ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM.

• Author: Bullard, Robert

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): You essentially launched the Environmental Justice movement with your work on the siting of landfills and toxic facilities. Can you explain what you found in your work and why it was so alarming?

Robert Bullard (RB): I started my work as something of an accident. Back in 1978 my wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, who is an attorney, asked me to assist her in a lawsuit that she had filed challenging the location of a municipal landfill in Houston, Texas. The landfill was being proposed for a black middle-class suburban neighborhood in Houston and she needed someone to collect data for the temporary restraining order that she had filed in federal district court.

I had ten students in my research methods class at Texas Southern University, and we embarked on a study to look at where all of the landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and waste sites were located in the city, from the '30s up until 1978. Ultimately, we found that from the '30s up until 1978, five out of five city-owned landfills were located in predominantly black communities. Six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. Three out of the four privately owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Even though blacks made up only 25% of the population, 82% of all the garbage waste that was being disposed over that period of time was disposed in black neighbor-hoods.

We went to federal court in 1979 and the case became Bean versus Southwestern Waste Management, Inc. That was the first environmental racism lawsuit to challenge this form of discrimination using civil rights law. We ended up losing in court because we could not prove intent.

Even though we lost the case, it sparked my interest in environmental racism, before it had a name. I wanted to know if this phenomenon spread beyond Houston. So, I expanded the study to these types of facilities in other parts of the South. I looked at Cancer Alley, the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. There, I found that most of the chemical companies and polluting facilities that moved there in the '40s and '50s were located in predominantly black communities, many founded right after slavery ended.

From there, I went to Alabama, which has the largest hazardous waste landfill in the United States. Every state in the United States and at least a dozen other countries ship hazardous waste there. It is located in the heart of the Alabama black belt, in a county called Sumter County. The county is 75 percent black and the Emelle community the landfill is located is 95 percent black. In...