Robert D. Bullard

Born in Elba, Alabama, Bullard is the son of Nehemiah and Myrtle Brundidge Bullard; he was the fourth of five children. He graduated from Elba's Mulberry Heights High School as class salutatorian in 1964. == 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. 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 waste sites. 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. 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." 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. 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. 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." == Academic career ==

• Associate/ Assistant Professor, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, 1976-88 ==Awards and recognition==

• Conservation Achievement Award, National Wildlife Federation, 1990 • One of thirteen "Environmental Leaders of the Century", Newsweek, 2008 • Building Economic Alternatives Award, Co-op America, 2008 • John Muir Award, Sierra Club, 2013 • American Bar Association, Award for Excellence in Environmental, Energy, and Resources Stewardship, 2015 • Iowa State University Alumni Association, Alumni Merit Award, 2015 • Stephen Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication, 2019 • 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award (Champions of the Earth) • Member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, 2021 • University of California Berkeley Ecology Law Quarterly, Environmental Leadership Award, Environmental Leadership Award, 2022 • The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2022. • University of Johannesburg, Honorary Doctorate, 2022 • Georgetown University, Honorary Doctorate, 2022 • Membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2022 • Elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine, 2024 == Selected publications ==

• Bullard, RD (1983). Solid waste sites and the black Houston community. Sociological Inquiry 53, pp. 273–288. • Bullard, RD, ed (1983). Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press. • Bullard, RD (1987). Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust. College Station Texas A&M University Press. • Bullard, RD (1989). In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. • Bullard, RD, ed (2000a). [1990]. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. • Bullard, RD, ed (1994). Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. • Bullard, RD, Grigsby, JE, III, & Lee, C (1994). "Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies. • Bullard, RD, & Johnson, GS, eds (1997). Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. • Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Wright, BH (1997). Confronting environmental injustice: It's the right thing to do. Environmentalism and Race, Gender, Class Issues. Race Gender and Class 5 (1), pp. 63–79. • Bullard, RD, & Johnson, GS (1998). Environmental and economic justice: Implications for public policy. Journal of Public Management and Social Policy 4 (4), pp. 137–148. • Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO (1999, Fall). Atlanta: Megasprawl. Forum: For Applied Research and Public Policy 14 (3), pp. 17–23. • Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO, eds (2000). Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta. Washington, DC: Island Press. • Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO (2000, February/March). Dismantling transportation apartheid through environmental justice. Progress: Surface Transportation Policy Project 10 (1), pp. 4–5 • Bullard, RD (2000b). "People of Color Environmental Groups Directory." Flint, MI: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. • Bullard, RD, ed (2003). Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Bullard, RD (2004). Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity. Boston: South End Press. • Bullard, RD (2005). The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. • Bullard, RD (2007). Growing Smarter: Achieving Livable Communities, Environmental Justice, and Regional Equity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Bullard, RD (2007). The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race and the Politics of Place. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. • Bullard, RD (2009). Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. == See also ==