Rich, white environmentalists love to moan about why the movement is so ... rich and white. But activists who don't fit that description are busy on the ground, wondering what the hell the white folks are talking about. Robert Bullard is one of them. Considered the first to articulate the concept of environmental justice, Bullard has been battling eco-inequities for nearly 30 years. He talks with Gregory Dicum about why he entered the fray, how things have changed since, and why "creating little black Greenpeaces" isn't the answer.
Comments
View as Flat
EcoReason Posted 10:15 pm
14 Mar 2006
The first is that the concept of environmental justice should probably be dated to the 1987 United Church of Christ , Commission on Racial Justice report: "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites." This landmark report correlated toxic waste dumps with census data based on zip codes. Unsurprisingly, it found rampant injustice across the United States. This report, more than anything else, crystallized the nagging doubt about the reach of environmentalism into difficult to ignore statistics and it gave the first contours to what would become the environmental justice movement.
The second is that the first history written that treated the issue of environmental justice was published four year's earlier than Bullard's, Dumping in Dixie. I recommend it to everyone. It is the 1995 Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980, by Andrew Hurley. Hurley demonstrated that environmentalism trumped social justice (both movements were present in these years) in Gary during the post-war years, resulting in the concentration of industrial pollution and toxic waste in the poorest neighborhoods.
Peace,
Kip
Permalink