Contemplating the radioactive cloud drifting across West Germany from Chernobyl nearly twenty years ago, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck famously observed that “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic.” This was another way of saying that the wealthy among us could no longer buy their safety from invisible new dangers. Others taking issue with Beck’s catholic fatalism countered that persistent inequalities in many parts of the world have concentrated pollution and its attendant health threats disproportionately in poor nations and in poor regions of wealthier nations. [...]