Risikat Adesaogun: The MPCA’s Role in Environmental Justice

On April 24th, I met with Risikat Adesaogun, one of Twin Cities’ local environmental justice leaders, at my house to drink tea. As a student in an Environmental Justice course, I was seeking a better grasp of what environmental justice means in practice in our local communities. This is something I thought Risikat was able to speak to very eloquently.

Risikat Adesaogun is currently the chief speech-writer for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (PCA) commissioner and manages their social media team as a communications strategist, though she has also worked on building the PCA’s Environmental Justice Framework over her five years there. The PCA serves as a state government counterpart to the EPA at the federal government level. It carries out its mission of protecting the environment and human health through issuing permits, monitoring and addressing pollution, enforcing environmental regulations, and offering financial and technical assistance to businesses and nonprofits.

Background on Risikat Adesaogun

Risikat currently lives in Minneapolis with her adorable pug, Maya. In fact, if you were ever to meet Risikat, you could be sure she would show you a picture of Maya, and even joked that if she were in charge, “We’d all have pugs. Ugh, we’d all be pugs, who am I kidding.” But to give some background on Risikat, she grew up in the Twin Cities and began her career with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Northern Colorado and a master’s degree in Strategic Communications Management from Concordia University-St. Paul. Her first experience in social justice work after college was as a Twin Cities metro social worker, advocating for 15 homeless families at a time. After such a consistently-high workload for five years, Risikat said, “It was like being a hamster on a wheel. There is so much inequality. The whole system is broken… I was frustrated, so I decided to become a researcher. That led me to policy work.” She found that her time doing research at the Department of Human Services (DHS) was some of the most fulfilling work she had ever done, but in 2013, Risikat was one of many people who lost their jobs in a mass layoff. This is where the PCA came in.

Why Does EJ Matter? 

After being laid off from DHS, Risikat needed a job, and the PCA building was right across the street. “I sometimes tell people that I just walked into the PCA and got lost,” she told me. At first, her new job protecting the environment didn’t seem as meaningful as a job researching the systematic oppression of people. This all changed, though, when Risikat discovered the field of environmental justice. An important part of her realization was one of the first tough jobs she got assigned. A seventh grade teacher reached out, asking to test soil samples that each of her students sent in from their front yards. When reporting the results back to the teacher, Risikat said, “Some of these kids’ yards that they were playing in, the amount of lead was over a 100 times higher than it should be…some, closer to the 200 times higher range.” Risikat suspects that most of this lead is being leaked into the residential soil from the North Minneapolis industrial area.

“There’s this whole generation of kids that aren’t starting on equal footing, and it’s not just about educational opportunities––though we could totally fund our schools better! “People can’t even breathe or drink or play safely, because we’ve decided as a society that these kids and their families mean less than people in richer, whiter neighborhoods.”Minnesota’s education gap has often been worst in the nation…and it’s not about food security––even though parts of Minneapolis exist in food deserts. It’s not only about homelessness, either ––even though there are many homeless individuals and families and we’ve long been headed toward a crisis. For me, it’s the environment, at its most granular level. It’s the air they’re breathing, the water they drink, the fact that they can’t let their brothers and sisters go play in the yard and make mud pies like we all used to… It’s participating in the most elemental parts of being a person. People can’t even breathe or drink or play safely, because we’ve decided as a society that these kids and their families mean less than people in richer, whiter neighborhoods.”

When I asked her what drives her when it is this bleak, she jokingly answered, “Spite.” but followed up, “Even though I think it [environmental injustice] is one of the least-seen injustices, at least in my opinion, it is one of the most important injustices to fight.”

Environmental Justice (EJ) and the State

So what does environmental justice mean on the State level? Risikat defines EJ as: “Making sure the policies and work we do don’t have a disproportionate impact on any particular group, and that there can be meaningful involvement for communities.” In her general role as a communications strategist for the agency, Risikat’s main concern within the State definition of EJ is the “meaningful involvement for communities” part. However, to set the agency up for meaningful involvement with a community, Risikat says it’s important to pre-emptively establish themselves and their intentions as anti-discriminatory. “Everyone really believes in the mission, but still we kept coming across these situations where people were being disproportionately impacted.” Because coded racism, sexism, and classism are baked into the State systems, just saying that the State won’t intentionally act racist isn’t enough. “When I go to work in the morning, there aren’t evil villains rubbing their hands together, saying, I’m going to harm someone today. People love the work, they believe in the work. But good intentions aren’t enough.” The systemic disenfranchisement and divestment from poorer, higher-minority neighborhoods accumulates over centuries, so at the State level Risikat says, “We had to be really intentional about incorporating EJ principles into the foundation of all our work in ways that can’t be glossed over. There isn’t a “justice” box to check on a list. It has to become second-nature for us to think about who is being negatively impacted at every turn.”

Because the State has played a role in creating and perpetuating those disproportionately-felt injustices, Risikat expressed some internal conflict about whether working for this oppressive structure makes her complicit in the oppressions done by the State. This especially came out when she was talking about writing speeches for candidates who she might not necessarily agree with on certain points. When asked about how she prioritizes her goals, especially within the changing political landscape of the Trump administration, Risikat said:

“I hold my own beliefs and values sacred [that all people have inherent worth], and promote those, even when they don’t seem fully aligned with this or that leader’s goals… Things get hard, but if I just disengage, if I decide, I’m done! I’m just going to quit, the work still has to get done. There always needs to be a tiny squeaky wheel in the room saying, Hey–who’s missing from the table? or… Wow, there aren’t really many people who look like me in this building. How are we addressing this? Is our own backyard clean?”

While she might feel like a nuisance to be one of few in the room pointing out that the PCA may be leaving Black and other marginalized communities out of their decision-making, the work Risikat does as a “squeaky wheel” in the agency is incredibly important. Some activists working at the grassroots level to represent their communities have criticized individuals for working at the state level. According to Risikat, some people espouse a kind of ideological purity about what activism means that excludes top-down models. Risikat subscribes to a more multifaceted view of activism: “It has to be a 360-degree approach. White supremacy exists at every turn and we need people to go right into the clown’s mouth to get things done… the system is so well-rigged that it can’t be repaired from the outside alone. We need grassroots activism, and we also need people in these decision-making rooms trying to change the tides. We need people shining a light on this stuff from every possible angle.”

EJ Principles: Meaningful Involvement

The PCA has always been obligated to publish their policies in a public setting, but that might mean publishing on a back page of the local paper, where it’s unlikely to be seen, when what is needed is real meaningful involvement of communities. Risikat wants to help change that. In 1992, President Clinton put out an executive order requiring all state departments to form their own EJ Program, but it wasn’t until 2015-2017 that Risikat, working with the newly-founded PCA EJ Program under Commissioner John Linc Stine, co-wrote the agency’s EJ Framework. The EJ Program surveyed many Twin Cities’ communities, asking, “Where are we failing? What do we need to do better? What is it about our internal policies that are inherently flawed?” With that feedback, they created the PCA’s first EJ Framework. When I asked Risikat what participatory justice looks like at the agency, she responded: “Let’s involve people at the very beginning, instead of at the end when it’s basically a foregone conclusion.” Surveying communities to create the EJ Framework is getting ahead of the problem before it happens. However, when it comes to policy-making, Risikat says, “The PCA has a lot of work to do before we are in a true, proactive state….When a company submits a permit application, that’s even kind of late, because at that point they’ve already had their consultants and scientists in, and they’re ready to move forward, often with thousands – or millions on the line.” In fact, because industry is the frontline in decision-making with respect to citing and interaction with communities, Risikat believes that industry has the first responsibility to ask their neighbors, “Who’s asking for this? Who’s going to be impacted by this?” and “for them to really slow down and talk to people first.”

Why the PCA has a Duty to Get Out into Communities

That said, Risikat knows that, realistically, industries can’t be relied on to self-regulate. Protecting citizens is the duty of the State––it is the duty that justifies its existence. And real meaningful involvement of communities in deciding what State protection looks like is a necessary part of that justification. Something Risikat thinks is really holding the PCA back from adequately doing its job as protectors of Minnesotans from pollutants in their physical environment is that, “A lot of people in charge have never had to directly confront people from the community.” There is a gap in knowledge and understanding of indigenous and communities of color. Risikat asks, “How can you really see the humanity in other people and empathize with them when you’re not interacting in organic, authentic ways?”

So I asked her, “What do you think the solution to this is?” To this, Risikat responded with a story from her first year as a young, middle class social worker. She’d told one of her clients to take public transportation to an unfamiliar part of the city, without directions, despite having never been on a city bus herself. She was reprimanded by a more-seasoned coworker who told her, “Don’t ever ask someone to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.” Risikat took the lesson about the importance of meeting people where they are at, to heart, which she applies to her work at the PCA:

“If we are asking community members to come to our building, which may be an unfamiliar space, and advocate for themselves and speak in formal scientific terms, at minimum we need to be willing to go into these communities and meet people where they are at, speak with them with respect, listen to them and learn about them, to do our own homework, and not expect people to overextend themselves to educate us, because that is unacceptable. I think that is the only solution. We really need to learn some empathy. Many believe the complicated pollution algorithms and equations tell the full story, but they mean nothing if people are being hurt.”

Since Risikat joined the agency, the PCA has re-started diversity training to try to bridge some of these empathy and knowledge gaps between PCA workers and ordinary Minnesotans. “It wasn’t enough just to have a shiny framework,” Risikat says, “We’ve had to really confront a lot of people’s internal biases,” and doing diversity training and education within the agency is a big part of that.

Barriers to Risikat’s EJ Work at the PCA

In her work to save Minnesota communities from the harms of environmental pollution, Risikat Adesaogun faces a number of barriers. While we have already talked about many of the internal issues Risikat faces with MPCA attitudes towards working with communities, she also faces issue with political shifts in administration, the “workload perspective” of EJ duties at the agency, the ingrained ways of an older generation, and the overall limits of state power to protect residents.

While it is a well-known fact that the current EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a coal-lobbyist and climate-change denier, Risikat says that at the PCA they have been blessed with leaders who are willing to push back. “EJ is the work. If we aren’t trying to make our environment better for everyone, what are we even doing here?” “We’re just going to tell the truth and we are going to keep telling the truth and figure out a way to get it out, because, even though the work is political, science isn’t––nor should it be.” But while the scientists at the agency are committed to the scientific integrity of their work, they may be less excited about the additional training and work it takes to get out into the community. Risikat says that some view the EJ work as an additional workload, but to her, “EJ is the work. If we aren’t trying to make our environment better for everyone, what are we even doing here?”

The last major barrier Risikat talked about facing at the MPCA is simply the limits of state protection. “At the state, we don’t really have the ability to say no. If a company can prove that whatever they are doing will fall under whatever limits (set by state law), then we have to approve the permit.” So the best they can do sometimes is just to include restrictions in permits, such as special routes or designated hours of operation that won’t interfere with residents’ daily schedules. Those with the actual power to deny a company a building permit are our local legislators, through things like zoning laws, “and many people don’t know that,” Risikat says.

Call to Action

So what can you do? To general citizens, Risikat asks that we “don’t get too complacent, stay hooked in, pay attention to what’s happening.” Ever since the 2016 Presidential election, people have been more politically active and aware, but, as Risikat pointed out, “It’s easy to get complacent when things look okay,” especially in such a beautiful place as Minnesota. Risikat reminds us that even though it may not look like our environments are polluted, “It doesn’t take much to get there.”

To young activists, Risikat calls for “a dual or triple-thronged approach” to combating environmental injustices. Not only do we need non-profit community organizers and grassroots representation advocating for their community to the State and the world, we also need State activists willing to respond to those grassroots community organizers and reaching out to EJ communities from positions of political power. Risikat encourages young activists with a final quote:

“Our society is built on a sophisticated, universal foundation of oppression. No matter what work field you find yourself in, you can bet that someone is being exploited or harmed, by design… But that also means you can help make things better, whether at a neighborhood meeting or from a tiny office cubicle. Plenty of people have already been on the scene, and there’s more than enough work to go around. It’s frustrating that we’re not further along, but your voices are wanted and needed. The stakes could not be higher.”

References and Further Reading

Adesaogun, Risikat. “About Risikat.” Risikat Adesaogun, 2018, www.risikat.com/about.html.

Adesaogun, Risikat. (2019, April 24). Personal Interview.

Brooks, Ned, et al. “Environmental Justice Framework: 2015 – 2018.” Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), 17 Dec. 2015, www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/p-gen5-05.pdf.

MPCA. “Disproportionate Impacts in Minnesota.” Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, 11 Jan. 2019, www.pca.state.mn.us/air/disproportionate-impacts-minnesota.

MPCA. “Story Map Series: Understanding Environmental Justice in Minnesota.” Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, 2019, mpca.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=f5bf57c8dac24404b7f8ef1717f57d00.

MPCA. “The Air We Breathe.” Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, 21 Mar. 2019, www.pca.state.mn.us/air/air-we-breathe.