By Rich Heffern
Originally published in National Catholic Reporter issue of 06/16/2006

There’s the environment, and then there are justice and human rights. It seems that these realms are separate, the former concerned with wetlands and wilderness while the latter is all about public policies or insuring equal protection under the law. For Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, the two are intimately connected and he has played a major role in organizing and mobilizing the environmental justice movement over the past two decades.

“I started back in 1978 while teaching sociology in Houston,” Bullard told NCR. “My wife, who was a lawyer, asked me to collect data for a lawsuit. With the help of my graduate students we were able to compile the history and pattern of landfill locations in our city. What we found was amazing, though not to the people who lived in those neighborhoods near the dumps.” The group found that 80 percent of all landfills and incinerators used to dispose of Houston’s garbage were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, yet blacks made up only a quarter of the population. “That’s a disparate impact: Everybody produces garbage; you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that rich people throw away more than poor people, yet the poor get the burden and health risks of living near the landfills.”

Bullard said that was the first lawsuit ever to challenge environmental discrimination. He wrote a book about it called Dumping in Dixie.

“From landfills to incinerators, from petrochemical plants to freeways and refineries, all those locally unwanted land uses, what we call LULUs, are usually near or in black and poor neighborhoods. Things others don’t want can be fended off because of income, political power and privilege, so LULUs generally follow the path of least resistance.”

Land use, home ownership patterns, and the locating of waste and hazardous materials facilities are all interconnected, Bullard said. “In most cases the community came first, yet sometimes the facility itself was sited first and then the community grew up around it. Low land values, zoning and real estate practices ensure that areas adjacent to these dangerous facilities get populated by the poor and people of color. It’s a chicken or egg thing. If you get sick from the pollution, it really doesn’t matter which came first, the neighborhood or the waste dump. You’ll be sick or dead in either case.

“It’s the same with freeways: Everyone has a car but the freeways they use frequently don’t follow the most direct line from one point to another. They zigzag and go around communities with power and money.”

The nation’s first environmental justice protest took place in 1983 in Warren County, N.C., according to Bullard. The state had selected that county as the site of a waste dump for PCB-contaminated transformer oil. The predominantly black citizens of Warren County took it to court. The federal court rejected their suit. Residents began to question the political reasons their community was chosen as a dump site. A second lawsuit was filed based upon discriminatory intent, which failed as well. In 1982 the state began trucking the contaminated soil to the sites. Residents and civil rights leaders attempted to stop the trucks with six weeks of peaceful civil disobedience. Over 523 arrests resulted; it made the national news. “It was the beginning of the environmental justice movement,” Bullard said.

In 1987 the United Church of Christ published the first national study detailing locations of landfills and waste sites by race, according to Bullard. They did a statistical regression analysis to pinpoint what was the most potent variable predicting where those facilities were located. It turned out to be race. In 1991 that church’s Commission on Racial Justice put together the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in Washington.

Bullard told NCR that the federal government’s response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year was not a surprise to those in the environmental justice movement. “We had looked at government responses to emergencies in African-American communities back to the 1920s on up to last year, and found that the response is consistent: In poor communities the government responds slowly and often in inadequate ways.”

The second disaster in New Orleans after the hurricane itself is still taking place, he contends. “The programs administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency make it difficult for low-income survivors to get assistance. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and several other legal groups have already sued FEMA over its response and handling of aid to storm victims. FEMA has referred more than 2 million people, many of them with low incomes, to the Small Business Administration to get loans.

-- CNS/Nancy Wiechec

Homes moved off their foundations by flood waters still sit on a sidewalk March 5 in St. Bernard Parish, a civil entity east of New Orleans, more than six months after Hurricane Katrina.
“Studies show that African-Americans are more likely than whites to receive insufficient insurance settlement amounts, and that’s certainly the case in New Orleans. What’s more, the phased rebuilding and restoration concentrates on the ‘high ground.’ Officials are being advised to concentrate rebuilding on the areas that remained high and dry after Katrina. These areas are disproportionately white and affluent. This scenario builds on preexisting inequities.”

Historically, housing discrimination and residential segregation has limited the amount of wealth creation that occurs within the black community, Bullard said, and this exacerbated the effects of the hurricane destruction on New Orleans. “Wealth in most middle-class families is tied to home ownership. When white families’ homes are destroyed, that’s generally only about 60 percent of their wealth, as the other 40 percent is located in other portfolios. For blacks, only about 10 percent of wealth is located elsewhere. Government response to disasters assumes that everything is equal here, but it’s certainly not.”

It’s important, Bullard said, that we not look at the response to Katrina as an aberration. “Over the last seven decades in the South, in floods, droughts, hurricanes and accidents, the government has responded to emergencies in ways that have endangered the health and welfare of African-Americans. During the Mississippi flood of 1927, blacks were rounded up and cordoned off in Greenville, Miss., while they evacuated the white parts of town. They forced the blacks to work on the levees at gunpoint. A year later in a hurricane in Florida, over 3,000 mostly black farm workers from the Caribbean and Deep South were killed. They were buried in mass graves. It was kept quiet to protect tourism.”

The Environmental Justice Resource Center recently looked at the plight of black farmers in the United States over the last 100 years and found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had a record of not paying off after droughts or floods. “Black farmers have had to sue to get payments,” Bullard said. “That happened most recently in 1997.”

In the area of hazardous waste, according to Bullard, the history of Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites shows that white communities get cleaned up faster utilizing the best cleanup technology. “Even if the same kind of hazards and toxins are present, it takes longer for black communities to get listed and then the government uses the cheapest format of remediation, often just putting a fence around the hazardous area and capping it with cement.”

The 2001 anthrax attack in the nation’s capital that followed close on the heels of the Sept. 11 catastrophe is another instance of environmental injustice, according to Bullard. “Senators and their staffers, who are mostly white, were given immediate health screening while it took the government three days to get to the folks in the nearby Brentwood mail facility, where two people died from anthrax inhalation.

“From history and documentation over past 70 years we know the government’s response to emergencies and health threats in communities of color will not be fair. If we have a future outbreak of bird flu or some kind of bioterrorist release of biological agents into cities we know quarantines, inoculations and vaccinations will be unfairly distributed.

“Besides these extreme events, there’s also a disproportionate occurrence of asthma and lead poisoning in low-income housing that affects millions of black kids. In 1988, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry did a study on lead, and reported that leftover lead poisoning affects black children at twice the rate for white children.”

Traditional environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society have heard from environmental justice advocates, Bullard said. “We’ve made progress over the last 20 years in identifying environmental justice and environmentalism as one and the same. Environment includes urban habitats as well as wetlands and wilderness. Transportation and housing are aspects of environmentalism. Many of the traditional groups have adapted their strategies to incorporate human rights. Some are further along than others. We’re keen on whales, oceans and wetlands but we are also concerned about rising asthma rates and childhood lead poisoning, about clean, affordable public transit.

“For example, a third of black people in cities don’t own cars. That’s certainly the case in Atlanta, where I live, and in New Orleans. Transportation needs to go where most jobs are, and nowadays that’s the suburbs. Urban sprawl, an issue the Sierra Club has been concerned with for some time now, is an environmental justice issue.

“Of course, urban sprawl is made possible by cheap oil, and when you look into that issue you see the connections between, for example, what happens in Cancer Alley in Louisiana and the horrible conditions in the Niger delta in Africa. With globalization, people on the ground get caught in the middle, and they’re usually people of color. Conditions are often much worse in developing countries, where resource extraction is done in very callous ways and protest can get you killed.

“Immigration is making headlines these days. Unfortunately the rhetoric drowns out issues of worker safety and health that we have been working on for years. Some of the worst jobs in the country are in animal processing factories in Arkansas, Oklahoma and elsewhere in the South.

“I noted that most of those factories were closed on May 1, the national day of protest for immigrant rights. When the workers who toil under slave conditions in these factories complain, they get turned in to immigration police. Again, it’s an environmental justice issue.”

Rich Heffern writes the “Earth & Spirit” column for NCR. His e-mail address is rheffern@celebrationpubs.com.

Resources
The Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University is a comprehensive university-based center dedicated to education, research, information dissemination, communications and community service related to human rights, environmental and economic justice, healthy and livable communities, sustainable development, fair housing, land use planning, transportation, smart growth, and regional equity. Over the past decade the center has provided leadership in education, training, research, policy, publication, information dissemination, technical assistance, and community outreach. For more information, go to their Web site at www.ejrc.cau.edu.

Books by Robert D. Bullard:

The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, edited by Robert D. Bullard. Sierra Club Books, 2005.
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 2000.
Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility, with Glenn S. Johnson. New Society Publishers, 1991.
Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. South End Press, 1993.
Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. Sierra Club Books, 1996.