Patricia Jovel Flores is Orange County Environmental Justice's new Project Director, and is excited to lead the organization in confronting the many environmental issues disproportionately affecting Orange County's marginalized communities. PJ was raised and currently lives in Santa Ana, California. She began organizing as a student at UC Berkeley, where she worked to bring student power to bear in support of campus labor organizing and the local prison abolition movement. After graduating, PJ returned to Santa Ana, where she organized with Colectivo Tonantzin, a local grassroots organizing collective, to fight wage theft and defend the rights of day laborers and domestic workers in Orange County. Currently, she helps coordinate the Tierras Comunitarias Coalition to ensure public lands in Santa Ana and Garden Grove are put towards community needs such as public parks and open space, in addition to organizing alongside Acjachemen and Tongva activists to Protect Puvungna and other sacred sites in Orange County. In her free time, PJ is a storyteller and musician, and is currently working on a novel centering trans femmes and two-spirit people in the fight for liberation and Indigenous sovereignty. In all her work, PJ is dedicated to building bridges between local Indigenous communities and communities of color in defense of the water, land, and air that we all call home.

Kayla Asato is OCEJ's Redistricting Organizer as of April 2021. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii learning about the effects of pollution, climate change, and environmental racism from war, so moving to Orange County to see similar racial injustices in our soil, water, and air really sparked that passion in making sure justice comes. Kayla enjoys bridging feminist, critical race/ethnic studies, queer, and international relations theories to practice at the local level in the fight for justice. She enjoys doing curriculum work, power mapping, coalition building, and inspiring people through deep canvassing/positive imaginary work most of all in organizing. She graduated from Chapman University in 2018 with a passion for organizing around issues and electoralism. Since graduating, she has been working on nonprofits and electoral campaigns nonstop, and is thrilled to join OCEJ as the redistricting organizer.

Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice is a series of informed, sustained, and enriching dialogues looking at how environmental toxicity and risk disproportionately impact populations based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and social standing. Environmental Justice brings awareness to these disparities, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future.

Guests: Patricia Jovel Flores and Kayla Asato
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Public Podcasting in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.

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[00:00:03] Patricia Jovel Flores: Environmental injustice isn't something unique to Orange County, to California, to the US. It happens all over the globe, but by nature of environmental justice and environmental racism, it's addressed local and specific issues. That, in effect, contribute to the climate crisis.

[00:00:21] Kayla Asato: Santa Ana has one of the highest rates of climate risk in the country, so susceptibility to drought, flooding, and increase in diseases that we're going to see in the coming years with the changing climate around us, but it also has the lowest climate readiness index for the country according to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative. Right here in Orange County, which is considered one of the most affluent places in the country, we have a city that has the highest climate risk and the lowest climate readiness. I do think that is because of who lives here and who's considered a priority as opposed to Irvine next door.

[00:00:54] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Heritage Future present Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice. This series explores environmental racism and climate injustice. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been choking our waters with waste poisoning our soil and contaminating the air we breathe all in the name of progress. The most vulnerable communities with the least amount of representation and power suffer through the worst effects.

Environmental justice brings awareness to these marginalized communities, their activism, and the path forward, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future. In this episode, we connect with Kayla Asato, the redistricting organizer for Orange County Environmental Justice, and Patricia Jovel Flores, the project director for Orange County Environmental Justice. Here are Kayla Asato and PJ Flores.

[00:02:01] Patricia: Environmental justice I think can be really misleading as a term because when people think about justice and environment and those two words together, they often think about it in terms of justice for the environment addressing environmental issues, but environmental justice is much, much more than that. Environmental justice is, by nature, a very local issue. It is addressing systemic racism that impacts people's health. I'll give it an example.

The first time I really learned about anything regarding environmental justice and how racism really affects health was in a medical sociology class at Chapman talking about how, depending on your zip code, your life expectancy changes, and how even in neighboring ZIP codes, it can be like 10 to 20 years different just because of these environmental burdens.

[00:02:55] Kayla: I think that the perspective that I use when I approach understanding environmental justice is that looking at all these issues, for example, like wildfires, drought, all these effects of climate change, who are the people that are being most impacted by those issues? Those communities globally as well as locally in the US, locally in California, all the way down here to Orange County are across the board usually low-income people of color. Those are the folks that are living in proximity to the highest rates of air pollution.

For example, looking at how air pollution burden works in Orange County, people of color have the highest burden of air pollution across the board, not even thinking about class. That means even higher-income people of color are facing a higher burden for air pollution than lower-income white communities. When we think about coming up with the solutions, I think that it's important to ground ourselves in the people who are most impacted by these issues. Since they're the ones that'll also be experts from their own lived experience and being able to offer the kind of solutions that we actually need that will address these problems at the root.

If we come up with, for example, like environmental solutions that focus on coastal communities where it tends to be more affluent like in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and all that, that's not going to do much to address the impacts on people living in the urban areas of Orange County like Santa Ana, Anaheim, or Fullerton that are closer to the freeways. I think that being able to address all of these issues at once means going to where these issues are the strongest.

[00:04:29] Patricia: I myself, I've always had a little bit of trouble breathing, but I used to live right next to a rail. Literally the railroad was on the other side of my wall, and when the train came by, it shook my house. There were freight trains that came by, passenger trains, freight trains, and you could see the smoke chains and everything. More importantly, that impacted my breathing. Now I live by two hospitals and by an energy transformer. Something that transforms sources of energy into energy itself and everything. I see smokestacks come from literally like 300 feet maybe from my window every other day.

It's just a matter of, do I want to keep my window open? Do I want to have an air purifier? Do I want to let my room become a sonic as my windows are closed sort of thing? Because there isn't much else I can do. There's a reason why my rent is so cheap sort of thing, and it's because, not only do I live in a more business working class area but it's because I live next to these hospitals, these smokestacks. I live next to two major freeways. When you look at a website like the CalEnviroScreen and you see air pollution at the 90th or 100th percentile, it makes sense. That's just air pollution. That's not even getting into soil lead.

That's not even getting into water quality because it's a low-income area, probably doesn't have the best pipes from the water source to my house, there are only so many things that we can do outside of addressing the environmental injustices of the sources of them. It's not just, do I close my window and get an air purifier? It's how do I stop it from polluting my air? How can I get them to stop polluting my community and my neighbors?

[00:06:34] Kayla: I think the other side of it is that seeing how the systems that similarly oppress people of color are interrelated to the same systems that cause these environmental and climate issues. The same factories that don't pay us well enough and that break our strikes and make sure that we're coming home with diseases from inhaling the fumes from the factories are the same ones that are impacting the environment for everybody's health regardless of whether you're a person of color from a low-income neighborhood.

[00:07:09] Host: Now with Orange County Environmental Justice, you do look mainly at your area. I would love to know what some of the unique challenges that Orange County have or create that make it more susceptible to environmental racism and how it differs from San Diego or Riverside or San Bernardino or Los Angeles.

[00:07:36] Kayla: Yes, so I think we definitely have a unique set of environmental crises going on here in Orange County locally. I can talk about from my own experience. I grew up in Santa Ana. I was born and raised here and my mom going to work, would have to walk through the Delhi neighborhood of Santa Ana. Santa Ana's biggest industries are the aerospace industry and the defense industry, so there's a lot of military manufacturing, airplane manufacturing in this Delhi neighborhood where my mom would always have to walk through. She feels that because of that, myself and my brother, we both have asthma.

She doesn't have a degree in environmental sciences or anything like that, that's just from her lived experience. When we came back later as an organization we formed in 2015, and I started as an organizer in 2016 with OCEJ, we did surveys in that same neighborhood that my mom would have to walk through all the time when she was pregnant with me. We talked to families there and there's actually several cancer clusters in that area, especially among youth.

Residents constantly talk about like, for example, cleaning the screens on their windows every day, and then the next within hours sometimes, it's completely covered in this soot-like material. There's a high prevalence of asthma and all these other respiratory diseases there, and so we see that it wasn't just a suspicion. It's actually backed up by evidence that they're witnessing in front of them and being impacted by. I think the prevalence of these industries is actually something that's very central to Orange County. Orange County has always been pretty friendly towards aerospace and military defense manufacturing, so cities like Fullerton and Anaheim face similar issues.

I'd also say the confluence of freeways. Southern California is a driving part of the country, and so I think that's definitely impacted low-income and migrant communities of color especially when we look at these areas.

[00:09:37] Patricia: I think Orange County is unique only in the sense that it is intentionally segregated. When Orange County was formed, it was formed by the Confederate soldiers, I believe, that were escaping Municipal Corps. They were like, "We want to escape to somewhere where it's nice," and kind of just in this whole vein of an antithesis to the liberal LA County at the time. Ronald Reagan himself said Orange counties is where good Republicans go to die. Richard Nixon is from here. If you go to several graveyards in close proximity with the Chapman, you can see unmarked Confederate graves.

If you see like Irvine, people see Irvine as a more Asian city. People see Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton as more Latino, Latinx cities. The Cypress Street Barrio in Orange, I think that part's self-explanatory. Orange County is very much redlined and segregated. I think that led itself to some more of that environmental injustice part.

[00:10:57] Kayla: I think that the Black Panthers actually, there was a Black Panther group in Santa Ana in the '60s and they pointed to the fact that this lead contamination that we talked about in our presentation with Chapman, this lead contamination issue is actually a result, in some ways, of desegregation because the areas that were opened for desegregation were areas that more affluent people were already trying to leave because they were aware of the issue of lead contamination. The areas where people of color were allowed to move in, which was a victory, at the same time, were specifically allowed to move into because they knew that there was already health issues there.

People were already trying to get out of the area. The lowering property values were already an issue at that time. The Black Panther chapter locally, and then nationally, they have a lot of science research that backs up their work. They were bringing this up back in the '60s. To this day, we are only barely getting policies enacted to address that lead contamination in Santa Ana and other areas of the county. I think that that's definitely a very specific issue in Orange County that is a result of, not only lead and paint but also lead and gasoline because of how much of a driving environment we have here. Those are a couple of the ways that it works specifically.

The only other way I'd want to mention is really how the Tongva and Acjachemen indigenous peoples here in Orange County were the original caretakers of this land. Locally, them being barred from being able to access their land, and especially given that both those tribes lack federal recognition, meaning that to this day, they don't have a reservation or any kind of land or law offense. Because of that, we're witnessing this mass industrialization of Orange County. It's gone from ripping up original oak forest to replace with citrus farms to this expansive LA metropolis. That's just part of this big old LA City basically at this point. Also, a part of that is the damning of the rivers.

Acjachemen, Tongva people believe in caring for this place from mountains to sea and caring for the waterways that connect them. The damning of the rivers has led to a lot of water contamination issues, it's also led to steelhead trout locally not being able to migrate upstream, and that affects the environments of the mountains, as well as the ocean. I think that seeing that as an environmental injustice specific to Orange County is also very important because it has to do with barring indigenous people to be able to care for those places and practice ceremony that relates to the health of life from mountains to the ocean.

[00:13:38] Host: When you talk about the Tongva and the Acjachemen nations, it's unfortunate, but as we discuss the challenges of marginalized communities, the indigenous community tends to fall to the back. How important is it to share the challenges and the need to address these issues for these indigenous communities?

[00:14:02] Kayla: I think it's incredibly important. I came into OCEJ as director back last November, but previous to that, I was working a lot with a group called Friends of Puvungna. It's a intertribal group of folks locally working to protect the sacred side of Puvungna in Long Beach. Kelsey Long Beach is currently built over it, but there's still 22 acres that haven't been built over that have been used for ceremony for decades now since people started practicing religious freedom within indigenous communities again.

Ancestrally, since time immemorial, Puvungna was a place of gathering for both the Tongva and Acjachemen people, so it's a place that they share in common as a place of emergence for their creator and lawgiver. Those sites like Puvungna have been consistently under threat of development. Most recently, Cal State Long Beach was trying to build several student facilities over the place. In the '90s, it was a strip mall, and so there's been several struggles over the years to protect it. Just last week actually, there was a settlement reached in the lawsuit so that the university can no longer touch the site or develop over it permanently. That's actually huge victory.

I personally believe that restoring custodianship to indigenous people, restoring their right to care for their own lands and water and to practice ceremony and to travel as they please, I think that's crucial to our survival for all humans, not just for indigenous peoples because they have the ancestral knowledge to care for this place to be able to restore the relationships between environment and people. If we don't start doing those things now, we're past the point that we can think about it, really. We're already suffering the effects of climate change. In the next 10 to 15 years, that's going to be even more dramatic and have mortal consequences on our lives.

Debating that, I don't think, is an option anymore. We have to bring into place the people who have this knowledge to be able to care for this place and give them the power to do so, and then build the bridges between their struggles and being able to see how that affects everybody else. For example, with our soil lead issue in Sant Ana, we're currently doing a study about how native California plants and fungi can be used to remove the lead from the soil because currently, the practice with the Cali PA and several local agencies like the Orange County Healthcare Agency that practices just dig up the soil and move it somewhere else.

We can no longer afford to just move environmental toxins from one place to another. Maybe you're not affecting this community now, but the next community that you dump it in is going to be affected. We have to use practices that actually restore the land. Those practices are held by indigenous peoples. They know how to use different plants and fungi to be able to maintain and balance between the nutrients and the soil. Being able to have folks at the table who can lead those kind of movements and use traditional scientific knowledge to restore the soil in a way that doesn't just move the problem but actually addresses it, I think those are the kind of solutions that we need right now.

[00:17:15] Host: It seems like one of the biggest challenges or potential opportunities is a sense of awareness. In your work, I'm sure you come across people who have lived in these places for decades and had no idea of the hazards that are in their air or in their soil or in their water. How does your organization go about bringing awareness to the community, and how important is the youth in bringing that awareness? I know with your Environmental Justice Organization Academy, it's focused on youth and youth activism.

[00:17:56] Patricia: I think youth are so integral to this process. People who haven't just decided like, "I want to make things better for future generations. I want to make sure that my kids live in a good and healthy environment." Okay, but what about you? When a kid is talking about like, "I'm going to inherit this place. I'm going to live in this world. I don't want to live in a world where I'm being slowly poisoned over the next 20 years before fires come and burn down my way of life and I have to evacuate and I can't move anywhere and I'm homeless and I'm slowly dying." People don't want that.

People want to take actions to their own hands because, I know at least my generation, is sick and tired of everything. We want radical change. People call themselves socialists, democratic socialists, communists, anarchists, whatever. People really want progressive populists that are actually going to change the system. When someone talks to their parents about why they want some change, it has a lot more of an impact than if their parent is talking to their kid about why they need that change.

One, because I think youth have more time on their hands and are more engaged with this kind of stuff and they want to be more engaged, but also because we don't have time to waste. We want to build alliances where we can and youth are the people who are going to seek this kind of information out more.

[00:19:36] Kayla: Yes, I think youth are essential for all of those processes. I think, for one, all of the research action initiatives that we take on are led by the community from the beginning. For example, with this soil lead issue is because community members brought up that they're aware that there's a huge prevalence of lead in the soil in specific neighborhoods that there started to be more media attention. ThinkProgress released the article where Yvette Cabrera, a reporter with ThinkProgress Inquest brought a XRF scanner. Just a little machine that you can use to test soil for lead, and was able to find incredibly high concentrations in a few neighborhoods.

After that, community members who read the article wanted more information about all the neighborhoods across Santa Ana. When community makes those demand like, "We need more research about this," that's where OCEJ steps in really. From the start, we have community involved and community living there. Afterwards, it's actually having community members carry out the research. We actually worked with a group called Jóvenes Cultivando Cambios, Youth Cultivating Change, and it's a local grassroots youth group in Santa Ana. They actually conducted most of the soil samples for our study.

They went out there, talked with residents, got permission to take samples, and participated in these discussions about the implications of these results that the neighborhoods that were most impacted by soil lead were mostly renters, low-income, no college background, and mostly migrant communities. At the same time as going out and taking these soil samples, they were having conversations with the people around them asking if they knew about any issues with lead.

When we got their contact information, once we were able to publish these results, we called folks back up again that we took soil samples from, and told them what the results were, and shared with them that we were engaging these conversations with the city and the healthcare agency and that their voices were important in that to make sure that people knew that they were concerned about it. We would take any opportunity to spread this information that way, especially first with the people who we knew their houses were on lead-contaminated areas.

Also, we did mutual aid calls outside of the pandemic, where we connected folks to resources for food and healthcare, at the same time as letting them know about the results of our soil lead study, and if they were living in a neighborhood impacted that this is where they can go get blood lead testing and to see to what extent that they'd been impacted by the lead contamination. Then telling them how they can get involved by advocating at the city level with the planning commission and the city council to get policies into the general plan update that address soiled contamination.

[00:22:29] Patricia: I think doing outreach to people in certain census tracks, in certain ZIP codes to try to find organizers in their communities and building power, building electoral power, building a lobbying power. That's why OCEJ is a 501(c)(4) organization so that we can elect people who will do something about the soil lead crisis, but the conversation that we've been having in Santa Ana have been tremendously different once we had a new city council and mayor. We got three environmental justice allies in one election cycle and the conversation and that's almost half of the city council. That's huge. The conversations that we've had are so much different.

[00:23:13] Host: I was just reading about your city of Santa Ana, and how, I think it was within the last couple of weeks, they passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency, and that the city will start to take action to examine. I know that your organization helped bring that about. Also, around the same time, LA County supervisors voted to phase out oil and gas drilling throughout LA County, and then Culver City earlier in the summer passed a similar order. Did these seem like huge steps in the right direction? How important are these decisions for the fight for environmental justice, and will they bring more attention and action to the fight, or are they lip service at this point?

[00:24:06] Kayla: I think they're definitely helpful. I think that for the resolution in Santa Ana particularly, we made sure that there is provisions on there that obligated the city to remitting the soil and to rental protections for folks living on lead-contaminated areas. The same rent control and just cause eviction protections to make sure that they can stay in the places that get remediated. I think that while the resolution itself doesn't create those policies, it creates an obligation for the city to do so, so it's something that we can hold them accountable to later. Or even now because we're trying to get these policies class in the general plan update that they're trying to get done by November.

While they were hesitant of including things about rent protections and stuff like that, now we have a document that says, "Actually, you already promised to do this." I think that with the resolution, they put on their an obligation to phase out fossil fuels and go to 100% renewable energy by 2045. I think that's insufficient. I think that should be like by 2030 because we can't wait until 2045. That's already at a point where we're going to be in the climate catastrophe if we're not there already. I do think that those kind of things only serve as lip service. We need more aggressive approach to these problems.

I think that from being in these conversations where I was talking with multiple city council members trying to negotiate with them to accept the 2030 date instead, a lot of it is just their fiscal concerns. I'm feeling like, well, we don't want the city to be responsible for this or we don't want to have to have the burden of creating a new infrastructure, so if someone else has the infrastructure, maybe we'll buy into it later. That's just not something that we can afford to do at this point. We have to have our local city governments taking the lead on these things and pushing to create those solutions. We need more than what's being promised right now, but it's definitely a start.

I think that the way that I balance that is not relying solely on policy because I do think that it's a helpful way of going about this work. It's something that we're going to need assistance with, but at the same time, it's incredibly slow and it's frustrating for our community members who are explaining their survival and what they need to be able to have healthy lives and to have officials snub their noses at them and just say that it's their own problem or that we don't have the capacity to do that. It's hurtful for a lot of the people that we work with and who are dealing with the worst effects of climate change.

We also want to try approaching grassroots solutions like with the whole native California plants and fungi solutions for remediating the lead. That's something that residents can do theirselves. That's something we're hoping to train residents to do is learn how to use remediation techniques that are more sustainable for our environment. I think balancing those two is necessary so that even as we're advocating for policies, officials can see that residents are already doing this, so if they don't create the solutions, then residents are going to do it and leave the city behind in some ways.

I think that's what keeps me hopeful in all of these fights is knowing that even when policy is going slow, residents have the passion to keep going and make their own way about it.

[00:27:32] Patricia: A lot of times people want to take action, but they don't know what to do, and that's fine. People see a hot-button issue and they try to hop onto it. Once you get the victory, you fizzle out, go to the next thing, if you save that long to begin with. Then we wonder and think like, "Why aren't we getting the changes? Why aren't things getting better?" Because I'm doing the things, I'm advocating, going to city council meetings, protesting, this and that. Unfortunately, organizing is not like a one-and-done sort of thing. It's not something that you can just do quickly and easily and move on to the next thing. It is long, it is arduous.

Oftentimes not super sexy in everything, but it is really, really rewarding and meaningful to see the changes happening in real-time. Seeing Santa Ana pass a, I think it was called the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty kind of thing, and as one of the county's biggest users of fossil fuels, that was huge. I think it's the third most population density in the entirety of California and one of the fifth or something in the country. Seeing some of these small victories, when we get soil-led remediation into the general plan and promises made, it really is nice and rewarding sometimes.

What I challenge people who are listening to this podcast to do, especially if we care about environmental justice or racial justice or even climate justice, join OCEJ or some other environmental justice climate works in Orange County. Be part of our member base, be part of our projects, be part of our work. If you see something that you think we have capacity for, propose it for yourself. Join us, work with us, and let's change Orange County for the better.

[00:29:41] Host: If you'd like to continue the conversation, visit ocej.org to learn more, or chapman.edu/wilkinson to watch the full lecture. For more socially conscious content, visit publicpodcasting.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.