It’s time for Colorado to take action against environmental racism | NOTICE | Notice

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Katara Burola

The Colorado Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC) can take an important step to begin addressing environmental racism when it holds a hearing this month on clean truck rules. These rules would make more large electric trucks and delivery vans available to Colorado businesses, and force other commercial vehicles to drive cleaner and pollute less.

These rules will help reduce air pollution and carbon emissions that cause climate change, actions that will have a significant impact on black, brown and indigenous communities across our state, especially those who live and work in disproportionately polluted industrial areas and road corridors.

What do we mean, as environmental justice advocates, when we talk about environmental racism? It is an extension of other racist practices that have resulted in fewer economic opportunities, greater health problems, growing income gaps and communities struggling to raise their children, get decent jobs, take care for their elders and stay healthy. The cumulative impact of this is, over decades, exhausting. It’s wrong. We can change it. It is time.

We have come together to form this coalition of advocates and activists to fight for environmental justice because each of us has experienced environmental racism, just like the generations before us.

They are our grandparents, who were sprayed with pesticides while working in the fields. They continued to work in the fields and in local restaurants, while facing even more racism as they were forced to go through the back door to cook for the wealthier customers. Today their children and grandchildren suffer from asthma and live in communities disproportionately impacted by the refineries, truck traffic and warehouses that are the backbone of the economy we all take for granted. .

He grew up in Montbello with high levels of pollution and now lives in Park Hill where there is highway pollution, factory pollution and an ever-diminishing tree canopy.

These are people in Five Points, Commerce City, Swansea, Greeley, Pueblo, Aurora and elsewhere who have died and too many more who are suffering from chronic illnesses from exposure to toxins, which build up in our homes, our lungs and our bodies over the years and years.

It’s about freeways that have been deliberately cut off in black and brown neighborhoods and the air pollution that concentrates along those freeways.

We know that we cannot erase the hurt and suffering that our communities have suffered in the past. But we can say ENOUGH. We begin to erase environmental racism by changing the future. The clean truck rules are one of them.

We know that achieving environmental justice is an important fight, which we gladly lead, for all the little ones to come. But it’s exhausting. We are tired of being asked to provide information to government agencies, only to be told that environmental justice will be on the agenda or after we have gathered more information. We appreciate some efforts to monitor pollution and ensure transparency; this gives us important information. But oversight and transparency are not enough. There must be ways to pursue accountability. Information without an action plan means nothing.

We know how to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. We know how to make our communities healthier. So let’s do it. Your community and neighborhood will also be cleaner and healthier.

We must ensure communities are equipped to engage in sustainability and climate action planning that incorporates policies and practices to advance food justice, champion transportation equity, champion civil and human rights in emergency management and to facilitate participatory democracy.

Join us. We need your help.

Katara Burola is an environmental justice organizer with Mi Familia Vota and authored this article with leaders from Protegete, Womxn from the Mountain, Denver NAACP & GreenLatinos.

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