Environment: Ecology of a Ghetto

Here in the ghetto

It's a bad situation;

Call it what you want to,

It's just a concrete reservation.

—Soul Song

ECOLOGY is too new a science to have examined the ghetto systematically. Yet it is clear that the country's environmental blight most severely affects the millions who are marooned in black inner cities—Hough (Cleveland), Harlem (New York), Roxbury (Boston), the Hill (Pittsburgh), the Central Ward (Newark). In Chicago, which has been called the most segregated city in America, roughly 1,100,000 blacks make up almost one-third of the population and are overwhelmingly confined to...