The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies The Oregon Council for the Social Studies is an affiliate of the National Council for the Social Studies Volume 10, Number 2 Page | 64 Dirty Air, Land, and Water: Exploring Place-Based Environmental Injustice using GIS Data Morgan P. Tate & Elaine Alvey As climate change worsens, communities across the United States are forced to deal with environmental challenges. However, not all communities are impacted the same, producing inequity. In this article we define environmental justice and its relationship to social studies education, offer a mini-unit which provides students with the opportunity to explore local GIS data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and engage issues environmental justice in their own communities. One in ten children in the United States attends one of the 12,000 schools located less than one mile from a hazardous industrial chemical facility (Starbuck & White, 2016). These children are disproportionately children of color who live in poverty (Starbuck & White, 2016). Schools in areas with unsafe levels of air-polluting neurotoxins are most likely to serve the youngest students in under-resourced neighborhoods of color (Grineski & Collins, 2018). These are examples of the urgent and unequal impacts of environmental harms; this inequity can be defined as environmental injustice. In this article we define environmental justice and its relationship to social studies education, offering a mini-unit which provides students with the opportunity to explore local GIS data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and engage issues environmental justice in their own communities. Defining Environmental Justice Environmental justice is the intersection of environmental harms and other issues of social and economic justice, recognizing the overlap of these problems and the compounding oppression and hegemony at work (Bullard & Wright, 2008). Our collective dumping, burning, and extraction has systematically been most burdensome to poor people and people of color. Kruvant (1975) described that “disadvantaged people are largely victims of middle- and upper-class pollution... Discrimination created the situation and those with wealth and influence have the political power to keep polluting facilities away from their homes” (p. 166). Put differently, people with wealth can avoid toxins. Furthermore, Robert Bullard (1993) defined environmental racism as racial discrimination in policy making, enforcement of environmental protection regulations, the targeting of communities of color as the place of dangerous industry and toxic disposal, and the exclusion of people of color from decision making process and the mainstream environmental movement. Bullard (1993) wrote that “whether by conscious design or institutional neglect, communities of color in urban ghettos, in rural 'poverty pockets,' or