Bunyan Bryant was a professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. He had an adjunct position with the Center of Afro-American and African Studies. 
His research interests included case studies on corporate, agency, and community responses to hazardous waste sites. Bryant’s literature includes Environmental Advocacy: Concepts, Issues and Dilemmas, Social and Environmental Change: A Manual for Community Organizing and Action, Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, and Environmental Justice: Issues, Polices, and Solutions. He was co-organizer of the 1990 Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards. In the early 1990s, he was a co-facilitator of the Martin Luther King Planning Committee at the University of Michigan. In 1991, he was on the Advisory Committee of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. He was a member of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. And in 1994 he was co-facilitator of the Symposium for Health Research and Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice. Bryant was a part of a movement that was responsible for President Clinton's signing of the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898.