Vianey Olivarría imagines a healed, more walkable Phoenix

• Vianey Olivarría, executive director of Chispa Arizona, connects climate change to social justice issues like immigration and reproductive rights.
• Chispa Arizona focuses on local issues such as electric school buses and creating “complete streets” with adequate shade and transit.
• The group aims to address historical inequities, like redlining, that have led to hotter temperatures in underserved neighborhoods.

This is part of a monthly series highlighting Arizona’s climate leaders and answering readers’ climate-related questions. The stories aim to help connect and inspire Arizonans who care about protecting a livable climate and may be struggling to find hope in that effort lately. You can nominate an Arizona climate leader or ask a question by filling out the form at https://forms.gle/QCCxBPSHGy1bUJQ99.

Vianey Olivarría doesn’t think of herself as outdoorsy. She’ll camp now and then, but only if there are showers nearby. She loves a breezy stroll along a promenade but doesn’t mess around with hiking Camelback. And she’s too much of a foodie to consider dehydrated meals.

For a long time, these were some of the reasons she couldn’t picture herself in the environmental movement. Then she started to notice how climate change complicates every social problem she deeply cares about.

“My issues were immigration and reproductive justice,” the chic organizer said from her office in one of central Phoenix’s historic buildings, as she sported a crisp black outfit with floral embroidered accents and gold jewelry.

“Then I realized how much environmental policy affects me and everyone else, through food access, access to water and clean air, being able to afford your utility bills, being able to walk to a bus stop without having heatstroke. And I knew I needed to be in this fight.”

Reflecting on her relationship with nature, she also recalled her mom and neighbors tidying the shared alleyway where she played as a kid in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, so they had a clean and beautiful place to explore. She remembered families with houses full of tended potted plants but no money for a car. And she thought about how every time her mom comes over to her house in Phoenix now, she later discovers something has been pulled out of the recycling bin and turned it into a soap dish or other higher purpose.

Respecting the environment as a community value, Olivarría realized, has always been central to her Latino roots, though it might look different than how shoppers crowding into REI for a gear sale imagine it. In her view, that’s just one way the climate movement could use a lot more imagination.

“I feel like climate work requires dreaming of what can be,” she said. “When it comes to nature, who gets to experience it and how is a big question. Who are we fighting to protect these places for?”

Now, as the passionate powerhouse and executive director behind the climate justice organization Chispa Arizona, Olivarría has made it her mission to show other Latinos in the state that they have a natural and essential place in the preservation of livable environments, even if she and her team have to build the community structure for it.

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Another recent climate profile: On Arizona’s environment, Sandy Bahr is everywhere all at once

Olivarría didn’t want to move to the United States when her family decided to relocate. She was 13 and thriving in Mexico, she said. When her parents enrolled her in an Arizona school without a strong ESL program, she struggled to adjust. Her classmates were often unkind and she felt the limits of a social dynamic that fractured along racial lines.

But after studying on her own at the library and landing in a gifted program at Peoria’s Ironwood High School, she bonded with one of the only other Brown girls. Together as high school seniors, they took on debating their peers over Senate Bill 1070.

Olivarría recalled the two of them arguing with other teenagers on Facebook that this revision to state immigration law, signed in 2010 by then-Gov. Jan Brewer, did little other than allow for racial profiling and harmful collaboration between local police and ICE agents. The experience fired them up as activists while welding a lifelong friendship.

Working to elevate marginalized voices on an issue as contentious and bizarrely politicized as climate change is often a tougher route than Camelback on the hottest day. Organizers must weather constant setbacks, troubling misdirection and frequent reminders of the natural and human forces working against them.

“With climate, there are just so many signs that we are going in the wrong direction. The worse the air quality, extreme heat and access to water gets, it just becomes difficult for people to exist in Arizona,” Olivarría said, calling this year’s record-breaking streak of 100-degree days in March “terrifying.”

“These things matter deeply for our dignity, our quality of life and how we work together, not just for climate but for economic justice, for migrant justice and having a city that feels welcoming and that is protecting people and that is a city we can live in the next 30 to 50 years.”

Though Olivarría sees this dignity and quality of life as beneficial across political and racial lines, not everyone appreciates the efforts. She used to get escorted out when she tried to go speak with past Arizona governors about issues such as improving public transportation, shade cover, sidewalk access and outdoor worker protections. Now, she’s welcome in those conversations on the ninth floor of the executive tower. She counts the win, while recognizing the delicate balance over the long haul in a state with fluctuating leadership directions despite steadily worsening heat.

“I think a lot of the people who may be mad about the work we do don’t understand that we’re trying to protect them too,” she said. “People of color get put under the microscope more. But at the end of the day, the pollution from fossil fuels and the heat it creates hurts all of us. Most of us are closer to being homeless than to being a billionaire.”

Past Chispa coverage: Environmentalists grow frustrated as lawmakers cast shade on bills instead of schools

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As head of Chispa Arizona, Olivarría has found momentum with a staff of eight full-time organizers who coordinate a network of volunteer committee leaders backed by nearly 300 members who help sponsor the work. They started in the school boards, focusing on alleviating health issues such as childhood asthma by pursuing funding for electric school buses to help reduce pollution and transition away from climate-warming fossil fuels.

Chispa mostly works in Maricopa County, but also has programs in Yuma and Tucson. Some committees focus on building connective community tissue and determining specific needs in underserved neighborhoods while recruiting youth for movie nights and future activism. Others have shaped policy and action around issues like public lands protection, preserving democracy, a transition to renewable energy systems that support grid stability and lower utility bills, and their “clean and green” campaign, which advocates for what they call “complete streets.”

Complete streets, Chispa Arizona’s website reads, “have adequate shade and vegetation, allow buses to run on time and make it safe for people to walk or move actively to and from their chosen mode of transportation. Complete streets will create the pathways for our future generations to be able to get to the location they need without fearing how they will get there, how long it will take, and the negative exposures they must go through.”

Seems simple enough. But Olivarría — who initially spoke for this interview from more walkable Washington, D.C., where she introduced U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Arizona, to attendees of the League of Conservation Voters’ annual meeting — has observed Phoenix adding more highway miles than light rails or bus routes and failing to fix broken water fountains or expand tree shade where it’s needed most.

Past Chispa coverage: How a Phoenix district’s electric school buses could protect kids and help them learn

Our climate Q&A series: Did climate change cause a toad to go extinct? A Flagstaff author explores the mystery

She views these incomplete streets as not just practical or municipal shortcomings — but as a failure to close long-festering justice gaps. It’s especially frustrating when the fix, a more walkable Phoenix, offers so many benefits.

“I honestly think that a lot of climate solutions available to us just starts to heal for us so much of the pain that has existed in the United States,” she said, referencing racist redlining policies that dictated where people of color were allowed to settle. After the decades of unequal investment that followed, that manufactured division contributed to minority-dominated areas in south Phoenix and the West Valley that are harder to navigate and can now be up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter on a summer day compared with Whiter, wealthier areas like Scottsdale.

“It’s horrible. It’s inhumane. And it’s just cruel,” she said about the dangerous exposure to extreme heat that results from a lack of access to public transit, shade at bus stops, water fountains and greenery in these neighborhoods.

Sitting at Chispa Arizona’s conference table with the blazing late March sun — a full 15 degrees warmer than average — setting behind her, she paused to press manicured hands against her eyes to avoid tearing up.

“There’s just so much that we could do to set ourselves up better. There’s empty buildings. There’s abandoned parks. There’s policies we could put in place if the city and state put some real money into it,” she said. “When I think about fixing the harms of the past, with the United States being a country that was built on the pain of slavery, on migration, on the suffering of Indigenous people, there is a way to understand that history and its complexity and its nuance and then look toward a future where we can do better.

“When you work in climate, you sometimes have to have a lot of imagination about what we deserve.”

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her journalism for various outlets has won national awards for investigative reveals, feature writing, business reporting and innovative climate coverage. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology with a focus on native bees. Send tips or questions to joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com or follow her work on Instagram at @joan_bikes_arizona.

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