EARTH MONTH: Why I am Asking the Sierra Club Board to Remove My Name from Its Dr. Robert D. Bullard Environmental Justice Award

It pains me to write this article since I have had a three-decade-long relationship with the Sierra Club, dating back to the mid-1990s.  The Sierra Club published two of my 18 books, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (1994) and The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution (2005).  In 2013, it gave me the John Muir Award.  And a year later in 2014, it named its new Environmental Justice Award after me. 

I’ve worked on and fought for environmental Justice for more than four decades across the United States and around the world—and have won numerous awards for this work. However, the most satisfaction does not come from a plaque or trophy—but comes justice work that helps achieve real solutions and lasting change in underserved and vulnerable communities. I write today to make known the disappointment felt by Black Shiloh community home and property owners in Elba, Alabama’s (my hometown) who have been dealing with broken promises made by the Sierra Club.  In my four and half decades of environmental justice work, I’ve learned trust is delicate like an egg, once it is broken it can’t be unbroken.  Because of the level of disappointment exhibited by the flood-battered Shiloh survivors and the fact that the homeowners no longer trust the Sierra Club to make good on its promises, Pastor Timothy Williams and other Shiloh flood survivors and the Bullard Center team agreed it was time to call it quits with Sierra Club and move on.  

Therefore, in the spirit of moving on, I have asked the Sierra Club Board of Directors to remove my name from its Environmental Justice Award.  The way the Sierra Club has treated the Shiloh flood survivors does not align with the Principles of Environmental Justice that I helped write in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and have practiced these many years. And I am also returning the John Muir Award and the lifetime membership in the Club that comes with the award.  

The Black Shiloh community has experienced a "triple whammy" of hurt, abandonment, and broken promises. First, by the Alabama DOT that built the flawed four-lane US 84 highway that flooded the community and left the residents and their homes to drown. Second, by USDOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose federal agency negotiated a Voluntary Resolution Agreement with the Alabama DOT, only after several homeowners filed a Title VI civil rights discrimination complaint against the ALDOT. Secretary Buttigieg left USDOT in January without making good on his promise to make Shiloh residents whole. While the VRA required ALDOT to fix the flawed highway’s flooding problem, it failed to include a binding agreement requiring ALDOT to compensate the Shiloh property owners for six-plus years of highway flood damage, leaving residents’ severely damaged homes to sink into the Alabama mud. Third, by Sierra Club’s Executive Director Ben Jealous who visited the Shiloh community in August 2024, talked to the residents and saw firsthand what they were experiencing. He stood on land in the Shiloh community, land that’s been in some families since Reconstruction, and promised to secure an attorney for the homeowners and support a lawsuit against ALDOT seeking compensation for damage to their property—empty promises that never materialized.  

While homeowners in the flood-damaged Shiloh community and the Bullard Center appreciate the assistance and support the Sierra Club staff provided beginning in the Summer of 2024, residents have come to feel a deep sense of betrayal and left hanging when the promise of securing an attorney and commitment to support legal action against the Alabama DOT never materialized.  First, the homeowners were led to believe the Sierra Club would sign up Attorney Ben Crump to represent them.  Shiloh residents were “over the moon” with excitement after hearing this promise. After the failure to secure attorney Crump, they were promised an attorney from Baltimore and later promised an attorney from Atlanta—neither resulted in an attorney to represent the homeowners.  And then weeks of silence ensued and no updates.  

People who know me, know I keep my promises. I am also a man of my word.  And as my father taught me decades ago, “your word is your bond; and in the end, all you have is your word.”  During Black History Month this year, Shiloh community leaders expressed to me their disappointment with the Sierra Club ignoring them, not returning calls, emails and texts, and not securing them an attorney or supporting a lawsuit on their behalf.  That’s when I stepped forward and promised the flood survivors in my hometown, I would find an attorney to represent them by this Earth Day April 22, 2025.  I have kept this promise.

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