My name is Samara Almonte. I lived in Bothell, WA the last eleven years, but originally my family is from Mexico, in the state of Michoacán. I chose Western Washington University for its environmental department, and the further I went into the environmental studies program I realized I really enjoyed urban planning, specifically looking at planning through a social justice lens.

I think sustainability has to be intersectional. Often when we talk about sustainability it frequently applies only to the environmental world, which can be good thing because we tend to be anthropocentric. But, we can’t talk about sustainability if we don’t talk about sustainable humans and sustainable communities. At the beginning of my interest in the environmental program I had the idea that we had to go back to a non-urbanized form of living in order to be sustainable. But in reality, cities have existed for a long time and will continue to exist. I believe that it’s not ideal to think that we should all go back to working the land and farming. I think that’s part of the process of healing the environment, but I don’t feel that it’s necessarily ideal for everyone. Now I see it as, ‘we have cities, but where can we go from here.’

A lot of where I come from and where I go back to is indigenous knowledge, not just indigenous groups of the U.S., but also indigenous groups in Latin America that have been resisting urbanization in its exploitative forms. They have redefined what a city is and can be. My biggest dream for sustainable development is how to do sustainable development from a decolonization framework, which is anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal. How can we re-imagine cities and space to be sustainable without borders?

My research interests revolve around education and spatial justice. I am looking at how we educate, where environmental knowledge is part of everything. There is a flaw in the education system because it doesn’t [necessarily] allow for multidisciplinary work that can show people connections between environmental degradation and human exploitation.

Traditional forms of sustainable living haven’t always been accessible, so my work in sustainable living has been in community engagement and activism. I like to look at my own ancestry and what people are doing outside the U.S. I don’t think the U.S. is the epitome of sustainability. There’s a lot to learn from other people.

Samara Almonte, Senior
Urban Planning and Sustainable Development