Houston — Known as the father of environmental justice, more than half a century ago he was just Bob Bullard of Elba, a flyspec town deep in Alabama. He did not pave the roads, install sewers, or install streetlights in areas where black families lived. as he lived. His grandmother had a sixth grade education. His father was an electrician and plumber, but he was unlicensed for years because of his race.
More than 40 years after Robert Bullard turned an unplanned career into environmentalism and civil rights, the movement he helped discover is marking one of its greatest triumphs to date. increase. About $60 billion of his $370 billion in climate-related spending passed by Congress last month was earmarked for environmental justice, which calls for equal environmental protection for all. This is the cause Dr. Bullard has dedicated his life to.
Some environmentalists have denounced new laws that allow more oil and gas drilling, which usually hits disadvantaged communities the hardest. For Dr. Bullard, the new law is welcome, but it also requires caution. Too often, he said, federal and relief funds are unfairly distributed by state and local governments and shunned from people of color and poor communities. This may be an important moment for environmental justice, but never before has there been such a big crisis.
Dr. Bullard said in a recent interview, “We need government watchdogs to make sure money moves where it needs to.” must get this right.”
Dr. Bullard, 75, is one of the world’s foremost environmental justice experts. His 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie, about toxic facilities in communities of color, has more than 5,600 academic citations to him. He doesn’t remember exactly when he became known as the “Father of Environmental Justice.” websitehe didn’t come up with it himself (there are other vaunted elders in the field), and it affects a certain amount of humility when asked about it.
“I’d rather be called ‘father’ than ‘son of’,” Dr. Bullard said in an interview at Texas Southern University this spring. “That’s really a compliment, but again, I was told worse.”
Especially in recent years, as environmental justice has come to the fore, Dr. Bullard’s visibility has skyrocketed.Lecture / interview request pour in His style allows him to deliver a blizzard of astonishing facts while remaining upbeat and offering honesty that’s not adorned with a smile. nearly half of our awards and honorary appointments have been given in the last four years. In 2021 he will become an advisor to the White House, raising $1.25 million from the Houston Fund, his $4 million later from the Bezos Earth Fund, and his Southern University in Texas to form the Bullard Center for Environment and Climate Justice. was established.
Professor Paul Mohay of the University of Michigan Department of Environment and Sustainability, who knows Dr. Bullard, said: Over 30 years. “When he speaks, he can’t help but get an adrenaline boost.”
Dr. Bullard was born in 1946 into an unexpected family. In 1875, ten years after slavery was officially abolished, his great-grandparents acquired several hundred acres of woodlands on the island of Elba. “I don’t know how they got it,” Dr. Bullard said. “We don’t ask.”
Land proved to be a game changer. As a property owner, his parents and grandmother were able to vote under Jim Crow laws. The timber cut from the land enabled the family to send Bob and his four brothers to college. This was unusual for black people at the time.
After graduating from Alabama A&M University, young Bob Bullard had another stroke of luck. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and he was drafted into the Marine Corps, but somehow was not deployed, escaping the dire fate that befell the rest of the platoon. As a result, he earned a master’s and doctoral degree in sociology and decided to model the career of his hero, author and civil rights advocate WEB DuBois.
The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
- Inflation control law: Investing billions in climate and energy programs, this new law represents America’s largest investment in combating climate change.
- Climate team changes: John Podesta, who headed President Obama’s White House on climate strategy, will oversee the $370 billion clean energy fund as President Biden’s top climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, prepares to step down.
- Executive Action: Following the signing of the climate bill, Mr. Biden plans a series of steps to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“He didn’t do dead white sociology, I did what you call outrageous sociology,” Dr. Bullard said. “You are a scholar, you are an activist, and you can do something to make a difference.”
The environment was not on Dr. Bullard’s radar while teaching sociology at Texas Southern University in 1979. His wife, attorney Linda McKeever his Bullard asked him for help. She filed a class action lawsuit to stop landfills from entering Houston’s middle-class black community and called her husband to find out where the other landfills in the city were . He enlisted his students, and after careful research, blacks made up only a quarter of Houston’s population, yet all five of the city’s landfills and eight of its incinerators were black. We found that 3 out of 6, 4 privately owned landfills were abandoned. black neighborhood.
The case was fought in court for eight years, and in 1987 a judgment was given allowing disposal of the final disposal site. Dr. Bullard was stunned. “The data and research were solid,” Dr. Bullard said. “But it wasn’t enough to overcome the legacy of racism in the county system.”
After the landfill was built in a tree-lined community of black-owned homes, Dr. Bullard said more industrial land followed, driving down property values. . Enraged, he was determined to expose more examples of how communities of color were disproportionately afflicted by polluted water, soil, and air.
In the 1980s, environmentalism and the civil rights movement were generally moving in two different directions, and Dr. Bullard struggled to win support from both sides. Major environmental groups have told him they are not addressing what they see as social issues. Civil rights groups, on the other hand, often say they focus on discrimination in housing, voting, employment and education. The manuscript for “Dumping in Dixie” was repeatedly rejected for similar reasons. Dr. Bullard was told that the words “environment” and “racism” do not belong together. The publisher who eventually bought it made it into a textbook, but at first angered Dr. Bullard and found it adopted by colleges and universities across the country, planting his findings in the minds of young people. rice field.
“’Dumping in Dixie’ is the bible of environmental justice,” says environmental health scientist Nataki Osborne Jelks, who studied under Dr. Bullard in college and now teaches at Spelman College. “He set a course for others to follow who wanted to combine scholarship with activism and advocacy.”
After decades of organizing and mobilizing, today environmental justice is a top concern for climate activists. we act for environmental justice, in Harlem, largely attributed to the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd. “We’ve been fighting the battle of David and Goliath on pachinko,” she said.
And environmental groups that ignored race 15 years ago are now “stumbling upon each other” to rally people of color, Dr. Bullard said.of Largest green group Remaining predominantly white, they face their own racial reckoning. publicly denounced. A few weeks later, the Sierra Club said it had to confront founder John Muir’s white supremacy.
Beverly Wright, founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans and a longtime collaborator of Dr. Bullard, said the exclusion of people of color comes at a price. Research conducted A 2020 survey by Yale University and George Mason University found that 80% of Latinos and 75% of blacks are concerned about climate change, compared to 59% of whites.
“They realized they couldn’t do this on their own. They needed us in the room to get anything done or pass,” said a leading environmental group. Dr. Wright said, referring to “Everything works better when you’re in the room.”
Yet they still have an uphill battle. In August, Democrats announced a further expansion of fossil fuels to gain support for the climate change bill from West’s Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who holds a key swing vote in a tied Senate. made concessions to allowthis iangry with environmental justice Proponents argue that marginalized communities, especially those near petrochemical plants on the Gulf Coast, are being sacrificed lambs.
There are also questions about whether Democrats are overestimating the $60 billion designated for environmental justice in the new climate law. Sylvia Chi, a strategist at Just Solutions Collective, has calculated that amount puts her closer to $40 billion. According to her analysis, the White House appeared to include the value of the entire program rather than a small amount of programs aimed at disadvantaged communities, or perhaps none at all. rice field.
Dr. Bullard touted the bill as historic and praised the inclusion of community block grants and funds for pollution monitoring near industrial facilities.
But he and his colleagues are concerned that funds will be directed to disadvantaged communities as intended, and fear that enforceable targets are not clearly set. “Implementation is a battle,” said Dr. Wright.
Dr. Bullard pointed to an investigation earlier this year by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that found that Texas agencies discriminated against people of color when distributing relief funds after Hurricane Harvey. Research has shown that FEMA, the government agency that helps Americans recover from disasters, has often helped white victims more often than people of color, even when the amount of damage was the same. There is a long history of unequal treatment of communities and lax enforcement of civil rights laws, especially in southern states, Dr. Bullard noted. “The devil is in the details,” he said.
A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget said the administration was “committed to allocating funds in line with the law.”
Jaronne White-Newsome, senior director for environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said she is developing a new environmental scorecard to hold federal agencies accountable. The funds will be allocated using a new framework announced by the Biden administration earlier this year. Still, the formula left out race, which caused some hackles.
Dr. Bullard has been in demand more than ever since the law was enacted, and Dr. Wright, also in his 70s, recently shared a laugh about how busy they are.
“I was like, ‘Bob, it’s coming too fast and we can’t get to it. ‘It could have been better at 40. Now that we finally have the resources, why slow down?’ ?” she continued. “He never slowed down. Why would he now?