Hello, my name is Ainslee Archibald and I’m the Coalition Coordinator for the Nevada Environmental Justice Coalition. Today, I’m proud to represent the organizations we’ve brought together for this listening session. In addition to uplifting the voices of our partners, I wanted to raise some of our issues with this process, which are as follows:
- First, the majority of the people speaking at these sessions are representatives of various non-profit organizations and companies. There is a noticeable lack of Nevada residents grappling with the impacts of climate. While the voices of organizations matter, they’re not the only stakeholders in the future of this state. We want to note that while important issues have been raised in these sessions, they are far from representative of the state and the impacts being experienced right now by frontline communities.
- Second, there has been a lack of outreach to change this. While our coalition partners have done their best to bring their bases into this conversation, the state has done very little to tell people about these events. This is reflected in who comes to the sessions.
- Third, there has been essentially no outreach to multilingual communities. We appreciate your responsiveness to our letter by adding a Spanish listening session, but I feel this should be a given. We hope that language inclusivity will be prioritized at every step of this process, and as you all turn to thinking about implementation and impacts.
Thank you for your time, and I hope you’ll listen to and prioritize our view of intersectional climate justice.
