Grist.com is doing a series on poverty and the environment that argues "the worst consequences of environmental degradation are visited on the homes, workplaces, families, and bodies of the poor."
This highlights an issue that I think deserves more attention. In a way, pollution is a subsidy. Things like air and water constitute a public commons. Polluters are subsidized with free waste disposal. In technical economic terms, the deregulation favored by conservative ideologues allows companies to increase profit by creating negative externalities. But viewing pollution as a subsidy undermines the basis in ideolofical libertarian economics for deregulation. I don't subscribe to libertarian economics or to the popular libertarian conception of justice being centered only in property rights, but I always think it's a good thing to show how an action can be justified on a number of views. Examples of externalities include the high price of asthma that are made even higher by pollution, and the cost to Gulf of Mexico fishermen from the "dead zone" caused by runoff from the fertilizer used on feed corn farms in the midwest.
When a factory chicken farm moves in next door to your property you are not compensated for any of the costs you incur: noise and light pollution, contaminated drinking water, increased risk of disease, stench and pollution, etc. Setting aside any moral arguments about how animals ought to be treated, it is very difficult yo call yourself an environmentalist or claim to care about social justice but regularly consume factory farmed meat then you are a hypocrite.
--play_jurist