Andrea Vidaurre, a 29-year-old Peruvian American organizer from Southern California, has received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her paintings protective her predominantly Latino community from rampant air pollution.
Vidaurre is considered one of six grassroots activists being awarded the $200,000 prize, which acknowledges folks from all six inhabited continents who’re taking bizarre movements to give protection to the planet, on Monday night time. She is being known for her grassroots management that persuaded state officers to undertake laws to considerably toughen air high quality for thousands and thousands of folks in California and cut back poisonous emissions from the native freight trade.
The prize was once first awarded in 1990 and continues to be administered once a year through the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which was once based through the overdue businessman and philanthropist Richard Goldman and his spouse, Rhoda Haas Goldman.
“I feel incredibly honored and privileged to be the one to talk about our movement’s work,” Vidaurre stated in an interview. “I feel a great responsibility to just uplift the fact that this has been decades of work from communities impacted by freight in the United States.”
Vidaurre was born and raised in California’s Inland Empire, a region about an hour east of Los Angeles that today is known for having some of the country’s worst air quality. But many of her childhood memories of the valley region are idyllic — climbing up and down the surrounding hills with her father and dog and enjoying the sprawling mountain scenery.
That started to change over the past few years, Vidaurre said, as she began seeing homes and schools in the area being replaced with warehouses and smelling diesel truck fumes that added to a growing air pollution crisis in the community.
“One day, you are looking at a lovely inexperienced box. The subsequent 12 months, you might be seeing massive concrete partitions with vans coming out and in all day, each day, spewing poisonous diesel,” Vidaurre stated.
The freight trade, which has lengthy been thought to be an crucial a part of the country’s economic system, has confronted the force of rising client expectancies for next-day transport. It additionally accounts for a significant share of air pollution for plenty of U.S. communities — particularly those who reside and paintings close to highways, ports, rail yards, warehouses and different freight routes.
“These emissions from transportation are also contributing to climate change,” Vidaurre said. “We’re breathing these toxic chemicals every single day … and more people are being exposed to it because there has been so much encroachment and expansion of warehousing.”
In 2018, Vidaurre started talking to her neighbors about their shared concerns over the environmental harms and health risks the changing freight industry has heaped on the Inland Empire. Many of them, including her Peruvian American relatives, worked in the industry in some capacity, from loading and unloading trucks and planes to working at warehouses.
“On really bad days, we do see it. We do see the smog covering the mountains, we do feel the thickness of it, we can smell it sometimes, especially on those hot summer days,” Vidaurre said. But most of the time, she said, it’s “hard to see air pollution” and its health risks.
There are different types of diesel fumes, some more harmful than others, but they’re all recognized toxic substances. Short-term exposure often causes eye and nose irritation, as well as headaches and nausea. More prolonged exposure can result in serious respiratory and heart diseases, as well as lung cancer.
“There is no safe level of diesel to be breathing in,” Vidaurre said.
Those conversations with community members fueled Vidaurre’s organizing efforts alongside environmental groups and warehouse and trucking labor unions to lobby the issue. In 2020, she co-founded the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit organization advocating for improving the Inland Empire’s air quality, among other concerns. She has also conducted community tours for state officials so they could see the impact of the industry firsthand.
Fast-forward to 2023: State officers in California followed two transportation laws to considerably restrict trucking and rail emissions and create a path to 100% zero emissions for freight truck sales by 2036.
“This goes to develop into the transportation sector,” Vidaurre said. “We’re now not going to see it in an afternoon, however in two decades, we’re going to have an absolutely other machine. We’re going to have totally other neighborhoods.”
Reflecting on that victory, Vidaurre said the biggest challenge she and members of her community faced in passing the regulations had to do with going against an industry that is “very well-funded” and that may convince decision-makers.
Despite facing years of obstacles, such as delays and misinformation about their efforts, Vidaurre said, they overcame such obstacles by “development a large group coalition.”
“These issues may well be replicated in different towns, in different states,” she said.
Vidaurre said she looks forward to monitoring how the new regulations play out and coming up with solutions to continue improving transportation systems.
“We actually have a accountability to take into accounts and actually prioritize how we are reworking the transportation machine in order that it may be extra environment friendly and it may be much less extractive to our communities, each to the well being of our communities and to whole planet,” she said.
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