What Does an Environmentalist Look Like? The new Colorado Latino Climate Justice Policy Handbook holds a few clues.

What do you picture when you think of an “environmentalist?” Do they drive a Tesla and wear clothes from REI? Beatriz Soto, director of Protégete for Conservation Colorado, says it may be smart to tie the environmental movement to people who are highly educated and wealthy, but that leaves a lot of people out of the narrative — people who care deeply about environmental and climate issues, and see those issues through a lens of justice and health equality. That’s where Protégete’s newly released Colorado Latino Climate Justice Policy Handbook comes in.

Big-picture, Protégete is an initiative of Conservation Colorado dedicated to building Latino environmental leadership and power to help drive climate, land, water and environmental justice policy forward. The new policy handbook, released just following this year’s midterm elections, is a powerful tool to do just that.

“I think it's really important to connect the environmental and climate conversation to all of these other issues impacting Latino communities,” Soto says. “And help the community, the leader, everybody that's working in the space connect the dots and realize we've been pretty bad at branding our movement, and we're moving beyond that — we're broadening who is an environmentalist.”

Photo credit: Protegete/Conservation Colorado

For Soto, the idea of shifting who’s seen as an environmentalist — and whose voices are heard in general — comes from a place of personal experience. “I really didn't start out being as active,” she says. “I grew up undocumented, and I'm from the silent generation, I would call it, pre-DACA.”

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama-era program that allows undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children to live and work in the US, protecting nearly 800,000 young people — also known as “DREAMers” — from deportation.

Initially Soto worked in the climate space as an architect, designing high-performance sustainable buildings in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and in Mexico. It wasn’t until she became a permanent resident during the Trump era that she dived in more politically, co-founding Voces Unidas de las Montañas, the first Latino-created, Latino-led advocacy nonprofit in the central mountain region of Colorado. Now, with Protégete, she’s focusing on the intersection of social injustice, racism, and economic injustice with environmental and climate issues.

The newly launched policy handbook takes an up-close look at those issues, analyzing what census data and polling say about Latino needs and values in Colorado, where the state average Latino population is 20% and some communities, often rural, have Latino populations upward of 50% overall. How does civic engagement, infrastructure, and the democracy structure in general look in those communities? That’s what the handbook dives into, Soto explains.

“We're overlaying those communities with oil and gas extraction, communities that are on well water with water pollution, all of these issues that impact our environment,” she says. “And a lot of times what we're seeing — and I think we also learn this through the EnviroScreen that Colorado just created — is that some of our most vulnerable communities are actually in rural areas, and where we have really high concentrations of [Latino] people. 

Soto continued, “I think it's also really important to look at the Latino community through that lens and not just through the lens that the majority of Latinos in Colorado might be in the Denver metro area, but the reality is that we're all over the state, and we're concentrated in certain communities.”

The policy handbook is filled with maps, innovative data and policy solutions for the unique struggles that face the Latino community. It’s intended for the community to share knowledge and awareness about the climate situation in Colorado, and how it overlaps with Latino priorities and the reality of the Latino community, Soto says. 

“It's completely bilingual, and we obviously state a lot of the problems, but we also bring forward solutions that we've really thought about, because again, what are the economic solutions?” she says. “What are the education solutions? What are the housing solutions? We might not naturally tie them directly to climate solutions.”

Soto continues, “Latinos are always the racial/ethnic group that supports more protection and expansion of public lands, that supports climate action, holding polluters accountable, that are concerned about drought, so all of the issues that we work on, our biggest supporters are consistently Latinos. And then we also look at the data and who uses less amount of gasoline, who uses the less amount of water and electricity are also Latinos, so we already have this strong environmental and conservation ethos, we just look at ourselves in the mirror and we don't see ourselves being environmentalist.”

photo credit: Protegete/Conservation Colorado

By communicating how all these issues are connected and that the Latino community are fairly united on the issues, Soto says she hopes to see more representation in civic society and more inclusion of the Latino community in democracy. “I think in general, I'm feeling pretty positive about being able to advance some strong climate policy in these next couple years, that'll really support Latino families,” she says. 

“Nobody understands our issues as well as we do because we live them, and we see it in our community, and it's really requiring us to step up and lead,” Soto says.

Check out the Colorado Latino Climate Justice Policy Handbook here.