Interview: Kim Wasserman and Juliana Pino of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization

The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Kelly Aves, a second-year student at the Harris School of Public Policy. Kelly spoke with Kim Wasserman and Juliana Pino of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). Kim is the Executive Director of LVEJO and has been a successful community activist for over 20 years. Juliana serves as the Policy Director of LVEJO and is a University of Chicago alumna. LVEJO advocates for environmental justice in the Little Village neighborhood, and beyond. In this conversation, Kim and Juliana discuss the history of the environmental justice movement and expand on how current events are now a driving force behind it.

Kelly: Not everyone might be familiar with the difference between environmental justice and conservation. How do you differentiate those two?

Kim: The biggest fundamental difference is that environmental justice is very intersectional.  The environment isn’t just one space, it’s all the spaces in which we live, play, and pray. Environmental justice is based on the lived experience of frontline communities that have been impacted not just by industry, but even for the sake of conservationism. Conservation is just about the protection of land, whereas environmental justice looks at the whole life cycle of that land, maintaining its health, the people that live on it, and interactions among the surrounding community.

Juliana: Conservation in the United States originates from the time when colonialism was still actively functioning to take land away from Native communities for the enjoyment and leisure of white settlers. It is based on the false idea that the land is separate from the humans, that it can be cordoned off and divided from the society that it feeds. Conservationists took beautiful photographs of pastoral landscapes, and in doing so literally removed Indigenous people from the landscape that they were photographing.

Environmental justice comes from the civil rights movement, along with other movements like labor rights, Indigenous sovereignty and other land-based struggles, which came together to focus on, “What does it mean to honor humans and human systems and ecological systems that’re deeply connected?” It’s also important to note that Black and brown communities are by far disproportionately impacted by pollution of all kinds. Landfills and industrial facilities are placed next to and on top of Black, Indigenous, and brown communities. The government and industry are violating human rights through the current way of siting and polluting.

Kelly: You touched a little bit about how brown and Black communities are disproportionately affected by pollution and environmental issues. Why is this?

Kim: The reason is structural racism: everything from how neighborhoods were created, to redlining of our communities, to predatory loan practices. Particularly in a segregated city like Chicago, a lot of the community design was created to contain people of color and low-income folks to a specific area, and to also put the most egregious of industries in the abutting areas, or vice versa. It’s not by chance that you can tell whether or not a community is an environmental justice community by a zip code, because structural racism has created the pathway for these communities to exist and for these practices to continue.

Juliana: Racial capitalism originates from the scholarship of Cedric Robinson, who pointed out that ordering society through racial disparities is a not only a requirement but a driver of capitalist wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism is also part of the reason Black and brown communities have been extracted from through slavery and genocide colonialism: to accumulate wealth and power to prop up the government and capital. That has taken different forms over time and has been contingent on the mass deaths and the dispossession of resources from marginalized communities. Our regulatory framework is based on equality, not recognizing that you have historical disparities that must be addressed to even achieve parity, let alone reparation.

Kelly: What would you like to see different in policy design and implementation by either local, state, or federal government? How can new and current policymakers within these institutions keep them accountable and help environmental justice?

Juliana: One (way) is creating opportunities for people who are directly impacted by issues to drive the policy content and decision making in a structural way. That said, we can’t rely on simple representation. Ultimately, direct participatory policy, maximizing democracy, and not relying on traditional governance or policy authorship pathways are fundamental to getting transformative ideas and key solutions that communities already have. Supportive allies are helpful, but they must set aside their own vision and listen to what communities are saying. The unifying principle for justice-focused policy work and effective governance is driven by the principle of listening.

Alongside procedural justice is distributional justice. If you’re trying to enact an effective policy over broad geography, understand that different local areas have specific solutions that are coming from residents in those areas, and money should be prioritized based on impact.

Kelly: Do you notice any shift in people supporting environmental justice or getting more aware of the movement because of COVID-19?

Kim: COVID-19 has definitely struck a nerve with community members in highlighting the direct correlation between our air quality and respiratory illness. As a community on the front lines already starting from a deficit in a respiratory pandemic, we are learning so much about air quality and how we’re being impacted by industry. The Hilco implosion that happened in April — right at the beginning of the pandemic in one of the worst hit zip codes in the city with COVID-19 — reignited people’s fight for environmental justice and accountability on behalf of the city.

Kelly: Do you find the calls for social justice are having a similar effect on the environmental justice movement, since it’s a tangible way for people to see systemic racism beyond police and state violence?

Juliana: The way we see environmental justice in our organization is deeply related to justice for Black and brown people across the board. That means we must be tackling racism against Indigenous communities and people of color. We believe that any organizations that do social justice work need to be taking a hard look at if their work is supporting the broader asks and campaigns for justice led by Black and Native community leaders, and if not, why is that? This is fundamental if we’re going to be addressing environmental justice as a byproduct of racial capitalism.

Kelly: I want to end our conversation on somewhat of a happy note. Why do you feel called to be involved in environmental justice and what got you to this point? What gives you hope going forward, either about environmental concerns or just in general?

Kim: My family and community gave me the courage to be able to ask the hard questions. My family instilled in me that I had to fight for my rights as a woman, particularly a person of color in this country. It grounded me in not just my civil liberties but also my civic responsibility towards people in our community. That, along with the history of our community fighting for its rights where my family’s from in Mexico and Cuba, but also in Chicago. The fact that community members are willing to get up every day and fight the good fight in defense of their community and their families is all the motivation I need.

Juliana: My family on both sides has been impacted by state action and involved in different fights for land sovereignty, battling back coal strip mining in our ancestral territory. I was politicized very early through immigration to this country and experienced a lot of devaluation of Black and brown people. I felt called to intervene on a case-by-case basis and at a structural level to stop the pattern from happening, to prevent this harm to communities, to fight state violence, and to link these issues together. The stakes are high, and the costs are high, but that has to be a call to action.