Robert D. Bullard. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, And Environmental Quality, Third Edition. Boulder: Routledge, 2000. xxii + 234 pp. $42.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8133-6792-7; ISBN 978-0-8133-4427-0.
Reviewed by Christopher Sellers (Stony Brook University) and Kimberly K. Smith (Carleton College)
Published on H-Envirohealth (April, 2020)
Commissioned by Michitake Aso (University at Albany, SUNY)
On March 27, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a key architect of what became the environmental justice movement, passed away. He led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) contingent that made the Warren County, North Carolina, protests against a landfill for polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated soil national news in 1982. We dedicate this roundtable to him.
Introduction to Dumping in Dixie: A Roundtable (Michitake Aso, University at Albany, SUNY)
The idea of environmental justice is now common currency, both among activists and among environmental historians. Mainstream, formerly largely white-focused environmental advocacy groups have begun to address environmental justice concerns, and environmental justice scholarship now ranges from histories of racism and pollution at sites across the United States to studies of black farm ownership.[1] Yet, as Christopher Sellers points out, Robert Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie reminds us how the terms environmental activism and social justice used to have little truck with each other, both inside and outside of the classroom. We are very fortunate to have two prominent scholars who have engaged deeply with environmental justice issues, Kimberly Smith and Chris Sellers, share their thoughts on Bullard’s book. Moreover, these scholars hail from different disciplines, which provides a fruitful contrast in perspectives on teaching, researching, and advocating with this book.
Kim Smith is a professor of environmental studies and political science at Carleton College. She is an award-winning author of several books and articles, including, most recently, The Conservation Constitution: The Conservation Movement and Constitutional Change, 1870-1930. In her reflection, she argues that Robert Bullard’s major contribution in Dumping in Dixie can be seen in light of environmental justice scholarship. While the field has blossomed into a dazzling array of shapes and colors, and some of Bullard’s methodology has been critiqued, Smith views his work as pathbreaking. It made good use of the tools available in the 1980s, when the book was being written, and its findings have largely been supported by subsequent studies. Along with the work of those such as Dorecta Taylor, Bullard’s book thus still serves as an excellent introduction to the field. Smith states that another important reason why she still assigns Dumping in Dixie in her courses is in light of its contributions to an African American tradition of environmental activism. The book provides, in her words, a model of “black environmental activism” for students, one that attends to both environmental health and social justice and one that seeks to improve lives in poor communities and communities of color.
Chris Sellers is a professor of history who also received a medical degree, and who teaches at Stony Brook University in New York. His scholarship has been at the forefront of the history of industrial disease and includes his 1997 classic, Hazards of the Job. He has more recently looked south, including research on Atlanta and Mexico. In his review, he points to some of the productive tensions between Bullard’s sociological approach and a historical approach to environment and health. Sellers notes how Dumping in Dixie, as with other classics such as Silent Spring, became important landmarks in the very movements they sought to analyze.[2] In this sense, Sellers argues, historians have paid attention to Dumping in Dixie more because of its role in shaping the past several decades of environmental justice movements than because of its role in shaping the burgeoning field of environmental history. As Sellers underscores, Bullard shows how communities of color in particular, and communities targeted for pollution in general, can act against injustice. Finally, Sellers highlights how Bullard’s book has helped to educate environmental historians about “black environmentalism” and push them into a then largely unexplored geographic region, the US Southeast.
The different disciplinary perspectives that Smith and Sellers bring to bear hint at just how wide-ranging the impact of Bullard’s book has been. From my perspective as a historian of the global environment, the US-focused environmental justice scholarship of Bullard, and many others, resonates on a global stage.
Take the place that I am most familiar with, Vietnam. During the 1960s and 1970s, the US and South Vietnamese militaries sprayed, poured, and buried millions of gallons of herbicides on and in the South Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian landscapes. Much of this herbicide was contaminated with dioxin, a toxic molecule and known carcinogen and teratogen. These chemicals were dumped on hapless people, including North and South Vietnamese, ethnic minorities, Koreans, Australians, and Americans, both civilians and soldiers. These individuals and communities, especially civilians in South Vietnam, had no choice in whether they were exposed to these toxins. But the links between South Vietnam and the American South were more direct than simply both being situations of environmental injustice. For example, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, two of the main producers of dioxin-laden herbicides for the US military, were also, as Bullard shows, major contributors to the pollution affecting black communities in the US South. [3]
Not surprisingly, chemical dumping in Vietnam has continued after the end of the Vietnam War. In 2016, a toxic release by Formosa Steel Corporation into the waters off of Ha Tinh, a province in north-central Vietnam, resulted in the deaths of large numbers of fish and the destruction of the local fishing industry. Formosa Plastics Corporation, whose actions in Louisiana Bullard examines, is the primary investor in Formosa Steel. Ha Tinh is a province with high rates of poverty and it returned to global attention in 2019 when migrants from the province were among those who tragically died in a truck in the United Kingdom. Thus the distribution of environmental risk in Vietnam reproduces the environmental injustice seen in the United States, with poor communities and those with less political clout facing the highest risk. Polluting factories, as Smith writes, “have been placed in communities least able to organize political resistance against them” and the story of Formosa in Louisiana and Ha Tinh shows how transnational companies seek the “path of least resistance” wherever they many find it around the world.[4]
Thus, the story of “black environmental activism” told by Bullard is relevant not just to an American audience but a global audience. As Smith points out, Bullard provided a sort of playbook for resistance against powerful corporate and state interests. His work on black communities in the US South has been, and remains, useful for those concerned about environmental health and social justice everywhere.
Notes
[1]. Just to mention a few prominent books: Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Dawn Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013); Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Ellen Griffith Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
[2]. See Dawn Biehler, Frederick Davis, and Amy Hay, “Review of Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring,” H-Envirohealth, H-Net Reviews, December 2017, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51002.
[3]. For a global history of Agent Orange, see Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). For Dow Chemical water pollution in Louisiana, see Dumping in Dixie, 105, 108-9, and for a mention of Monsanto, see 52.
[4]. Dumping in Dixie, 107-8. For newspaper coverage of the Formosa spill, see Richard C. Paddock, “Taiwan-Owned Steel Factory Caused Toxic Spill, Vietnam Says,” The New York Times, June 30, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/asia/vietnam-formosa-ha-tinh-steel.html and Angel L. Martínez Cantera, “‘We Are Jobless Because of Fish Poisoning’: Vietnamese Fishermen Battle for Justice,” The Guardian, August 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/14/vietnamese-fishermen-jobless-fish-poisoning-battle-justice. For a scholarly treatment of an earlier controversy involving bauxite mining and environmental justice in the central highlands, see Jason Morris-Jung, “The Vietnamese Bauxite Controversy: Towards a More Oppositional Politics,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): 63–109, https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2015.10.1.63.
Reflections on Dumping in Dixie (Kimberly Smith, Carleton College)
Students in my Environmental Justice course sometimes ask me why I still assign Dumping in Dixie. First published in 1990, revised in 1994 and 2000, the book is now older than most of my students. It’s not as though there isn’t enough recent research on environmental justice to keep us busy. On the contrary, the field is producing ever-more sophisticated and compelling scholarship, ranging from case studies to large-scale quantitative analyses to rich theoretical and historical works. Environmental justice is now a major line of inquiry across the environmental social sciences and humanities.
But in my view, the best introduction to the topic is still Robert Bullard’s seminal book, Dumping in Dixie. It would be worth reading for its historical importance alone—for its role in giving intellectual credibility to the environmental justice movement. But the book is also valuable for the way it showcases how sociological research can address environmental problems. For my students, the way the book links social justice with environmental problems through the use of history, case studies, and surveys is revelatory. For most of them, Bullard offers an entirely new angle on the environmental movement. For some of them, this book is the first time they have seen their stories and their communities appear in the environmental studies curriculum.
Of course, focusing on one book and one scholar inevitably distorts our view of the political and scholarly landscape. Bullard’s book did not come out of nowhere. He is part of a tradition of African American environmental activism that reaches back to the nineteenth-century urban reform and antipollution movements.[1] That activism coalesced into the environmental justice movement in the early 1980s, a movement already well developed when Dumping in Dixie was published. Similarly, Bullard’s research built on scattered empirical research in the 1970s and 1980s that started to document environmental inequalities across the American landscape. His intellectual community included, most prominently, Dorceta Taylor, whose scholarship on black environmentalism emerged concurrently with Bullard’s.[2]
Still, I find it pretty easy to explain to my students why we read Dumping in Dixie. For one thing, it was (as far as I have been able to determine) the first work to formulate the “path of least resistance” theory: the claim that locally unwanted land uses like waste facilities have been placed in communities least able to organize political resistance against them. Admittedly, Bullard’s evidence for that inequality, focusing on the distribution of hazardous waste facilities in the American South, is open to criticism. He relied on a 1983 study by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which were the first two empirical studies of racial inequalities in the siting of waste facilities.[3] These studies used what has come to be known as the “unit-hazard coincidence” method: the researcher selects a geographic unit (such as census tract), determines which units contain a waste facility, and then compares the demographic profile of the “host” communities with the profile of non-host communities. The goal is to determine whether the host communities have, on average, greater numbers of minority residents than do the non-host communities. As geographers have long recognized, this method can lead to conflicting results depending on how large the unit selected is, and the unit of analysis is not always a good measure of the actual host community (especially since many waste facilities are located on the edge of political units such as counties). Similarly, Bullard cites a 1992 National Law Journal study purporting to document inequalities in the enforcement of federal toxic waste laws (pp. 99-100).[4] This study has been properly criticized for its methodological flaws. Inequalities in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement remains understudied, but the little research there is does not provide much support for racial inequality in this area of federal policy.[5]
Nevertheless, a substantial body of research following Dumping in Dixie overwhelmingly confirms Bullard’s original claim that predominately nonwhite communities are at greater risk of suffering environmental burdens than are most predominately white communities. Indeed, Bullard himself has helped guide environmental justice scholars toward better spatial analysis strategies, relying on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to examine these inequalities.[6] And in my view, no one has successfully challenged Bullard’s claim that a community’s capacity for political organization and action is one of the most important factors explaining that unequal distribution. Later research adds complexity and nuance to the causal story; race plays into the story of industrial development in the United States in multiple ways. These dynamics cannot be captured by a simple snapshot of the environmental riskscape. But it should be noted that Bullard himself recognized that complexity. Indeed, the resilience of Bullard’s original argument lies in the fact that his book does not rely solely on the quantitative analysis provided by the GAO and the Commission for Racial Justice. Rather, this was just one kind of evidence produced in a multimethodological study that drew on historical research about industrialization and political development in the South, along with case studies, interviews, and survey research, to provide a rich exploration of environmental activism in black communities.
In fact, the subsequent scholarly debate over the existence and causes of unequal distribution of environmental harms has somewhat obscured Bullard’s main goal in Dumping in Dixie: to explain how community attitudes and socioeconomic characteristics influence activism and mobilization strategies of black residents confronted with environmental stressors. In other words, he was less interested in documenting the existence of environmental inequalities than in documenting the existence of black environmental activism. The majority of the book is devoted to the case studies of environmental activism in majority-black communities throughout the American South. That research was well structured and solidly grounded in the social movement literature, and it too has stood the test of time. This is why I use the book to introduce my students not only to the problem of environmental inequality but to the strategies used by communities to address it—and to study it.
In addition, I like to use the book to study Robert Bullard himself, as a model of a public intellectual doing engaged social research. His research on toxic waste grew out of his involvement as a consultant, workshop leader, and guest speaker in communities fighting hazardous waste facilities. In undertaking his formal research, he recruited students from local historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to conduct interviews and surveys, thus helping to connect these institutions to the environmental activists in their communities. Moreover, he followed up Dumping in Dixie with eighteen books (at last count), extending and deepening his original research. His scholarship reflects the growth of the field, from a narrow focus on waste to a more comprehensive investigation of the race- and class-inflected environmental impacts of metropolitan development in the United States. In addition to his public talks and published works, he founded the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and was co-founder of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium. In short, Bullard is an excellent example of how one can integrate social activism with scholarship in the service of one’s community, and Dumping in Dixie provides a good window on how he did it: how he claimed authority for himself and for black environmental activists, and how he made visible their common work.
That work—building our capacity to understand and address environmental injustice––is surely one of Bullard’s most important legacies. Environmental inequality persists; environmental justice remains very much a work in progress. But Bullard helped us to see and name the problem. He demonstrated the variety of ways we can study it, and the wealth of questions we can ask about it. Most importantly, his scholarship helped to give environmental justice a place on the environmental policy agenda. The environmental justice movement transformed environmentalism,[7] and Dumping in Dixie is a powerful lens through which to explore that transformation.
Notes
[1]. See Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
[2]. Dorceta E. Taylor, “Blacks and the Environment: Toward an Explanation of the Concern and Action Gap between Blacks and Whites,” Environment and Behavior 21 (March 1989): 175-205.
[3]. US Government Accountability Office, The Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (Washington, DC: GAO, 1983); Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: United Church of Christ, 1987).
[4]. Marianne Lavelle and Marcia Coyle, “Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law—A Special Investigation,” National Law Journal 15, no. 3 (September 21, 1992): 1-12.
[5]. David M. Konisky and Christopher Reenok, “Evaluating Fairness in Environmental Regulatory Enforcement,” in Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government's Response to Environmental Justice, ed. David M. Konisky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 173-203.
[6]. Robert D. Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright, Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States (Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ, 2007).
[7]. Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Reflections on Dumping in Dixie (Christopher Sellers, Stony Brook University)
Now thirty years out from its first edition, Robert Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie; Race, Class, and Environmental Quality looms as a legitimate classic, but only partly because of what it contributed to the academic field of environmental history. When it first appeared in 1989, environmental history was still coming into its own as a field of historical study. But in terms of concerns and frameworks, environmental historians and Bullard have had relatively little truck with one another. Later historians like Andrew Hurley and Elaine McGurty would draw the field in the direction of Bullard’s themes, but he himself has hardly been a regular at ASEH (American Society for Environmental History), and a reread of Dumping makes abundantly clear that his method is predominantly sociological rather than historical.
In retrospect, the classical status of this book has less to do with far-reaching intellectual impacts on our field than with its role in the historical traditions we study, to which it can now be seen to belong. Like Silent Spring, it deserves to be read less because of the history it narrates than because of a certain historical agency this book itself turned to out to have. Reflecting directly on an environmental crisis of its own time, Dumping also helped catalyze and steer a movement just then taking shape, on behalf of environmental justice.
In our time, justice talk trips easily off the tongues of many environmental and climate activists and a Green New Deal aspires to tackle not just climate change but a gamut of social inequities. It has become difficult to recall just how separate social justice and environmental activists seemed from one another back when Bullard researched and wrote his first book. One of his chief points was that they only seemed to live in different worlds. This era’s prevailing views of the history of environmentalism aside, not just a white middle class in search of wilderness but black and lower-income communities had environmental issues. And John Muir- and Sierra Club-centric narratives of environmentalism aside, Bullard’s five case studies show black communities becoming concerned and started to organize around environmental issues at least since the early 1970s, years before the neologisms “environmental racism” and “environmental justice” came to be coined.
Also obscuring a black environmentalism that we now know went much further back was environmental history's early neglect of the southeastern United States, where most American blacks still live. Our field’s own original and enduring regional bias leans in another direction, toward the American West. Supposedly the wildest and most nature-saturated of regions, it has more easily yielded to what became environmental history’s classic modus operandi: unpacking the human hands and history behind this naturalness. A regional switch of the field’s gears to the Southeast came more slowly, as, with only a few exceptions like Mart Stewart’s work, the next fifteen years of work in our field continued to breeze past this region. Yet its environmental history, as Bullard’s book suggested, offered intriguing departures from what environmental historians thought they knew. When poorer rural and suburban black communities were targeted by industrial dumpers, for instance, he showed how a preexistent culture of civil rights activism served as springboard to a black environmentalism worlds apart from Muir and his legacy. Over the last decade and a half, a surge of southern environmental history has finally caught up with Bullard’s regional focus, not least through a book like Ellen Spears’s, fleshing out many of his themes in historians’ terms.
Rereading Bullard’s book also makes plain how much this black environmentalism was up against over the 1970s and 80s. The build-up of a federal environmental state in the United States increasingly made it possible for environmental officials as well as many more traditional environmental groups to dismiss their objections to hazardous waste sites as not-in-my-backyard- (or NIMBY-)ism, an all-too-local defense of neighborhood and community that neglected the bigger picture. The mainstream environmental groups, on the other hand, were at the same time gravitating toward issues they could and did frame as more broadly shared and (presumably) more “ecological.” There was acid rain, for instance, and by the 1990s, the greenhouse gases causing global warming. Whether or not these turns amounted to a kind of intellectual white flight, this era’s divide between the localism of environmental justice activists and the translocal orientation of a mainstream environmentalism was ironic, given what we have subsequently found out about the origins of this mainstream itself. As I and others have shown, the white environmentalism coalescing across the suburbs of America’s largest cities over the 1950s and 60s, missed in most Sierra Club- and wilderness-centric histories of environmentalism, looked surprisingly like the local struggles of black communities described by Bullard.
Especially since the mid-1990s, environmental historians have worked hard to unpack all sorts of episodes like those identified by Bullard. We now recognize “environmental justice” issues and movements across many periods, including those long predating the 1970s, and not just in the United States but across both the developed and the developing world. Reading Bullard’s book serves as a reminder that just thirty years ago, this term “environmental justice” was a novel one, gaining traction only as Bullard along with a few others were fleshing out what it meant. A certain linguistic and analytic alchemy was at work, discovering and naming commonalities of cause and mobilization, in Bullard’s case starting among black communities across the Southeast. Whereas a largely white mass environmentalism in the decades after World War II drew on expertise in health or ecology or biology, for environmental justice, engaged social scientific expertise like Bullard’s furnished more of the analytic props. Environmental inequities, after all, were not just about ecology or health per se, but also about the unequal distribution of environmental burdens between human communities, and the social as well as political factors behind those differences. His contribution was academic, sure enough, but his book also actively shaped the evolving identity of a movement itself in the process of gathering steam, whose time, at least in some important senses, had come. Just five years out from Bullard’s book, President Clinton would sign an executive order “implementing environmental justice … to the greatest extent practicable.”[1]
In the America of 2020 the corrosion of the EPA and many federal environmental laws now pursued by the party in power carry echoes of the early Reagan administration, underway just as Bullard began noting the commonalities culled in Dumping in Dixie. While we still attribute environmental justice struggles almost entirely to local activists, as did Bullard, this parallel suggests the import of another, larger development to which these local movements were reacting. The Reagan-era assault arguably had its deepest and most corruptive impacts on the then-new federal hazardous waste program, overseer of those very sites Bullard’s black environmentalists confronted. Recognizing the place of Bullard’s classic itself in environmental history thereby offer glimmers of hope for our own time. For even as powerful players in our nation’s capital are hard at work dismantling many of our environmental laws and institutions, what counteracting mobilizations now struggle to be born? Five years hence, will we be able to look back as Bullard did in in 1989, at countercurrents cresting into a future wave?
Note
[1]. Executive Order No. 12,898, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations,” 59 Fed. Reg. 7629 (February 11, 1994).
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Citation:
Christopher Sellers and Kimberly K. Smith. Review of Bullard, Robert D., Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, And Environmental Quality, Third Edition.
H-Envirohealth, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53412
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