Cook Society Lecture on Environmental Justice Feb. 28

Robert Bullard, a leading figure on issues of race and environmental justice, will speak at Duke University Wednesday, Feb. 28, about how pollution disproportionately affects racial minorities.

The talk will be held at 4 p.m. at the School of Nursing Auditorium at 307 Trent Dr. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Duke Clinic Parking Garage (directions).

Bullard, director of the Environmental Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, is giving the Samuel DuBois Cook Society Lecture, an annual event honoring Duke's first black professor.

"All of us produce garbage, but not all of us have to live next to the landfill or the incinerator," Bullard said in a phone interview. Where such waste sites are located, he said, "that's a fairness or equity question."

Bullard is author of 11 books on environmental justice, including Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, which won the Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation. He served on President Clinton's National Resources and Environmental Cluster transition team, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Dorothy Powell, director of the School of Nursing's Office of Global and Community Health Initiatives, said Bullard is an appropriate speaker to honor Cook's legacy.

"Dr. Cook shined a light on the discrimination that was evident at Duke when people of color were barred from the university," Powell said. "In many ways, Dr. Bullard has done some similar kind of work in making communities aware of an unequal distribution of hazardous waste around them and what their rights are to respond."

This month Bullard and three colleagues issued a report concluding that "people of color make up the majority of those living in host neighborhoods within 3 kilometers (1.8) miles of the nation's hazardous waste facilities."

Bullard said North Carolina is home to one of the earliest environmental justice efforts, a campaign in predominantly black Warren County to clean up a PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) waste site.

"People all around the country know Warren County North Carolina as ‘Oh, that's the place that PCB landfill was located," he said. "It sparked a movement. It's like Selma; it's like Montgomery and the bus boycott."