Environmental justice advocates look to empower underserved Las Vegans
In Cheyenne Kyle’s home, everything has a second life.
Her plastic grocery store bags become shower caps while empty butter containers transform into food storage containers.
Kyle, programs coordinator for the Obodo Collective, said people of color have been practicing conservation efforts for years, even as they may not be familiar with the fancier or more technical terms often applied to their actions.
“It’s something that we do in practice, but we aren’t aware of it as a concept,” Kyle said. “When you cross over the threshold into white America, you have these words like ‘upcycling’ and stuff like that, and it’s been what we’ve been doing forever.”
Local organization the Obodo Collective primarily works in the Historic Westside of Las Vegas to educate residents on issues like food security.
Informing residents who may not have full access to education on the environmental justice movement is key to the collective’s work, collective executive director Tameka Henry said.
“We need more allies in this work,” Henry said. “We will learn together and grow together and just help people become the best advocates for themselves, for their families and for their community.”
In the face of studies that confirm incoming, drastic alterations in the climate — as well as the affect these changes will have on low-income people and people of color — local organizations are prioritizing climate justice by connecting with the most vulnerable populations. Climate justice meshes the fight against climate change with issues of social inequity. Community leaders of color, like Kyle and Henry, lead these campaigns in Las Vegas.
On a national scale, President Joe Biden has vowed to place fighting environmental racism at the core of his plan to combat climate change, underscoring the need to protect impoverished and minority communities that are exposed to more pollution and other harmful climate effects than better-off communities.
Locally, the collective is attempting to create a community garden to show residents how to grow fresh produce. Henry, who lives in the Historic Westside, said the area was populated with gas stations and fast-food restaurants, neither of which sell particularly healthy food.
While bringing a healthy grocery store
On a national scale, President Joe Biden has vowed to place fighting environmental racism at the core of his plan to combat climate change.
His familiar refrain that the world must choose between democracy and autocracy looks different now that the Taliban are once again in control of Kabul, reversing many of the democratic gains of the past 20 years. COVID is resurging in much of the world. And the French just recalled their ambassador in outrage — not just over losing a $60 billion-plus submarine contract but also because it was made clear they are not in the inner circle of allies.
Biden and other leaders are gathering in New York City against a backdrop of disastrous climate change, polarized superpower relations and a devastating pandemic that has worsened the global rich-poor divide.
The event is a major test of credibility for Biden,.
He said the world faced a choice between the democratic values espoused by the West and the disregard for them by China and other authoritarian governments.
“The future belongs to those who give their people the ability to breathe free, not those who seek to suffocate their people with an iron hand authoritarianism,” he said. “The authoritarians of the world, they seek to proclaim the end of the age of democracy, but they’re wrong.”
But the president vowed not to pursue a new era of sustained conflict with countries like China, saying that the United States would “compete vigorously and lead with our values and our strength to stand up for our allies and our friends.”
“We’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War, or a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said.
Climate change and the pandemic are also expected to dominate the week, and Biden planned to host a COVID summit on the sidelines to push other countries to increase capacity to manufacture vaccines for poor countries.
“This year has also brought widespread death and devastation from the borderless climate crisis,” Biden said. “Extreme weather events that we’ve seen in every part of the world — and you all know it and feel it — represent what the secretary-general has rightly called code red for humanity.”
On COVID, Biden urged leaders to move more quickly to rein in the pandemic that has killed millions.
“We need a collective act of science and political will,” he said. “We need to act now to get shots in arms as fast as possible, and expand access to oxygen, tests, treatments, to save lives around the world.”