Our Latino Community Is One of the Most Impacted by Oil and Gas, Environmental Justice, and Lack of Access to Resources
By Elizabeth Velasco, Colorado Representative and Hispanic Conservation Leadership Council member.
I am proud to be the first Mexican-born legislator in the state of Colorado. I moved to the United States when I was 15. Starting a new life and learning a language at that age was challenging.
I grew up low-income, living in mobile home parks in the Vail Valley, where I had to work multiple jobs to put myself through college and support my family.
Throughout the years, I have seen first-hand the realities that our working families face every day. I went to school as a chef and worked in the service industry, an experience that made me realize that Colorado runs because of the labor, efforts, and sacrifices of many hardworking immigrants and Hispanics.
I also worked as a wildland firefighter and public information officer, witnessing how urgent many issues—like access to life-saving information and emergency alerts such as evacuations, road closures, and water and air quality—were.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked as an interpreter in hospitals. While doctors were fully protected in what looked like space suits, essential workers like me wore cloth masks and were not eligible for a vaccine. I strongly advocated for us to get access to the vaccine. In a community where 30% of the population was Latino, we represented 70% of the COVID cases.
What all these different jobs and circumstances have in common is that they showed me how our Latino community is often left behind.
As a state representative, Coloradan, and Latina, I firmly believe that we must be at the decision-making table, and our voices matter because our community is one of the most affected - if not the most affected - by issues related to lack of access to resources and environmental justice.
Living in and representing a district of a rural resort community where 60% of the land is public lands, it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that I am an active environmentalist and advocate for protecting our public lands and waters.
This area of Colorado is incredibly beautiful, but it has been mistreated in numerous ways by various activities and industries. It's essential that we take action to protect it.
When you fly over this region, you can see the impact of oil and gas not only on the forest but also on our communities. There are oil wells in the middle of cities, and schools—where minority kids are the vast majority—are closing because of broken water and gas lines.
Unfortunately, our Latino community and working families are the most affected by the operations of these extractive industries.
In the United States and in Colorado, the oil and gas industry is given a lot of leeway. The Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), which regulates oil and gas and energy development in the state, is working on rulemaking to ensure that stronger measures are implemented, but we must remain vigilant.
The impact of oil and gas is not confined to a single location. The ECMC's assertion that these impacts are limited to a one-mile radius is being challenged by many of us in the Colorado legislature. It's important that we continue to fight for the truth and ensure that our communities are informed and involved in this process.
In Colorado, we have large oil and gas companies, but also small production ones that are not regulated in the same way as the bigger players. However, the combined impact of these smaller producers is significant. Their abandoned wells, also known as orphan wells, are a major environmental concern as they leak methane fumes, posing a serious threat to our health.
Every oil and gas company, regardless of size, must be responsible for cleaning up after drilling. Unfortunately, taxpayers have been footing the bill for these clean-ups, with the state and federal governments being the ones doing the job.
We cannot allow them to continue with business as usual. We see the impacts on the health of our kids and our community, from nosebleeds and cancer to asthma and other issues that stay for generations.
Investing in clean energy—geothermal, hydrogen, wind, or solar—is more critical now than ever to avoid the devastating impacts of oil and gas.
One of the big challenges of our generation is climate change and climate adaptation. We have a duty to protect our environment and natural resources, not just for our present, but for the future and the next generations.
