by Laura Petersen
Robert Bullard, Ph.D.
The father of the environmental justice movement is excited. From the young people protesting in the streets for climate action and justice, to the White House elevating environmental justice as a key feature of policy discussions across the administration, people are finally paying attention.
“We are lightyears away from 1979,” says Robert Bullard, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, who has spent the last four decades researching, writing and talking about environmental injustices and inequalities – or, as he likes to say: who gets what, when, where and why in terms of pollution.
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Lane Community College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. event was held online this year via Zoom, with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Bullard, who is known as the “father of environmental justice.” The event, hosted by Dr. Lamont A. Francies, coincided with King’s birthday on Jan. 15.
Francies is an educator and the senior pastor at Delta Bay Church of Christ in Antioch, California. The Zoom event was held to discuss environmental racism, and how it affects minority communities disproportionately. Bullard has been working and researching environmental justice since 1979, and is the nation’s leading researcher on the subject.
The event opened with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” considered the “Black national anthem.”