Robert D. Bullard Quotes

American sociologist known as the father of environmental justice

Robert Doyle Bullard (born December 21, 1946), formerly Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, is an American academic known as the "father of environmental justice" for his work beginning in the 1970s to extend civil rights thinking to issues of environmental inequality.

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Alternative Names: Robert Doyle Bullard • Robert Bullard

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what we’re saying is that our communities, communities of color, want to be sustainable, want to be resilient. They want to be healthy and livable. And it should not somehow be something that’s relegated to white middle-class suburban or urban core.

We have to talk about environmental racism and call it out when it exists. We can’t just run from it

The environmental justice framework shifts the burden of proof to polluters and dischargers who do harm, who discriminate, or who do not give equal protection to racial and ethnic minorities. Under the current system, individuals who challenge polluters must prove that they have been harmed, discriminated against, or disproportionately affected. Few affected communities have the resources to hire the lawyers, expert witnesses, and doctors needed to sustain such a challenge.

Students and young people have fueled every social movement in the United States, including the civil rights, environmental, antiwar, women's movements.

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.

America is segregated, and so is pollution.

disasters like this widen and exacerbate inequality. And so, the communities that are most at risk from not having, you know, the kinds of infrastructure in those areas, in terms of flood protection, in terms of trying to get out, in terms of transportation, etc., I mean, it played out

billions come flowing in (after a disaster), and then you have all kinds of organizations and individuals parachuting in, raking up the money, I mean, when the local groups that have been working on these issues for years and years and years somehow get bypassed, get left behind.