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Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.

The main findings of the article are that the relationship between natural disasters and communicable diseases is not as much due to dead bodies or high trauma as it is to population displacement and a lack of preparredness of the local governing body for the disaster and the crowding of survivors that follows a disaster as this

1: Crowding is shown to be common in displaced populations, and local overpopulation/crowding often facillitates the transmittion of disease

2: Natural disasters that do not cause a displacement of a population are rarely associated with disease outbreaks

3: There is little or no evidence that dead bodies, as some believe, pose a epidemic risk for a population of survivors after a disaster has struck

"The risk for commuicable disease transmission after disasters is associated primarily with the size and characteristics of the population displaced, specifically the proximity of safe water adn functioning latrines, the nutritional status of the displaced population, the level of immunuty to vaccine-preventable diseases..., and the access to healthcare services"

"...natural disasters (regardless of type) that do not result in population displacement are rarely associated with outbreaks"

"When death is directly due to the natural disaster, human remains do not pose a rise for outbreaks"

The main methods that the authors appear to use are reported data from disasters that have happened around the globe, including numbers and types of infections, displacement and crowding data, and knowledge of the disaster incidents examined

Emergency response is addressed in a broad sense of the major risk factors associated with a natural disaster and epidemics. The main points they make are that preparedness, with a focus on availability of safe water and primary healthcare services, along with surveillance for the beginnings of an epidemic, are necessessay for a strong response to a disaster situation   

This article has been referenced in a wide variety of emergency medicine journal articles, ranging from flood protocols, use of cell phones in disaster enviroments, earthquakes and medical complications, to the costs of disaster consequences. Many of the articles referencing this paper appear to go into greater depth for some of the epidemics and diseases that were touched on in the research article. These include hepatitis E, Leptospirosis, cholera, and tetanus.