Dr. Robert Bullard's Presidential Lecture on Environmental Justice

March 6, 2007

Environmental issues are human rights issues, and everyone has a right to clean air and water, said Dr. Robert Bullard, who spoke at the University Theater Monday night as a part of the Presidential Lecture Series at the University of Montana.
Bullard is the Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Ga.
Environmental justice focuses on many places that are often overlooked in the world of environmentalism: places like ghettos, slums, reservations and the U.S.-Mexican boarder. It is the idea that minorities and the poor are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation.
Bullard spoke about the environment beyond what many Montanans are used to – beyond the Rocky Mountains and wildlife preserves.
“The environment is everything,” Bullard said, where people work, play, worship, and live. It is both the countryside and urban areas.
Bullard said that all communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental laws.
“There’re some communities that don’t have the luxury of clean air,” Bullard said.
When a company wants to put a toxic waste dump in a place where they say no one lives, Bullard and his groups find the people that live there are help give them a voice. Bullard gave the example of the nuclear repository in Yucca Mountain, Nev. He said the developers said no one lived there. “What about the Shoshone tribe who has been there for thousands of years,” Bullard said.
“Many of these communities live in terror,” Bullard said. The terror of waking up “at three in the morning, your kids wake up choking, you can’t breathe. That is terror,” Bullard said.
“We deal with lots of issues that environmental groups don’t want to face,” Bullard said.
Bullard used the environmental history of New Orleans to illustrate his point, using the examples of the aftermaths of Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina.
Bullard said the majority of people who are left behind when a natural disaster strikes are people of color, the poor, the elderly, the disabled and sick, and those who can’t drive or don’t have cars.
“Who gets left behind? It’s not rocket science,” Bullard said.
In 1965 Hurricane Betsy devastated the New Orleans in many of the same ways Hurricane Katrina did in 2005. Bullard showed pictures of a house thrown on top of a car by each hurricane. The damage from the each hurricane was the same; only the type of car had changed.
“We’ve gone from Buick to Toyota,” Bullard said.
“God didn’t do it,” Bullard said, “The levees broke: Faulty maintenance, shoddy construction. It was no accident.”
Bullard said the road home for many Katrina victims is more of a roadblock. Their predicament is similar to many victims of environmental injustice, according to Bullard.
“People want to go back home but they can’t go back home because their paradise has been destroyed,” Bullard said.
Bullard’s mission started after his wife, a lawyer sued the state of Texas and needed a sociologist to help her.
She talked Bullard, who has a degree in sociology, into helping her.
“I got pushed into it kicking and screaming,” Bullard said, “I got drafted.”
Since then he has written 13 books on the subject of environmental justice and has taken delegations to UN summits, The Global Summit in Brazil, The Hague, and to communities all over the U.S.
Bullard said today’s college students seem to understand the need for change. He said that students from all over the country, including Montana, are forgoing spring break flings in Cancun for a week of service in New Orleans.