Discussion of the environment often focus on global climate change and the conservation of natural resources, but there are other environmental issues, too.
Food and Environmental Justice Week at the University of Colorado, presented by the student-run Eco-Social Justice Team, aimed to broaden the conversation. Activities this week included “Environmental Racism: the Most Pressing Issues and Heroes in Colorado,” a Tuesday evening panel discussion.
Among the members of the panel were:
• Patricia Garcia-Nelson, a mother from Greeley fighting the construction of natural gas wells behind Bella Romero Academy — her son’s school.
• Fatuma Emmad, a former academic now working on gardening and food issues in Denver’s disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• Candi Cdebaca, a community activist with deep roots in Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood who is running for Denver City Council.
Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish, who teaches environmental studies at Naropa University, said disadvantaged communities along the Front Range — especially Latino communities — are disproportionately impacted by urban and suburban environmental problems.
“There’s a pattern where communities of color and low-income communities and communities with less political or economic power end up clustered around waste, unwanted land uses and toxic facilities,” Gabrieloff-Parish said.
“Those communities feel the impacts of our treatment of our environment first, and they often feel it the worst.”
CdeBaca, who was known by many in the crowd, spoke on a variety of topics,including the expansion of Interstate 70 that bisects Elyria-Swansea.
“I-70 in Denver between Colorado Boulevard and Brighton Boulevard is being tripled,” she said. “They will be dropping this highway, which is currently a bridge, below grade, below the water table in a flood plain.
“They’re going to make an 800-foot cap that connects both sides of the highway,” and Swansea Elementary School, she said, “which is 100 percent Latino, 100 percent free and reduced(-price) lunch, will be on top of that highway. In other states, it’s illegal for you to even locate a highway within 500 feet of a school.”
CdeBaca said her involvement with the issue stemmed from the fear of losing her home — the one her great-grandmother lived in —to eminent domain as the highway is widened. It also catalyzed her run for city council.
“I didn’t know until that period in my life that I was living in the most contaminated ZIP code in America,” Cdebaca said.
Now, that fact is a rallying cry for her campaign.
Garcia-Nelson, who grew up in Greeley, said her goal is “really telling you how it is in Weld County,” which she said has 40 percent of all the active (oil and gas) wells in the state of Colorado.
“Originally, the (well) site was slated to go behind Frontier Academy, which was a school on the west side of town.” An affluent school, Garcia-Nelson said, whose students are mainly white.
“After some upheaval from the mothers at that school, the operator decided, during an internal analysis, that the site wasn’t suitable for production,” she said. “Three years later, they found that the site, which was 686 feet from the playground at Bella Romero, was suitable.”
Garcia-Nelson said oil and gas companies exercise great control in the communities in which they operate and that can intimidate those who speak out against their plans.
She pointed to a chance to appear on “The Daily Show” and how, in the days before appearing, three mothers who agreed to be part of the segment dwindled to one who would only speak anonymously.
In the fall, Bella Romero will begin evacuation drills in case the wells explode, Garcia-Nelson said, choking up when telling the audience she didn’t know how to explain that to her son.
Doug Grinburgs, an amateur photographer from Louisville, said environmental racism also can manifest itself from groups working toward the same goals.
CdeBaca said the Sierra Club was happy to help her file litigation against the I-70 expansion, but the organization’s members had trouble understanding the largely poor, mostly Latino Elyria-Swansea community. She said leaders and members were often upset by limited community involvement.
What those people don’t realize, she said, is that many in the neighborhood “work two or three jobs literally just to stay in the household, because even in a Superfund site, that’s the best we can afford.”
Still, Grinsburgs said, “There’s so much important work that needs to be done locally, regionally, nationally. He believed the theme should be ‘all-for-one, one-for-all.’ We have to help each other out.”
