The Eco-War Hits the Streets of the Inner City : Environment: More grass-roots groups are claiming racism and fighting back when toxic dumps and polluting industries are proposed for their neighborhoods.

When Robert D. Bullard became an environmentalist in 1978, he didn’t do it by joining the causes of the day--the disappearing condor, the endangered redwoods, the polluted trout streams.

He did it by sticking pins--representing landfill sites--on color-coded census-tract maps of Houston.

“When I completed the work, the data just jumped out,” recalls Bullard, then a census specialist.

It showed that from the late 1920s to the late 1970s, Houston put all of its city-owned landfills and six of its eight incinerators in predominantly black neighborhoods--although blacks composed only 25% of the city’s population.

Bullard was the first to identify a pattern of environmental racism: putting hazardous wastes, garbage dumps and polluting industries in minority neighborhoods.

Throughout the 1980s, grass-roots groups sprang up--in Houston and beyond--waging battles piecemeal and almost invisibly against this form of discrimination.

Since then, they have grown into a nationwide network of activist organizations that has attracted traditional organizations such as the Sierra Club with their fusion of environmental and civil rights. More and more, they are taking their place in the environmental movement. Their goals are the same as the traditional ecological groups: To save the Earth. But their priorities are different: Rather than start with an acre of forest, they tend to start closer to home with a city block.

And their issues are different--oftentimes based on race and class. For example, the Mothers of East Los Angeles formed in response to a proposal to build a prison in their neighborhood.

“The issues are not new,” says Bullard, now a UC Riverside professor and author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality,” published last year. “The larger environmental movement is just now catching on.”

In October, more than 700 leaders of black, Latino, American Indian and Asian-American groups met in Washington for the first Leadership Summit on People of Color and the Environment. They joined in workshops, strategy sessions and policy discussions to build a national agenda and adopted a “14-point declaration of environmental justice principles.”

“What this movement is saying,” Bullard says, “is that the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water and live in a community that is not contaminated should be a right all of us enjoy, and not some privilege for those who can afford to buy bottled water.”

Bullard undertook the Houston dump site research--and become an environmental pioneer--at the urging of his wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, a lawyer who was fighting a landfill project under a civil rights statute.

Although she did not win the suit, the case set a precedent for defining the legal premise that a clean environment is an inalienable right. It set the stage for a grass-roots movement variously labeled “environmental equity,” “environmental justice” and “toxic justice.”

Through the ‘80s, toxic dumpings around the country were meeting growing resistance. The familiar “Not in my back yard!” rallying cry of the largely white environmental movement was being answered with “Not in our back yard either!” by minorities.

The issue solidified in 1982, when more than 500 demonstrators were arrested in predominantly black Warren County, N.C., where the state wanted to put a disposal site for 6,000 truckloads of toxic soil, despite the area’s shallow water table. Although the protest failed to stop the dumping, it mobilized a broad-based national group to protest the inequities that place toxic sites in minority communities, and established landfill siting as a national concern.

The consciousness of the larger movement was further jolted in 1990 when a coalition of civil rights and minority groups sent a letter to the “Big Ten”--the major national environmental groups such as the Audubon Society. The letter criticized their “whiteness” and charged them with racism in staffing and in setting their priority issues.

The letter outlined demands for change that the larger groups generally agreed were justified.

“The letter was a catalyst both for action and for constructive dialogue,” says Lynn Bowersox of the National Wildlife Federation, the nation’s biggest conservation organization. “The concerns that come from those communities are very real, and I think there’s a new awareness of the disproportionate impact of pollution on communities of color.”

While the environmental movement largely remains separate and unequal, there is hope that will change.

“We don’t want a people-of-color movement on one hand and a white movement on the other. For a movement to be strong, it has to be inclusive,” says the Rev. Benjamin Chaviz Jr., director of United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which sponsored the October conference.

“There was a myth that people of color were not concerned about the environment,” says Chaviz. The reality is that “we’re not only concerned about endangered animal species, we are concerned about endangered human species. And we are focusing on real communities.”

Chaviz, who envisions some sort of environmental justice institute, thinks the Washington summit was a turning point.

“Now, when anybody talks about environmentalism, it has a social-justice nuance to it,” he says. “I predict that the environment will be the one bridging issue going into the 21st Century.”

Inside

Being an environmentalist traditionally meant saving whales. In recent years, it has also come to mean saving inner-city neighborhoods.

TO PROTECT THE KIDS--If you’re looking for a place to put a prison or an incinerator, don’t try East L.A. The Mothers are there. E4

SNUFFED OUT--Incinerator plans were dashed by the Concerned Citizens of South-Central L.A., who said, ‘Not in their back yard!’ E4