Welcome to Horizonte a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host Catherine Aniya.

With climate change and more intense heat forecasted for Arizona in the coming decades.

One Arizona grassroots organization is working to protect our barrios from the impact of climate and inequity through environmental justice initiatives.

Here to tell us more about AC land and why their work is so critical to Arizona's future is the founder and CEO Reggie Carrillo.

Nice to have you here, Reggie.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Catherine.

Thank you Horizonte.

Thank you to the team for having easy plan of writing the space for us to just talk about the work we're doing, that it's essential in this time and space.

Well, I'm impressed by your work and I want to talk a little bit about what environmental justice or climate equity, looks like, particularly for when we're talking about our historically, impacted and predominantly Latino communities.

Yeah, I like to step back and forward educator by trade.

So define the environment, climate.

A lot of people get those mixed up, but the environment is really related to the land, the resources on the land, the foreign fauna, and the ecology that is on our land.

And when we talk about climate, we're talking about weather trends over a 30 year period.

And we're having beautiful weather today, right?

Yes.

Very rainy.

And so we're talking about, just adding just to that, we're really talking about incorporating including people that have been historically impacted, traumatized by, racist policy policymaking, to be honest, by bank redlining, by segregation.

And we're really talking about how those, poor decisions have impacted and manifested in the environment, natural and manmade.

And when I envision, justice, we're talking about just transition where we are including everybody to build a more sustainable, resilient community and our barrios.

Well, you you created this organization, to educate, like you said, to create and implement solutions for a future that is also racially just what is environmental racism and the patterns that you believe exist?

Yeah, environmental racism is is referring to that, past policy, that past history of traumatizing a community of bad decision making of of what, I'll say, systemic racism and a term that, that I will give you some homework as an educator.

Look up is Sun belt apartheid, sun belt apartheid.

It's the ways that, again, institutional decision making has impacted and harmed our communities 50, 20 years ago, presently and going into the future.

And some patterns you can see, as Bipoc communities are affected the most, communities are predominantly Black and African, black, African-American, Latinx.

And you can see that we live in high industrialized areas.

We live in areas that have low walkability scores, lower life expectancy.

And some tools you can look at are the Tar Tree Toxic Release Inventory, I alone in my community, and 85004 there's 20 high census high hazard census tracts along the central city south and west corridors.

These are areas that are generating and meeting but also tasked with managing these these chemicals that are being, released into our atmosphere.

And another one you can do to measure climate risk is the National Risk Index.

And that speaks to our that gauges our climate risk in our communities.

And how well or mostly how poor will do during, extreme weather events.

You're so knowledgeable and so good about educating.

Talk to me a little bit about your story and how you were inspired to do this work.

A little bit of your back story.

Yeah.

My, my foray into this work started much earlier than I thought.

I thought I started in college, but actually started when I was a child.

I grew up in the barrios of Amarachi, Arizona.

I was fortunate to have a two parent income household, grew up in a two parent income household.

And I had, I credit my dad for my love of the environment of the southern desert.

Took us hiking, fishing, camping.

He's the one who built me up with the knowledge to be familiar with our desert terrain, our Arizona terrain as I know it.

I credit my mom with being civically and politically active in those couple together made me the person I am today, and unfortunately, when I went to from middle school to high school, I lost my mom to lung cancer.

She was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and within five months my mom was gone.

And what I had always been taught is you engage in these individual risk factors, you suffer these outcomes, right?

These are these individual outcomes in programs like their had taught us that what I need to be true of my mom and other fatalities of my family is that it make sense.

That wasn't true.

And so I had a lot of questions and I, I credit Zora Neale Hurston who says, oh, here's a bag of questions.

And they're just that big of answers.

And when I went to college, I got those answers.

I studied global health, which is the more comprehensive view of of what impacts our health, looking metaphorically at what's in the water or what's in our environment, natural and manmade.

And that was our high moment, moment.

I needed to realize my mom never needs to smoke.

She just needs to live in the city of Phoenix, which is the fifth most polluted city in the nation.

And that's why she, she that's why her health was impacted that way.

And so, when I stepped into becoming a public school educator, I saw my students dealing with this same level climbing anxiety, fear about their communities.

And I knew that I had the expertise, the experience, the education to provide them with this, rigorous level of education, and show them that they have the power to change the future of of what's happening right now.

Well, how are you reaching these students?

And I love that you do.

You go into, you know, middle school and talk to these students about what your work is doing, how do you reach them in new and innovative ways that that engage them.

We have what we call our educator academy.

And so for me as a public school educator, it was important that, we take our students beyond the four walls of the classroom.

We know that traditional styles, of teaching, the learning occurs in classroom and with our educator academy.

We can speak more about it.

But one of the things we do is coordinate field trips out into their community.

And we take them to the hurricane center.

We take them to the museum, and one of the places we take them, which is a perfect case study of environmental racism, is a real Salado.

In South Phoenix.

There alone, you can identify 19 landfills.

You can see in the south, highly a more highly industrialized area.

And you can look at to the north, where the downtown Phoenix is one more affluent white communities are.

And and you can just see the stark difference.

And so we take our students there.

We task them with investigative learning lessons where they can investigate urban heat islands.

They can investigate green spaces, and they can also learn things that they go and investigate along that, that, that river, our nature based solutions, all issues that and solutions that we can implement, in our community.

And so are they able to connect with that on a deeper level, because they are really hands on in the environment and able to translate it better to their own lives?

Yeah, they are, because these are fun, engaging activities that we do.

We also root their work in their own culture and their own identity and own history.

So they're learning about environmental climate justice issues, but also learning about their own culture.

I for one, corruption in my culture.

And again, when I went to college, when I learned about the trailblazers icons in my own community and my own history, I began to, be instilled with that sense of pride.

Another thing in terms of engaging activities, when we talked about renewable energy, one of the things we had students build was renewable energy cars.

When they got to learn about solar power, they got to build little cars, and then they got to raise them.

And we gave the the the students who whose cars won.

And we're more creative.

We it we gave out, giveaways to them.

And so we try to make it as fun as possible.

We try to make it as engaging as possible, and we try to make sure that these ideas we're talking that seem abstract, we try to, make them, create hands on activities so that they can feel touch what they're learning about.

That's fantastic.

You also do an initiative.

It's called the barrio innovation approach.

And the phases of your grassroots efforts to improve and protect the sustainability, of our neighborhoods.

Can you tell me a little bit about how that process works?

Yeah.

Environmental justice scholarship says overwhelmingly that if we're going to implement these solutions, we have to be working with community members.

We'll be centering community members in the body innovation Approach approaches, a highly grassroots, collaborative approach that says, just that to stick to it supports the phrase that those most impacted by these issues are the ones closest to the solutions.

And so it supports that phrase.

And it says, if you're an entity, if you're a private nonprofit, an organization you want to work with, communities don't just talk to talk.

But here's a framework to help you and support you in this process.

In the first thing that we say, what the body innovation approach is, is you have to carry a mindset of abundance or shifting mindsets.

And that's to say to the viewers, when we're talking about the crisis, are the solutions that that we need, that that they exist already.

They're in our barrios.

They're not known as our daughter's ideas or nieces and all.

Oliver.

They have that knowledge there in our communities.

We have the resources in our communities, but we just need to what the innovation says is invest resources, financial resources, intellectual resources, physical resources into our community to support, and create spaces where our community can come together and, and scale those, those innovations up.

So again, bonding innovation says that the holes most impacted are closest to the solutions they have, the solutions.

We just need to be, supporting them.

And lastly, it says that when we do that, we can create customizable solutions, with those community members.

Well, it's kind of working.

So Phoenix is not going to work, and I'm just not going to work in another city.

Right?

We need customized, customizable solutions.

And then from there we can create transformative pathways.

That's a guide that we need to be able to elevate education about the community.

We need to be able to create, make sure that research and data is accessible.

We need to create space where we can future build dream without limits and then and not just dream, but action.

Advocacy is that last phase of saying that, we need to work to raise awareness about these issues and ensure that our dreams are becoming tangible realities to transform our communities, many communities that, they have solutions, resources that we can feel touch and that also, most importantly, nourish us.

And that awareness is such a key component to everything.

Talk to me a little bit about how you engage with the artists to go out in the community, because I know you host a lot of community events to really create that awareness in education, how the artists are able to use their special skills to bring and visualize some of these concepts together for the community.

Yeah.

So we have a project called Theater Arts right now.

Again, former public school educator, my co-founder Monique Franco, a former educator, too, we realized that that 1950s style of teaching that everybody engages with that style of teaching.

Right.

And when we're talking about seemingly controversial, stressful, traumatic, topics, issues, we we realize that, again, that traditional style of teaching is not the best conduit for that.

So with the art, we work to support local, emerging Arizona based artists, and we identify an environmental climate justice topic that they want to teach about.

And then we help support, a series of workshops.

So we have two that are alive right now, one focusing on fighting and protecting our public lands.

These are communal spaces that everyone should have access to, that the next generation should have access to.

And we have an upcoming workshop, focused on, creating pinatas about public lands.

And so that's exciting.

So again, art is a very powerful tool to engage people about these issues.

It's a very powerful tool to root these solutions, these ideas, these dreams, and our own cultura, an oral tradition to get people to relate to, step into.

And astoundingly, when people do this work with our artists, they feel a sense of calmness and being comfortable talking about, again, seemingly controversial, stressful issues.

It's so important to get them comfortable and that connection.

I agree.

Yeah, yeah.

Great work.

Tell me about the work that land is doing.

On a city and state level, what kind of support are you receiving?

And how is your research and your advocacy, influencing that kind of, of reception?

Yeah.

So we have a huge partnership with the city of Phoenix.

Thankfully, just for our residents in Arizona, we have, a leadership that has launched strong initiatives, master plans.

We have the Office of Resiliency with the governor's office and at the City of Phoenix level, where we do bulk of our work.

We say we go around and we're invited, and Phoenix is is a wonderful place for us to do that work.

They launched a shade master plan so we don't recreate the will.

We work with the city of Phoenix, but our job is to really connect those solutions, those initiatives, and make sure that we're working to redistribute resources to support our community and the solution that they have.

And so one of the projects we're working on, that we just, closed out and people can go see it is called Sombra Experiments in Shade.

We we created artistic temporary shade structure.

That's that still an integral part to center, a return to indigenous knowledge, right.

Indigenous people have been living on this land since time immemorial.

And then when we return back to Indigenous Knowledge Center and did indigenous innovation and brilliance, the that is the knowledge that we need to help navigate us out of that climate crisis.

It's made with Adobe bricks, right?

It's like return back to to earth engineering, made with corn husk again rooting our solutions and our own computer.

And then, we put recycled plastic materials, a reminder that these materials are on Earth forever.

How can we purpose them?

And so that has been a huge support with the City of Phoenix funding that, helping us with workshops, marketing everything, to raise awareness about urban heat, gallons, and types of heat that impacts Bipoc communities.

Yeah.

So impressive.

The work that you're doing where would you like to see us in 10 to 15 years?

What kind of change would you like to see?

When I look at us for, 10 to 15 years from now, I like to see that governments, everyone's working together again.

It's going to take collective action for us to to address these, what seem insurmountable issues.

But again, all the solutions are there, the resources that exist at the top need to flow to the bottom.

And the solutions that exist at the at the grassroots level need to be supported because, those are innovative resources.

What I would like to see is us implementing what, I described earlier, a just transition where Bipoc communities, those most impacted are, are not just at the decision making table, but are being, resourced and invested in and that our communities are more walkable.

We have extensive light rail.

We have, more tree greenspace, canopy coverage, more access to, to to, nutrition.

All that type of stuff is what I would like to see in our communities.

Well, I would like to remind people that, again, you do great work, you do great community events.

They can find out more information and learn how to support Easy Land as well by going to your website.

It's ACL and.org.

Reggie, thank you so much for joining me I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me Kathryn.

Good to see you.

That's our show for now for Autism and Arizona PBS.

I'm Kathryn Aniya.

We'll see you next time.

At that time when I begin.