Robert D. Bullard is Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. Known as the 'Father of Environmental Justice',[1] Bullard has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the U.S.A in the 1980s.
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In 1979 Bullard's wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, represented Margaret Bean and other African American Houston residents in their struggle against a plan that would locate a municipal landfill next to their homes.[2] The lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first of its kind in the United States that charged environmental discrimination in waste facility siting under the civil rights laws. Houston's middle-class, suburban Northwood Manor neighborhood was an unlikely location for a garbage dump except that it was over 82 percent black. Bullard, having received his Ph.D. in Sociology at Iowa State University only a couple of years before, was drawn into the case as an expert witness. In this role Bullard conducted a study which documented the location of municipal waste disposal facilities in Houston. Entitled 'Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community', the study was the first comprehensive account of ecoracism in the United States. Bullard and his researchers found that African American neighbourhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic waste sites. All five city-owned garbage dumps, six of the eight city-owned garbage incinerators, and three of the four privately-owned landfills were sited in black neighbourhoods, although blacks made up only 25 percent of the city's population.[3] This discovery prompted Bullard to begin a long academic and activist campaign against environmental racism. "Without a doubt", Bullard has said of his experience, "it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table."[1]
Over the 1980s Bullard widened his study of environmental racism to the whole American South, focusing on communities in Houston, in Dallas, Texas, Alsen, Louisiana, Institute, West Virginia, and Emelle, Alabama. Again he found a clear overrepresentaion of environmental hazards in black areas as compared to white areas, causing increased health risks to black citizens. In 1990 Bullard published his first book, 'Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality', and was awarded a Conservation Achievement Award by the National Wildlife Federation. In the book, Bullard wrote that the Environmental Justice Movement, a grassroots movement by people of colour then spreading across America to protest environmental racism, signified a new covergence of the African American civil rights movement and the environmental movement of the 1960s.
In 1990 Bullard (then at the University of California-Riverside) became one leader of a group of prominent academics, later known as the Michigan Group, including Bunyan Bryant of the University of Michigan and Charles Lee of the United Church of Christ. The group wrote letters to Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to William Reilly, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, asking for meetings with the officials to discuss governmental policy on environmental discrimination. Sullivan never responded, but Reilly met the advocacy group several times, resulting in the creation of the EPA's Work Group on Environmental Equity. This group later became the Office of Environmental Equity, and then the Office of Environmental Justice under EPA Administrator Carol Browner in 1993.[4]
Bullard also played a key role in the organising of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. Starting out with a list of only 30 people of color groups working on environmental issues, Bullard expanded the list to over 300 groups by calling the leaders he knew personally and gathering information on other groups they had come across. It was these groups that attended the Leadership Summit in October 1991, at which a list of seventeen 'Principles of Environmental Justice' was adopted.[5] Bullard's expanded list eventually included groups from outside the United States, including Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico, and has been published as the People Of Color Environmental Group Directory by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.[3]
In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 after advice and research by a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which included Professor Bullard, who chaired the Health and Research Subcommittee.
Bullard continued to act on behalf of struggling African American groups across the U.S. It was his expert testimony that won the case of Citizens Against Nuclear Trash (CANT) v. Louisiana Energy Services (LES) for the environmental justice group, directly causing the federal government's decision to deny the LES's permit for a uranium enrichment plant in Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana.[6] In 2006 when asked what keeps him going in his quest for environmental justice, Bullard answered, "People who fight... People who do not let the garbage trucks and the landfills and the petrochemical plants roll over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years. And in the last 10 years, we've been winning: lawsuits are being won, reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have been put on notice that they can't do this anymore, anywhere."[1]
In 2008, Newsweek named Bullard one of thirteen “Environmental Leaders of the Century.” In the same year, Co-op America honored him with its Building Economic Alternatives Award (BEA).[7]