The question above was posed to us in one of the workshops I attended (“Initiating Collaborative Community, from Archiving Projects to Environmental Health Governance”) by Thomas De Pree, Research Assistant Professor from the University of New Mexico, when he was talking about pollution in New Mexico. In the state, there are huge disparities in environmental cleanup between white and Indigenous/Latine communities. For instance, a nuclear testing plume in New Mexico followed the Spanish colonization route and resulted in the Church Rock uranium mill spill in the late 1980s. Even though there hasn’t been uranium mining in New Mexico since the 1990s, waste and tailings still remain and impact groundwater, with three plumes entering Rio San Jose.

There is still ongoing resistance to the spill and commemoration by Diné people today. De Pree talked about the need for baselining—a common understanding between stakeholders (like governments, communities, and corporations) of what the “baseline” is for restoration and cleanup. UNM, the Multicultural Alliance for Safe Environment, and others used photo essays, presentations, and communications strategies to engage and document cleanups. They are gathering oral histories and testimonies from the spill with the Southwest Research and Information Center; those histories will be housed in a digital archive at a library in the Church Rock community. All that is to say: land and people are interconnected in their needs for protection and preservation.

In another session called, “Community Science Perspectives” led by Sacoby Wilson (Director for the Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health at the University of Maryland) discussed environmental justice science,and highlighted the importance of our work being grounded in EJ principles. A term Wilson that proposed and that I will continue to reflect on was “inpowerment”—the idea that science’s role is to build capacity, critical literacy, agency, and connection to power for community. Furthermore, Wilson said that to make change we need to focus on the types of communications that reach policymakers—e.g. white papers, briefs, and infographics versus longer reports, academic articles, and so on—and to be in the room where decisions are made. This felt particularly resonant to Front and Centered’s mission and my work.