UT Humanities Center Tenth Annual Distinguished Lecture Series – Robert Bullard

The Quest for Environmental and Climate Justice

Climate change is the defining global environmental justice, human rights, and public health issue of the 21st century. The most vulnerable populations will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks because of where they live, their limited income and economic means, and their lack of access to health care. Professor Bullard’s presentation will focus primarily on the U.S. and the need for empowering vulnerable populations, identifying environmental justice and climate change “hot-spot” zones, and designing fair, just and effective strategies for adaptation, mitigation, emergency management and community resilience and disaster recovery. He will offer a framework for dismantling systemic racism and policies and practices that create, exacerbate and perpetuate inequality and vulnerability. 

Robert D. Bullard is known as the father of environmental justice. He is the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University and was the founding Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. An award-winning author of eighteen books, including Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, he is co-founder of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and has been featured on CNN and in Newsweek, which named him one of 13 Environmental Leaders of the Century. His latest books include Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina (2009), Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States (2011), and The Wrong Complexion for Protection (2012). Among his other awards, Dr. Bullard was named by Planet Harmony as one of its Ten African American Green Heroes; was given the John Muir Award by the Sierra Club, which also named its new Environmental Justice Award after him; was named by the Global Climate Action Summit as a Climate Trailblazer and by Apolitical as one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy; and was honored by Washington State University with the William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement of Justice, by WebMD with its Health Heroes Trailblazer Award, and by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) with its Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award, the UN’s highest environmental honor.

Photo credit: Texas Southern University

This event has been organized by UT Africana Studies, Black in Appalachia, and the UT Humanities Center.

Free and open to the public