For three decades now, Dr. Robert Bullard has fought tirelessly to ensure that low-income and minority communities are not ignored when it comes to environmental protections.

Considered the father of the Environmental Justice movement, Bullard’s activism began in 1978 as a young environmental sociology professor in Houston. At the time, his wife, an attorney, enlisted his help in researching a case against the city, which wanted to force a garbage dump on a mostly African-American neighborhood.

Through his research, Bullard uncovered a pattern of institutionalized racism in environmental policy, one that disproportionately targeted the neighborhoods of people of color—regardless of their annual income—for landfills, toxic waste sites, industrial run-off, and other environmental hazards.

That revelation became the basis for the entire EJ movement:

“Just because [a community] is poor or physically located on the wrong side of the tracks doesn’t mean it should be bombarded with all of the things that other communities don’t want in their own backyards.”

Since then, Bullard has continued to fight the good fight, authoring 14 books and heading the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.

In this interview with Simran Sethi, he addresses a wide range of topics, including the prominent role of African American women in the EJ movement, the need to incorporate EJ principles into our larger debates over climate change, and the fundamental differences between the EJ movement and the larger mainstream environmental movement, among other topics.

As Bullard explains, the Environmental Justice movement is not just an anti-dumping campaign, it also empowers communities to take on their own battles, and it emphasizes the need to build up neighborhoods with green jobs and energy-efficient construction.

Ultimately for Bullard, it’s not a matter of standing up for the environmental rights of one particular group. Instead, it’s about preserving those rights for all of us.

“There is no Hispanic air, no black air—there’s just air that we all breathe.”

Please see Bullard’s suggested links below for more information.

By Ranjit Arab