During Dr. Robert Bullard’s first stint at Texas Southern University, researching assorted urban issues while also teaching, he linked where some people live with their comparative lack of household finances, and from there, parsed how those dual forces factor into what gets dumped in their proverbial backyards.
Landfills, garbage incinerators, industrial plants and other polluters are more likely to be situated in areas populated by poor, politically powerless people, Bullard concluded, as he began backing up what he knew was true anecdotally with empirical evidence.
He also concluded that those living near landfills, toxic smokestacks and such also tend, disproportionately, to travel outside of their neighborhoods for well-stocked supermarkets. They confront shortages of affordable, habitable housing and insufficient means of transportation. They are less likely to get hired by major employers — including industrial polluters operating in their communities — who pay wages that reasonably sustain a family.
“Those questions go to the heart of equity and justice,” says Bullard, who, after departing TSU in 1987, returned last year as dean of its Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs.
From the school of public affairs, Bullard aims to pump more minority graduates into environmental policy-making and monitoring, an arena still largely dominated by Whites. Likewise, he says, TSU also is striving to push more professionals into spheres intersecting with the environmental arena.
“The environmental lens brings it all together,” he adds. “There’s a reason why we have childhood obesity and asthma epidemics in certain populations. There are reasons for high unemployment and high dropout rates. … We need to unravel and disentangle the institutional factors that make communities sick, that lower property values. That’s an overlay I’ve tried to bring to this field, trying to set a framework for people to understand how all of this is connected.”
The return of pioneering Bullard — dubbed “father of the environmental justice movement” — to a programmatically expanding TSU has been a much-welcomed personnel move, says Dr. John Rudley, TSU’s president.
