Keith Matheny, Detroit Free PressPublished 5:27 p.m. ET July 25, 2019 | Updated 5:40 p.m. ET July 25, 2019
It's a troubling combination for many Michigan residents: daily exposure to heightened environmental risks such as air and water pollution, heavy traffic and contaminated sites, and having those conditions particularly affect the most socially vulnerable populations — the poor, less educated, sometimes with limited English language skills.
It's situations like this that create chronic conditions that activists and regulators call "environmental injustice": pollution — and polluters — frequently besetting those neighborhoods with little means and political voice to do anything about it.
"We’re a vulnerable community," Theresa Landrum, a southwest Detroit resident and environmental activist living in the shadow of the Marathon Detroit Refinery and other polluting industries, recently told the Free Press.
