Dr. Robert Bullard and the Environmental Justice Movement

In partnership with the Texas Observer

Dr. Robert Bullard is one of the foremost researchers and authors of the environmental justice movement. After 40 years of scholarship on the topic, Dr. Bullard was awarded a Lifetime Achieve award by the United Nations Environment Program in December 2020. “Professor Bullard’s work has, in my view, ushered in a third wave of the human rights movement, with growing recognition that all people have a human right to a healthy environment,” said Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN’s Environment Program. In our latest collaboration, Deep Indigo created pictures and conducted photo search for a profile of Dr. Bullard written by Amal Ahmed of the Texas Observer, and was published in both the Observer and The Nation.

June 2, 2021: Amal’s detailed reporting leads her audience through the milestones of Dr. Bullard’s career, while revealing the evolution of the environmental justice movement. We learn how Dr. Bullard researched the discriminatory placement of landfills in Houston, when Dr. Bullard and colleagues created the 17 principles of environmental justice, and when Dr. Bullard was in the room with President Bill Clinton when Clinton signed an executive order for the federal government to recognized environmental injustices across the United States. We also read that Dr. Bullard and his colleagues were dismissed by traditional environmental groups, how the 1992 Environmental Justice Act never got a hearing in Congress, that even today “low-income communities of color are significantly more likely than white residents to live near hazardous waste and air pollution,” even as younger activists like the Sunrise Movement are continuing to advocate for environmental justice.

It was important we contributed visuals that support the timeline and milestones highlighted in the story. Through a bit of photo research, Dr. Bullard personal archive linked images to certain moments. These images ranged from an environmental racism protest at a Houston landfill in 1979 to joining the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Climate Change Consortium students at the Peoples' Climate March in New York City in 2014. In addition, we met Dr. Bullard on campus to make portraits of the professor and to document him continuing his academic work. Like many during the COVID-19 pandemic, his work is done virtually in his university or home office. During our visit, Dr. Bullard was photographed conducting a discussion with writing students at Iowa State University, his alma mater, on the subject of environmental justice.

Please take a look at more of the our coverage below and then take the time to read through Amal’s thorough reporting. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We are looking forward to hearing from you, and working with your newsroom to create the images that best illustrate the environmental and climate issues you are planning to report.

-Andy Jacobsohn, Executive Director

(Rights to these images belong to Deep Indigo Collective. Please contact the nonprofit to license this content.)