholarly literature, and suggests public policy implications.; Using a geographic information systems approach, United States Census Bureau data at the census block group level was collected from two areas near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. These data were analyzed using Tobit and logit multivariate regression analyses as a basis from which to identify relationships between residents' demographic characteristics and high levels of aviation noise. In both analyses, the predominant predictor for inclusion in the study's noise-impacted areas was found to be the Hispanic head-of-household variable. Less dramatic findings associated with income, education, race, marital status and spoken language variables are also presented and discussed.; Inference is made relating to the relative importance of three causal factors—discrimination, economics, and political influence—within the context of a theory of influence found in the scholarly literature. For this case, the findings most strongly support the hypothesis of pure discrimination, with mixed support for the hypothesis of economic considerations causing disparate impact of environmental burdens by race. The hypothesis that different levels of political influence are the cause is contradicted. Thereafter, public policy implications relating to the research are discussed with a focus on the federal and local levels of government.; While many questions relating to the emerging field of environmental justice remain, this dissertation contributes findings from a new environmental disamenity to the larger body of research on environmental burdens affecting disadvantaged communities. |
