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eco-hero:  Robert Bullard (bio), sociologist widely regarded as the first to articulate the concept of environmental justice. Dumping in Dixie (excerpt) Most recently has been writing about Hurricane Katrina as the latest environmental sacrifice zone. In this interview:{ Bullard explains why the environmental justice movement is different than mainstream environmental organizations. See A Fierce Green Fire ***}excerpt:{.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[link:{.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/EL1FTRNPU08&list=UUgVOzAPWeqlqL34csSLIW6Q):{.}:link:{.}:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Bullard

Robert Doyle Bullard (born December 21, 1946 in Elba, Alabama) is former Dean of the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs (October 2011 - August 2016) and currently Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Previously Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard is known as the 'father of environmental justice'.[1] He has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the United States in the 1980s.

Early life and education

Born in Elba, Alabama, Robert Bullard is the son of Nehemiah and Myrtle Brundidge Bullard; he was "the fourth of five children."[2] He graduated from Elba's Mulberry Heights High School, as class salutorian, in 1964.[3]

Continuing his education, Bullard received a bachelor's degree in Government at Alabama A&M University, in Huntsville, in 1968. Upon graduating from college, he served two years in the United States Marine Corps, at an "air control station in North Carolina".[3]

His M.A. in Sociology was earned at Atlanta University, in 1972. Bullard obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Iowa State University, in 1976, under the supervision of urban sociologist Robert ("Bob") O. Richards.[3][4]

Environmental justice work

Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.

In 1979 Bullard's wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, represented Margaret Bean and other Houston residents in their struggle against a plan that would locate a municipal landfill next to their homes.[5] The lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first of its kind in the United States that charged environmental discrimination in waste facility siting under the civil rights laws. Houston's middle-class, suburban Northwood Manor neighborhood was an unlikely location for a garbage dump except that it was over 82 percent black. Bullard, having received his doctoral degree only a couple of years before, was drawn into the case as an expert witness. In this role Bullard conducted a study which documented the location of municipal waste disposal facilities in Houston. Entitled 'Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community', the study was the first comprehensive account of ecoracism in the United States. 

Bullard and his researchers found that African American neighbourhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic wastesites.All five city-owned garbage dumps, six of the eight city-owned garbage incinerators, and three of the four privately owned landfills were sited in black neighbourhoods, although blacks made up only 25 percent of the city's population.[6] This discovery prompted Bullard to begin a long academic and activist campaign against environmental racism. "Without a doubt", Bullard has said of his experience, "it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table."[1]

Early work

Over the 1980s Bullard widened his study of environmental racism to the whole American South, focusing on communities in Houston, in Dallas, Texas, Alsen, Louisiana, Institute, West Virginia, and Emelle, Alabama. Again he found a clear overrepresentation of environmental hazards in black areas as compared to white areas, causing increased health risks to black citizens. In 1990 Bullard published his first book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. In the book, Bullard wrote that the Environmental Justice Movement, a grassroots movement by people of color then spreading across America to protest environmental racism, signified a new convergence of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement of the 1960s.

Advocacy

In 1990 Bullard (then at the University of California-Riverside) became one leader of a group of prominent academics, later known as the Michigan Group, including Bunyan Bryant of the University of Michigan and Charles Lee of the United Church of Christ. The group wrote letters to Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to William Reilly, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, asking for meetings with the officials to discuss governmental policy on environmental discrimination. Sullivan never responded, but Reilly met the advocacy group several times, resulting in the creation of the EPA's Work Group on Environmental Equity. This group later became the Office of Environmental Equity, and then the Office of Environmental Justice under EPA Administrator**Carol Browne**r in 1993.[7]

Bullard also played a key role in the organising of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. Starting out with a list of only 30 people of color groups working on environmental issues, Bullard expanded the list to over 300 groups by calling the leaders he knew personally and gathering information on other groups they had come across. It was these groups that attended the Leadership Summit in October 1991, at which a list of seventeen 'Principles of Environmental Justice' was adopted.[8] Bullard's expanded list eventually included groups from outside the United States, including Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico, and has been published as the "People of Color Environmental Group Directory" by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.[6]

Robert Bullard, PhD

In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 after advice and research by a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which included Professor Bullard, who chaired the Health and Research Subcommittee.

Bullard continued to act on behalf of struggling African American groups across the U.S. It was his expert testimony that won the case of Citizens Against Nuclear Trash (CANT) v. Louisiana Energy Services (LES) for the environmental justice group, directly causing the federal government's decision to deny the LES's permit for a uranium enrichment plant in Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana.[9] In 2006 when asked what keeps him going in his quest for environmental justice, Bullard answered, "People who fight... People who do not let the garbage trucks and the landfills and the petrochemical plants roll over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years. And in the last 10 years, we've been winning: lawsuits are being won, reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have been put on notice that they can't do this anymore, anywhere."[1]

Academic career

Awards and recognition

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D.Bullard#cite_ref-grist.org_1-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D.Bullard#cite_ref-grist.org_1-2) Dicum, Gregory (2006-03-15). "Dicum, Gregory. 2006. "Meet Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice," ''Grist'', March 15". Grist.org. Retrieved 2012-12-11.
  2. ^ "Robert D. Bullard", Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Institute (MELDI), University of Michigan, n.d. Accessed: December 11, 2012.
  3. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D.Bullard#cite_ref-hm_3-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D.Bullard#cite_ref-hm_3-2) "Robert Bullard," The History Makers, April 12, 2011 (video). Accessed: June 16, 2012.
  4. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Bullard#cite_ref-cv_4-1) Robert D. Bullard, Curriculum Vitae. Accessed: May 16, 2012.
  5. ^ "Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. - Significance, Waste Management In Houston, Laches And State Action, Impact, Further Readings - JRank Articles". Law.jrank.org. 1979-12-21. Retrieved 2012-12-11.
  6. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Bullard#cite_ref-ejrc.cau.edu_6-1) Johnson, Glenn S. (n.d.) "Robert Bullard", Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University Accessed: December 11, 2012.
  7. ^ Cole & Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement, (New York University Press, New York & London), 2001
  8. ^ "Principles of Environmental Justice". WEACT.org. 1991-10-27. Archived from the original on 2012-02-19. Retrieved 2012-12-11.
  9. ^ 'In The Matter Of Louisiana Energy Services, L.P.', Decision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, May 1, 1997
  10. ^ TSU, "Message from the Dean". Accessed: May 16, 2012.
  11. ^ "Robert D. Bullard". Weact.org. Archived from the original on 2012-02-22. Retrieved 2012-12-11.
  12. ^ Mock, Brentin. (2013, September 24). "Robert Bullard, pioneer in environmental justice, is honored by the Sierra Club," WashingtonPost.com. Accessed: September 25, 2013.
  13. ^ https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dr-robert-bullard-the-stephen-schneider-award-for-outstanding-climate-science-communication-tickets-70965514765

External links

Authority control 

Categories: 

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bullard: 2006 interview

http://grist.org/article/dicum/

Robert Bullard says he was “drafted” into environmental justice while working as an environmental sociologist in Houston in the late 1970s. His work there on the siting of garbage dumps in black neighborhoods identified systematic patterns of injustice. The book that Bullard eventually wrote about that work, 1990’s Dumping in Dixie, is widely regarded as the first to fully articulate the concept of environmental justice.

Since then, Bullard, who is as much activist as academic, has been one of the leading voices of environmental-justice advocacy. He was one of the planners of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, at which the organizing principles of modern environmental justice were formulated. Bullard later helped the Clinton administration write the watershed executive order that required all federal agencies to consider environmental justice in their programs.

Under the Bush administration, progress made during the 1990s is under attack, with even the U.S. EPA working to dismantle that provision. As he has for 25 years, Bullard stands at the forefront of efforts to maintain environmental-justice gains, and to make mainstream environmentalists aware of the issues at stake.

Currently on sabbatical from his position as director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard has just published his 12th book. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution brings together more than 20 contributors for a survey of the movement’s past and future.

Grist caught up with Bullard as he took a break from working on a Ford Foundation-funded study of how government actions have endangered the health and welfare of African Americans over the past seven decades. Most recently, this work has turned Bullard’s attention to the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina, which he describes as the latest urban environmental sacrifice zone.

How did you first become involved in environmental justice?

I was a young sociology professor just two years out of graduate school. My wife asked me to collect data for a lawsuit she had filed. A company had decided to put a landfill in the middle of a predominantly black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood — a neighborhood where 85 percent of the people owned their homes. Of course, the state gave them a permit, but the people said “no.”

I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government.

That’s how I got dragged into this.

And you got hooked.

I got hooked. I started connecting the dots in terms of housing, residential patterns, patterns of land use, where highways go, where transportation routes go, and how economic-development decisions are made. It was very clear that people who were making decisions — county commissioners or industrial boards or city councils — were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities.

Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table.

Just before Hurricane Katrina, you were getting ready to look at natural disasters as part of a study of how government actions endanger the health of African Americans in the South. How does Katrina fit the historical pattern?

Katrina was not isolated. It was not an aberration, and it was not incompetence on the part of FEMA and Michael Brown and the Bush administration. This has been going on for a long time under Republicans and Democrats, and the central theme that drives all of this is race and class.

You’ve done a lot of work with schools. Why is that of particular concern?

Poor children in urban areas are poisoned in their homes. And when they go to school, they get another dose. And when they go outside and play, they get another dose. It’s a slow-motion disaster: the most vulnerable population in our society is children, and the most vulnerable children are children of color. If we protect the most vulnerable in our society — these children — we protect everybody.

Can you give a sense of the scale of the problem surrounding these schools?

Moton Elementary School, in New Orleans, is built on top of a landfill, causing lots of problems with the water in the school. The playgrounds in Norco, La., in Cancer Alley, are across from a huge Shell refinery. You stay there 15 minutes and you can’t breathe. And in South Camden, N.J., there are schools and playgrounds on the waterfront where you have all this industry, all this nasty stuff. Almost two-thirds of the children in that neighborhood have asthma. In West Harlem, the North River Water Treatment Plant covers eight blocks near a school. On the south side of Chicago, it’s the same kind of thing.

From coast to coast, you see this happening. It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral.

Let’s look at a specific case in which you’re an expert witness: In Dickson County, Tenn., a county that is just over 4 percent black, a landfill was sited in the middle of a poor black community several decades ago. The dump was later a candidate for Superfund status, yet black families contend that authorities told them their water was OK to drink, even as they were telling white families not to drink it. In 2003, one family whose land borders the dump began a lawsuit against the county and the company that allegedly dumped the industrial waste. What does it take for a community to stand up against such comprehensive injustice?

In every struggle, somebody has to step forward, just like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. In this case, it’s the Holt family: they have drawn a line in the dirt and said “no.”

Every time I go there, I’m amazed at their spirits. These are fighters, from strong stock: this is a community of black people who owned land dating back over 100 years. They are resilient. But at the same time, they’re sick. Harry Holt is the patriarch in the family right now, and he has cancer. His daughter, Sheila Holt-Orsted, has cancer. His son has an immune deficiency.

That’s how these lawsuits play out: it’s a waiting game. The people with the money can wait the longest, and the people who are sick generally can’t, because at some point, sick people die. And they know that. That is the cruelty and the horrific nature of environmental racism.

What keeps you going?

People who fight. People like the Holt family. People who do not let the garbage trucks and the landfills and the petrochemical plants roll over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years.

And in the last 10 years, we’ve been winning: lawsuits are being won, reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have been put on notice that they can’t do this anymore, anywhere.

It’s no longer overt policy to practice environmental racism in this country, yet it keeps happening. Where is the locus of the problem now?

Now it’s institutional racism. You don’t have a lot of individuals out there wearing sheets and hoods. Instead you see it as the policies get played out. On their face, policies may appear to be race-neutral. They say, “We’re going to look at unemployment, poverty rates, and educational level,” but the poorest areas oftentimes correspond to racialized places. Without even talking about race, you can almost predict where these locally unwanted land uses, or LULUs, will go.

In your 2003 book Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, you took a look at what sustainability means from an environmental-justice perspective. Is there such a thing as sustainability without justice?

No, there’s not. This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised.

In your latest book, you wrote, “Building a multiethnic, multiracial, multi-issue, anti-racist movement is not easy.” That seems like a huge understatement. Has anything like that ever been done?

No. What we’re up against is really trying to disentangle and unpack a lot of baggage, from slavery to colonialism to neo-colonialism to imperialism, and all those -isms that have really served as wedges.

For example, before we had the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, there was very little interaction and understanding and collaboration among African Americans and Latino Americans and Native Americans and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans on anything. We had the civil-rights movement, but the modern civil-rights movement was not necessarily your model multiethnic, multiracial movement.

There was friction and lots of confrontations and animosities in terms of who’s going to lead and the extent to which paternalism and racism and sexism could be eliminated. The environmental-justice movement took on the huge task of breaking down mistrust and stereotypes and the internalized racisms that we’re all victims of. You have some dynamics that are really very complex. But we’ve made a lot of progress: we’ve worked out the relationships for partnering and respecting leadership styles.

There are a couple of cases in your latest book of people involved in local struggles who went on to hold elected office. How representative is that of environmental justice as a leadership incubator?

In at least a quarter of cases, the leaders that emerge to work on local environmental-justice issues get involved in electoral politics. They get elected to school boards, city councils, and run for state representative. And 35 percent of them are women.

In other cases, they become the go-to people when it comes to, “What about jobs? What about this facility? Will it be a good thing or is this just a sell job?” Whether they be retired school teachers or retired mail carriers or little old grandmothers who have lots of time to devote to these issues, this is the training ground for leaders.

Marshall Ganz has pointed out that many of the mainstream, national environmental groups are D.C.-based lobbying organizations that don’t have the really engaged grassroots constituencies you’re describing. How do you see these two different kinds of groups working together?

The environmental-justice movement was never about creating little black Greenpeaces or little brown Environmental Defenses or little red Audubon Societies. These organizations have their expertise and when we can work together and maximize our strengths, that’s when we win.

There’s division of labor that can work to the advantage of this whole movement. When the mainstream national environmental groups pair up with environmental-justice groups that have the ability to mobilize large numbers of constituents — to get people marching and filling up those courtrooms and city council meetings — that’s when you can talk about an environmental movement.

A great example of how it should be done is happening right now in Louisiana. The Natural Resources Defense Council is partnering with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to work on testing and issues of environmental justice after Katrina. NRDC brings a lot of expertise, but is respecting those organizations based in New Orleans and Cancer Alley. They’re really showing how a national group and local groups can form a relationship that is principled.

So you’re hopeful?

On our side we have lots of committed troops on the ground and a growing movement of young people. Because of the way race operates in this society, there are some people — poor white people, for example — who have been given blinders; they’re blinded by racism and have voted against their own best interests. When we take the blinders off and allow every single American to rise and reach his or her potential without these artificial barriers, then we could really become a great country.

What environmental-justice issues might we be surprisingly close to breaking through on?

Globally we’ve got a long way to go, but the fact is we don’t have a lot of time — I think that reality will force collaboration. An awareness that what we do in the developed world doesn’t just impact us is now pretty much a given. But we have to move that to another level of action and policy: the framework that environmental justice has laid out can resonate across a lot of developing countries.

In the end, I think we’ll be able to get our message out because it’s based on principles and it’s based on truth and justice.

Click here to read more thoughts from Robert Bullard on Katrina and institutionalized racism.

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akz4ae/a-legendary-black-environmental-group-is-back-and-**advising-joe-biden**

no lnx pix vid

Inside the racist nightmare that led to the founding of the National Black Environmental Justice Network, the devastating death of its first leader Damu Smith, and the political shifts that brought the network back and made it more relevant than ever.

GD

By Geoff Dembicki

July 30, 2020, 3:00am

Damu Smith

DAMU SMITH, THE NETWORK'S FIRST EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HAS BEEN CALLED THE MARTIN LUTHER KING OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT.

Tipping Point

Tipping Point covers environmental justice stories about and, where possible, written by people in the communities experiencing the stark reality of our changing planet.

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Throughout the summer, Joe Biden has gotten advice on racism from an environmental organization that few people have ever heard of. Despite only relaunching in June after being inactive for over a dozen years and having less than 1,500 followers on Twitter and Facebook combined, the National Black Environmental Justice Network has done several meetings with the former vice president and his campaign.

In those meetings, the network’s leaders urged Biden to make undoing government-led discrimination towards Black people a key part of his climate platform. That could mean ensuring no federal green stimulus package is passed without carefully considering the impact on people already breathing in a heavier share of pollution from the fossil fuel industry—or creating opportunities for Black people to own, not just work at, the green companies that will lessen our dependence on oil, coal, and gas.

“We’ve been working with the Biden campaign,” said network co-chair Dr. Beverly Wright.“They have heard us.” In mid-July, Biden announced a $2 trillion plan for fighting the climate emergency that proposes 40 percent of all clean energy and infrastructure spending goes to disadvantaged communities, many of them Black. “We are in the process of sharing this with our members and asking them to send input,” Wright said of the announcement.

The network’s leaders and members are able to get Biden’s attention because they created the concept of “environmental racism” and were some of the earliest people to start fighting it.

They founded the network in the late 1990s because Black people were being poisoned and killed across the U.S. by industrial facilitiesbuilt far from where most white people live. But with Black people now confronting police brutality in the streets, dying disproportionately from COVID-19, and facing climate disasters that cause them greater and longer-lasting harm than other Americans, if anything, the emergency that led Wright and others to fight back a generation ago is even greater today. Some outside observers argue there’s never been a better time to relearn the network’s hard-fought wisdom.

“We are in a moment when the National Black Environmental Justice Network is desperately needed,” said Tamara Toles, North America director for the climate group 350.org.

If Biden wins the election in November and takes seriously the network’s demand for solutions that can address today’s spectrum of crises, “then oh my god, there’s so many possibilities for change,” Wright said. Her experience has taught her to be cautious in her optimism, though. “I am so hopeful,” she continued. “But we’ve been hopeful before.”

As a researcher in the 1980s, Wright’s pathway into environmental activism started with her learning about the racial disparities of “Cancer Alley,” a cluster of more than a hundred petrochemical plants, six refineries, and many other polluting facilities stretching from her hometown of New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Most of the inhabitants of this polluted corridor are either Black people or people of color.

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“They’d have little white crosses on their lawn showing the number of people who’d died in their families. Sometimes there was two, sometimes there was eight,” Wright said. “All the birds had disappeared except for the crows. Screens on their windows were rusting and falling off in like three months. The air was so corrosive that the paint on their cars was being melted off.”

Wright looked deeper and saw it was no accident that people of color were suffering most. “Much of the industry, which is the source of an area’s pollution problem, is found near minority and lower-income neighborhoods,” she wrote in a 1984 paper co-authored with Dr. Robert Bullard, another towering figure in the environmental justice community who is co-chair of the National Black Environmental Justice Network.

Three years later, an investigation by the United Church of Christ revealed this to be a national pattern. “Although socio-economic status appeared to play an important role in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, race still proved to be more significant,” it concluded in the seminal report “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.”

The same zoning decisions that excluded Black people from more desirable white neighborhoods were also exposing them to life-shortening chemicals and pollution.

Black people were more worried about the quality of their environment than white people, a trend that still persists today.

Yet even with these horrifying revelations there was a perception that Black people didn’t care about environmental issues as much as white people. “I heard that assertion a lot, but I didn’t see any data really to prove it,” Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan, told VICE News. He pored through large national data sets in the late 1980s and found that by several measures—including the desire for more government money to be spent cleaning up air and water—Black people were more worried about the quality of their environment than white people, a trend that still persists today. “That was an eye-opener,” he said.

Instead of joining national green organizations like the Sierra Club, Wright said, Black people were more likely to work with local civil rights groups that connected pollution to a legacy of racism. In 1991, hundreds of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian activists from across the U.S. who also shared this wider perspective met in Washington, D.C., for the first ever People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. “Delegates were shaken by the reports of widespread poisoning, oppression, and devastation that communities of color are experiencing—including water, air, and land contamination, which cause cancers, leukemia, birth defects, and miscarriages,” reads a dispatch from the event.

The summit set off changes that helped introduce “key buzzwords like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘environmental racism’ into the legal, political, economic, and social institutions in the United States,” according to the Southwest Research and Information Center. And the 17 “principles of environmental justice” that delegates adopted are now the moral and political foundation for thousands of grassroots organizations around the world, including the Climate Justice Alliance and the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum; more recently, they helped guide Elizabeth Warren’s plans for fighting climate change.

One of the summit’s lead organizers was an activist named Damu Smith, whose strategy for achieving racial justice can today be heard in the Green New Deal legislation proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Though Smith died from cancer in 2006 and is now barely known to a new generation of climate activists, people such as Mustafa Santiago Ali with the National Wildlife Federation see Smith as a civil rights organizer comparable to Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez. “You’ll one day find him in textbooks and people will be studying his techniques,” said Santiago Ali, who is on the National Black Environmental Justice Network’s steering committee.

“No community should be poisoned, no community should be disproportionally exposed, no community should be subject to things that make us die.”

Born in St. Louis in 1951, Smith was raised by working-class parents—his dad was a fireman and his mom was a nurse—in a public housing complex. “Much of what I am today has been shaped by the fact that I grew up in not wretchedly poor surroundings but we struggled,” he would later recall. “I know what it is to go to school without heat at home and study by candlelight and not have enough money to get adequate clothes.”

Later, as a high school student, he made two visits to Cairo, Illinois, to attend Black Solidarity Day rallies. While there he listened to speeches from people including Amiri Baraka, Nina Simone, and Jesse Jackson and visited an area where white supremacists had fired guns at Black people’s homes. “The visits to Cairo totally transformed my life,” Smith later said in an interview with Contemporary Black Biography. “I made my decision on the bus leaving there that I would commit my life to the movement of social justice and Black rights.”

In 1973, Smith moved to Washington D.C., and for the next three decades worked on a huge range of activist campaigns, opposing police brutality, nuclear war, gun violence, South African apartheid, and U.S. imperialism. Smith believed the root cause of these problems was a system where one group of people attempted to dominate another. And this was especially true for pollution.

“While everybody on the planet is suffering from toxic contamination, there are some communities that have been targeted…based on race and income,” he once explained. Smith argued the best way to oppose “environmental racism” was to build a protest movement capable of pressuring politicians that united Americans across age, race, gender, and regional lines—this was one reason for him helping organize the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.

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“No community should be poisoned, no community should be disproportionally exposed, no community should be subject to things that make us die,” he said.

People who knew Smith said he had a talent for turning the specific grievance of a community into a universal call for justice—and he could do it in a way that disarmed people’s defences and made them eager to show up for the fight. “There’s a lot of dogmatism in movements, a lot of finger-wagging, a lot of angry voices, but with Damu, he met you where you were,” said John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA from 2000 to 2008. “You could see his brain going, ‘How am I going to bring these issues into your reality?’”

Santiago Ali first met Smith at the 1991 Environmental Leadership summit. Then early in his career, Santiago Ali was impressed with a speech Smith had given and approached him in the hallway. “Damu took the time to sit down with me, learn about where I was from, and he started to drop knowledge,” Santiago Ali said. This was Smith’s approach no matter how much or little social status you had. “He could navigate in any situation and hold folks accountable but also make them feel comfortable at the same time,” Santiago Ali recalled. “In my estimation, he’s one of the greatest organizers that this country has ever had.”

Smith worked with Greenpeace throughout the 1990s to assist Black communities fighting chemical pollution in and around Cancer Alley. This put him in close contact with Wright, who by then had founded and was leading the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.

Among their top priorities was confronting Shell, which operated a huge chemical complex bordering the Black neighbourhood of Diamond in the town of Norco. In 1973, there was an unreported gas leak and when Leroy Jones started his lawnmower it ignited the gas, burning him and another resident alive. Another leak in 1998 caused a “cloudy-white mist” to fall on the community, making people sick. “Some residents reported a smell like burnt garlic; others felt the skin tighten on their faces,” reads an account of the incident by Steve Lerner, author of Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor.

ROBERT BULLARD, BEVERLY WRIGHT, AND DAMU SMITH (MIDDLE ROW)PROTEST AGAINST THE SHINTECH CHEMICAL PLANT IN ST. JAMES PARISH IN 1997. PHOTO COURTESY OF BEVERLY WRIGHT

Wright’s group provided education and training to residents demanding Shell help them relocate by purchasing their homes. Diamond had existed before Shell set up its complex, and now that people’s houses were next to a refinery it was very difficult to sell them. “People are locked into these toxic prisons,” Smith had said.

The involvement of Greenpeace in the battle brought national media attention. “I knew we could embarrass (Shell) to death with the combination of race and toxics,” he explained. “I knew that if we exploited that reality that ultimately we could win.” Shell eventually offered to buy out up to 400 Diamond residents, but continued to release cancer-causing chemicals.

Meanwhile Wright was putting out the word for other Black communities seeking help to get in touch. “We started getting calls and the calls never stopped,” she said. “We were up to like 15 communities, all of them living in horrible conditions, and then we realized it wasn’t just in Louisiana, it was all over Texas, it was all over the South. Then we got calls from California. It seemed like an emergency to us.” In 1999, she and Smith helped set up a meeting in New Orleans for Black-led organizations fighting environmental racism. From that, the National Black Environmental Justice Network was formed.

One of the battles the network got involved with was inDickson County, Tennessee, where members of a Black homestead were fighting the local government for putting a landfill just over 50 feet from where they lived, and then failing to warn them that it was leaking toxic chemicals into their drinking water—while cleaning up the water of nearby white families.

“We are all sick and the government seems to be waiting for us to die,” said homestead resident Sheila Holt-Orsted, who has experienced breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and gastrointestinal disorder.Bullard would later deem Dickson County “the ‘poster child’ for environmental racism.” In 2003, the Holt family filed a lawsuit against the city and county, which was settled in 2011 with 12 family members receiving $1.75 million. A separate lawsuit resulted in $7,500 each for nine other family members.

The network helped change federal policy, advising the Environmental Protection Agency on programs specifically addressing the needs of communities of color. “There was a big voice coming from the National Black Environmental Justice Network and many of its members,” recalled Santiago Ali, who worked at the EPA for 24 years. “They were helping to push for all those things that now people point to as foundational inside the government.”

But just as it was gaining influence and momentum, the network started to unravel. While on a peace mission to Palestine in March 2005, Smith collapsed and had a seizure. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was an especially rough year for Wright, because in August, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, killing nearly 2,000 people and flooding her home with 8 feet of water while leaving an alligator in the backyard pool. “Damu called me and sent me an email talking about how sorry he was that this had happened and how much he wished that he could be more involved,” Wright said. But by then his health was in serious decline.

[News

This Map Shows Which U.S. Homes Will Flood Over the Next 30 Years Due to Climate Change

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Wright’s own life was upside down: “After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered.” Seven years after the disaster, the average white household was earning income of $60,000, a 40 percent jump from before, while for Black households average income declined to $30,000.

Smith died in 2006 at the age of 54. “Even though he’s 10 years older than me, he looked young,” Passacantando said. “He was a fanatic about eating good food. When a guy like that gets sick it sort of flips your whole universe upside down. How could he possibly get sick? I think that’s one of the reasons people were so shocked. He was so into healthy eating, and then out of nowhere he gets this cancer and then disappears. It was horrifying.”

Wright felt a huge range of emotions. “I was angry with him because his father died of colon cancer, and Damu just didn’t go to the doctor. I was upset at him for not taking better care of himself.”

With the anger came grief. “I’m telling you, we were depressed; that knocked the wind out of us,” she said. Wright, like the network’s other leaders, was also running her own organization.Only Smith had been singularly focused on fundraising and growing the network’s influence. With him gone, Wright struggled to keep it going. “Eventually we just gave up,” she said.

Climate Change Is About To Make Gentrification Even Worse

Not long after, national environmental groups partnered with Democrats, fossil fuel companies, and some Republicans to get a cap-and-trade bill passed by Congress. The smaller Black-led groups Wright’s network had represented were mostly excluded from those discussions. And they saw little reason to celebrate when the House passed legislation imposing a limit on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, because companies that exceeded the limit could pay a fine and then keep contaminating the air and water of non-white communities. (A 2016 study concluded that California’s state-level version of cap-and-trade “did nothing to alleviate the toxic pollution facing communities of color,” Time reported.)

But after cap-and-trade legislation died in the Senate in 2010, it created a political opening for a more confrontational, race-and-income-aware style of activism. Throughout the decade, Indigenous peoples led fights against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and groups representing communities disproportionately exposed to the climate emergency came together as the Climate Justice Alliance in 2013.

“I am so hopeful. But we’ve been hopeful before.”

The Green New Deal proposed by millennial congressperson Ocasio-Cortez in early 2019 channelled the demand for climate solutions that would address the specific vulnerabilities of Black, brown, Indigenous, and lower-income white people by proposing trillions of dollars of green investments in disadvantaged communities. The mass political movement that activists like Smith had once called for—uniting Americans across generational, racial, and wealth divides to address environmental disparities—appeared to be finally taking shape.

By early 2020, Wright, Bullard, and others were having talks about relaunching the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Those conversations took on unexpected urgency when the coronavirus arrived.Wright couldn’t understand why St. John Parish, a largely Black community outside of New Orleans, had one of the highest per capita death rates from COVID-19 in the country. But then researchers at Harvard University published a study in April finding that breathing air pollution can make you more susceptible to the virus.

It all clicked for her—St. John Parish is in the heart of Cancer Alley, right near where her and Smith fought a chemical plant decades earlier. “The Harvard study comes out and I’m like, ‘OK, now I understand,’” she said. “Black people are dying because of where we live.”

When the network relaunched in June, it felt to Wright like the pollution battles of the 1990s and 2000s all over again—but in some ways worse. Today, race is still the biggest predictor of how exposed a community is to health-destroying emissions and chemicals. But Black people are also being hammered with heavy job losses due to the coronavirus—the unemployment rate for Black people between age 16 to 19 is nearly 35 percent, compared to 28.3 percent for white people of the same age. And Black communities remain dangerously exposed to torrential rains, river flooding, hurricanes, heat waves, and other forms of climate chaos.

“People of my age group are so angry,” Wright said. After dedicating her life to fighting racial disparities, she lamented, “Why are we in the same place? We’ve actually lost some of the progress.”

She thinks there is a once-in-a-generation chance to turn things around in November, however. Millions of Americans are taking a hard look at systemic injustice. The climate movement is finally putting people of color at its center. Biden has endorsed most of the fundamental principles of a Green New Deal, if not explicitly in name, promising to phase out industries that are poisoning Black people and replace them with millions of green jobs.

“This is our opportunity,” Wright said. “Everything hinges on this election.”

Follow Geoff Dembicki on Twitter.

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