Talking Environmental Justice
Dr. Robert D. Bullard

W: Dr. Bullard, you’ve been at the center of the Environmental Justice Movement since its beginning. What is the ultimate goal of the movement?

RB: Our goal is to eliminate manmade potential disasters and integrate justice into all aspects of our society — whether it’s housing, transportation, types of industries we develop, foods we grow, how we manage our waste and how we live. No community should become a dumping ground. Every American has a right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, to play outside on playgrounds that are not contaminated or built on top of a dump. All our neighborhoods should be places where you don’t have to worry about a chemical plant exploding and having to shelter in place or evacuate.

W: What first opened your eyes to environmental justice, what got you started?

RB: I was drafted. I had graduated from Iowa State University and was working as an assistant professor at Texas Southern University. It was 1978 and my wife, who’s a lawyer, asked me to work on a case with her on the siting of a municipal landfill. I collected data and served as an expert witness, and have been doing it ever since.

W: Was there an Environmental Justice Movement in 1978?

RB: No, in 1978 there was no environmental justice movement, no computerized databases to inventory solid waste facilities, there was nothing. I taught a research methods class in the Sociology Department and I had ten graduate students. We invented a methodology for locating landfills and overlaying race, ethnicity and income data. We did it all manually. We stuck color-coded pins in maps. This was the first lawsuit charging environmental discrimination using the Civil Rights Act — Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.

W: Obviously there’s a strong connection between this work and the Civil Rights and Environmental Movements. Did you reach out to make those connections?

RB: At the time we saw it as a case of discrimination, and the way to address it was to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Every one of the city-owned landfills in Houston was located in a predominantly black neighborhood. But we also approached the major environmental groups asking for help. We showed them these statistics. What we heard back from them — I don’t want to call any names.

W: We’re Waterkeeper; we like to name names.

RB: Yes, I know.

W: Even if it’s us.

RB: These were the old-guard; they didn’t see anything wrong with it. “Aren’t the landfills supposed to be in black neighborhoods?” We went to the civil rights groups, too; you know all their initials. “We do housing discrimination, employment, voter rights, education, but we don’t do environment.”

We fell into this gap between the Environmental Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, so we didn’t get any help. But fast forward almost 30 years and it’s a little bit different now.

W: It seems the churches were the first to get involved?

RB: Yes, and I think that’s no accident. Churches have some degree of autonomy because they are not so dependant on government funds that they can’t challenge the government or speak out against racism. So faith-based organizations began working on this issue, talking about stewardship and the fact that we have a responsibility to nature and to preserve something for our children, and our children’s children.

Another thing, it’s no accident that the issue came out of historically black colleges and universities. Texas Southern University is a black university. And when communities looked around for help, they came to us. Today there are four environment justice centers at historically black colleges and universities across the nation. Later on civil rights and environmental organizations joined in. It just took us a while to get others to understand this is as a basic human rights issue.

W: How did the 1987 United Church of Christ report come about? Isn’t it unusual for an academic report to be issued by a religious institution?

RB: It was unprecedented to have a church-based civil rights organization publish a very sophisticated statistical report. It came out of demonstrations against a proposed landfill in Warren County, NC, in 1982. The landfill, slated for a low-income predominantly African-American county, was to be used for the disposal of PCB contaminated solid waste. More than 500 people were arrested in civil disobedience; it was the first national rallying cry for the Environmental Justice Movement.

In 1983 a U.S. General Accounting Office report showed that three out of four of the hazardous waste landfills in the South were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis, who headed up the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, decided to do a national study to find out if the pattern held across the U.S. The 1987 report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, documented how this was a national phenomenon. The report used a multiple regression analysis to show that race — not income, not land values — was the most potent factor for predicting where hazardous waste facilities were located.

W: It seems that what followed was a tidal wave of research that supported your conclusions.

RB: Report after report came out showing that the United Church of Christ report was scientifically reliable, valid and accurate. It was not some report made up by some radical sociologists.

Shortly after that Reverend Chavis and United Church of Christ decided that we needed to have a big conference. That’s how about seven of us began planning the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in Washington, DC in 1991. We planned it for 300 people but more than 1,000 came from every state and at least a dozen countries.

During the last day of the summit we adopted the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice. The principles set the stage for expanding the movement beyond U.S. borders. In 1992, when the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, I met Brazilian environmental justice organizers who were passing out the principles in Portuguese. There was an aboriginal woman there from Australia who had a copy of the principles. In one year those principles had been translated and were being used as organizing tools around the world. At the United Nations’ 2001 World Conference Against Racism and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, environmental justice was a key issue. Today environmental justice is an important component of any discussion of sustainability, poverty, development issues, even climate.

W: I know you’re going to be modest, but my understanding is that you actually coined the phrases environmental justice and environmental racism. Is that true?

RB: Reverend Chavis coined the term environmental racism, and environmental justice came out of some of the writing that I had done. But I don’t take credit for it. At first some people were wary of using the terms. Government people used the term environmental equity. The term environmental equity was troubling because we were not talking about spreading the poisons and the problems equally — it is not ‘equity’ we want, we want justice.

W: So in the early 1990s there was a flurry of activity, ultimately leading up to Clinton’s Executive Order on environmental justice. But why was it an Executive Order and not a law?

RB: We had this great conference of academics and grassroots activists at the University of Michigan that was organized by Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai called the Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards Conference. We followed up the conference by writing letters to EPA Administrator William Riley, Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan and White House Council on Environmental Quality Director Michael Deland.

W: It’s funny, it sounds like such a group of decent guys, considering the present situation.

RB: Yes, they were! We met with CEQ and William Riley at EPA. Riley agreed to conduct an Environmental Equity Work Group, which produced in 1992 a report called Reducing Risks for All Communities. For the first time EPA acknowledged that there were environmental disparities by race and ethnicity.

When the Bush administration left and the Clinton administration came in, Reverend Chavis and I were appointed to Clinton’s transition team for the environmental cluster — the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Interior and EPA. We helped grassroots groups develop a position paper on environmental justice, coordinated by Deeohn Ferris, for the Clinton-Gore Transition Team. We were able to push some of the specific recommendations from that paper to the administration — one was that we wanted an Executive Order on Environmental Justice. We wanted the EPA Office on Environmental Equity to be elevated to an Office of Environmental Justice and fully funded and staffed. We wanted people of color leading the federal environmental agencies. (We succeeded with the Secretaries of Agriculture and Energy.) We wanted EPA elevated to a cabinet level agency and we wanted a permanent committee set up under the Federal Advisory Committee Act [the National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee]. We got a number of these things put in place. But the environmental justice initiatives in the federal government actually started under William Riley and the Republicans; Clinton expanded them.

W: In 2001 we lost the ability to bring environmental justice cases under the Civil Rights Act. What happened?

RB: In the Alexander v. Sandoval decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that you have to prove intentional discrimination, not just a history and a pattern of disparate impacts. So the court moved from having an ‘effect’ test to an ‘intent’ test to prove a civil rights violation. That decision also took away the right of citizens to sue. Proving intentional discrimination is very difficult. There are very few cases where you can find hard evidence to show that something is done intentionally because of race. But it’s not impossible.

W: What is the Environmental Justice Act of 2007, the bill introduced in the U.S. House by Representative Hilda Solis? Will it fix this problem?

RB: It does not fix the Civil Rights Act, but it does codify Clinton’s Environmental Justice Executive Order into law. The Executive Order is built on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars the use of federal funds to discriminate, and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that requires impact assessment to be done on major projects. When you combine those two laws you have a pretty good shot at addressing many environmental justice issues. But there is nothing in an Executive Order that requires agencies to enforce these two laws in combination; it’s all voluntary. President Bush did not rescind Clinton’s Executive Order, but the federal government simply ignores it. As a law, states and federal agencies will have to live up to the requirements, they would no longer be at the whim of the White House. That legislation is moving.

There is also some movement in Congress to fix the Civil Rights Act, and attempts to reinstate the Toxics Release Inventory — which has been stripped by this administration. Many of the gains that were made have been rolled back. But with the new Congress many people are saying that it is time to strengthen and enforce existing laws. We have some very good environmental laws, but they are not being enforced. Especially if you live on the wrong side of the tracks.

W: I think that most Waterkeepers, in the U.S. or around the world, would say that often what’s written in the books looks good from an academic standpoint, but enforcement is always key.

RB: Katrina really pushed environmental justice back on the radar. People could see in living color many of the issues relating to government inaction and incompetence. EPA, Army Corps and state agencies failed to respond to the emergency. And then they failed to address the environmental crisis; cleaning up spills and contaminated soils in schools and homes, addressing water quality and drinking water issues, and putting people in trailers with formaldehyde. I think Katrina lifted the veil, uncovering so much that is hard to deny.

W: You detail Katrina and the Dickson County case in the Toxic Waste at Twenty report, which you released in March 2007.

RB: We were asked by the United Church of Christ to do a new study on the 20th Anniversary of the 1987 study. We put together a team of some of the top researchers in the nation. We expanded the report using the new data and more sophisticated statistical techniques. What we found was that race is still the most potent variable for predicting where these facilities are located.

We also found that people of color are more concentrated around these facilities today than they were 20 years ago. The majority of people living within a two mile radius of commercial hazardous waste facilities in America are people of color (56 percent, up from 33 percent in 1987). When you look at clustering of two or more facilities, the number is even more staggering. People of color make up only about a third of the U.S. population, yet almost 70 percent of people living within a two mile radius of clustered hazardous facilities are people of color. This cannot be due to chance.

We profiled the Dickson County, Tennessee, case, a poster child for environmental racism, because of the multiple “smoking guns,” government memos that documented intentional discrimination against an African American family whose wells were contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected human carcinogen, from the nearby county landfill. White families received written notices warning them about the harmful effect of TCE in their water, provided bottle water, and placed on city water system. On the other hand, a black family received written notices saying their well water contained TCE, but the water was safe to drink and would not cause any harmful health effects. Clearly, TCE does not discriminate. Unfortunately, governments do.

W: One of the main purposes of the Toxic Waste report was to engage the mainstream environmental movement. Where are things today in this effort?
RB: Twenty years ago we challenged the mainstream environmental groups on their paternalism, their elitism and racism, we really hit some nerves. Many of those groups saw themselves as some of the most progressive groups in the country. But if you looked at their staff, boards and agendas, it was very homogeneous. Today, we’ve made progress, but we still have a long way to go. If these national groups really want to remain national, and many of them are international, they will need to look at how the demographics of this county have changed. By the year 2050, this county will have a majority people of color. Nationally and internationally, it makes good sense to have some reflection of reality.

The environmental justice movement is grounded in a grassroots, community activism model. One of the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice is that communities speak for themselves. When we did our summit in 1991 we said that we did not want to replicate the white environmental organizations, we did not want to create little black Greenpeaces, or little brown NRDCs or red National Wildlife Foundations. We wanted to create our own institutions, build capacity and to develop our own indigenous leadership. We had to concentrate on lifting up our own organizations and our own leaders so we could be in the room and speak at the same table on the same page.

Our movement has matured and broadened well beyond just landfills and toxics — these things are still very important — but as we move our movement to be inclusive and comprehensive, we have to deal with housing, transportation, land use planning, air quality and water quality. We all drink the same water. There’s no Latino air, no black air, no white air. When we talk about resolving these problems we have to talk about bringing everyone together. That’s how the environmental justice movement has been able to expand and broaden, but it has to broaden further, to continue to be the conscience of the environmental movement and to protect everyone, not just those communities that have been systematically left behind. w