Lylianna Allala has always been close to nature. Now she's working to make clean air, water, and surroundings a right for all, rather than a privilege for some.

Growing up in Arlington Heights, a suburb just north of Chicago, Lylianna Allala fell in love with nature.

It's understandable if you do a double-take reading that.

Allala explains, “The home was on about a half-acre of land surrounded by this forest. And then, as I grew older, the forest shrank and shrank and shrank.” 

That story, of the disappearing deciduous forest amid growing development, neatly frames a starting point for Allala’s career trajectory today. As the climate justice director for the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment, her work is centered on figuring out how the City can keep nature accessible to all communities, as well as to mitigate harsh environmental impacts that fall disproportionately onto less affluent communities.

For a city where civic pride rests heavily on being urban yet so close to nature, Seattle has some work to do. According to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, there’s a 13-year life expectancy difference between residents of South Park and the Duwamish River Valley and residents of more affluent, mostly white, neighborhoods, such as Laurelhurst and Magnolia.

Allala’s new role reflects some of the work the City is doing to change that (even the title has changed—the role used to be called climate director). Allala’s office oversees the Equity and Environment Initiative, which attempts to tackle some of those issues. It began in 2015, when community advocates lobbied Mayor Ed Murray to say that the benefits of great environmental work happening in the city, “were not reaching communities of color in an equitable way,” says Allala.

Allala’s deep connection to sense of place and the outdoors threads through her entire family and is particularly influenced by the women in her life. Her parents moved to Chicago from their home in south Texas before she was born; but every year they went back to Texas for winter break, where they rode horses and hung around at the ranch that has been in her family for at least four generations. Back home in Chicago, nature was not only in her backyard but next door, at her grandmother’s house. “I remember walking through the garden with my grandmother and she would teach me the names of the flowers in English and Spanish. It was just embedded in the way that we lived.” On her mother’s side, there is a lineage of curanderas, healers/shamans, and Allala fondly remembers her other grandmother’s herbal remedies for everyone’s various illnesses. “That connection to nature and medicine, plants as medicine, was always a piece of my growing up as well.”

She moved to Seattle in 2006 as a newly minted college grad with an English degree—and a slight sense of aimlessness—to take a position with EarthCorps, a conservation group based in Seattle, via the AmeriCorps program. 

“I saw it as an enrichment opportunity,” says Allala, who had at the time never considered a career focused on the environment. For that, she says, she owes a huge debt of gratitude to the person who took a chance on her based on her love of nature and not her degree. “To this day, I will never, ever forget the call that let me know I was hired. I was like, ‘Wow, I don't even have a background in this!’” she laughs.

The person who hired her, she says, was a queer person of color, “who did not see themselves reflected in the movement” and used their hiring power in a way that was equitable and creative, seeing potential in Allala.

“That experience opened a world for me,” says Allala. “I learn so much by doing, and I think that there's so much merit in elevating different pathways of learning and growth and gaining expertise.”

Allala never looked back and has become a rising star in climate and environmental justice, advocating for environmental equity for BIPOC. She’s worked on trail building in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, led efforts to restore the West Duwamish Greenbelt, prescribed burning for habitat restoration, and more. Prior to her work with the City, she served as lead staff on environment and climate policy for Rep. Pramila Jayapal. 

One of her biggest legacies so far was to help create and launch the RAY Diversity Fellowship, a first-of-its-kind program to develop workforce and leadership for young people of color wanting to work in marine conservation.

Creating opportunities for those who might not otherwise get them is a big part of what drives Allala, and in her role as climate justice director, she helps give voice to underserved communities and will help shepherd the next phase of the city’s Equity and Environment Agenda next year. “With environmental injustice and climate injustice, I think a part of that work is really understanding the systemic issues that have created these situations. So first and foremost, acknowledging that racism exists, systemic and institutional racism, is a root cause of all of this work.”

Climate and environmental injustice starts with the original sin of colonization, which she says disrupted and severed the connection Indigenous communities had with the environment. The results ripple out into everything from policies like redlining to the way we perpetuate wealth and land ownership. To right those wrongs, she says, “It's really important to acknowledge the history. Because if we're not acknowledging that we're not seeing our mistakes and learning lessons, we can't effectively move forward.”

There are many elements that play into the wide environmental gulf between economically disparate communities, in Seattle and elsewhere, says Allala. Exposure to pollution and toxins coming from the industrial corridor, proximity to highways, and access to clean water all translate into different health outcomes for residents. When it comes to the study of life expectancy between neighborhoods in Seattle, Allala says, “Those types of things, over time, absolutely impact people's health in a generational way.”

The water piece, she notes, is especially huge. Clean water is linked to food sovereignty for tribal, immigrant and refugee communities. And while Seattle residents are generally very lucky in having access to clean, beautiful water coming from the Cedar River watershed, the waters these communities use to access first foods (also referred to as Indigenous foods), including the Puget Sound and Duwamish River, are less so. “[The Duwamish] is a salmon-bearing river,” says Allala. “And it is a Superfund site, the most polluted area in Seattle.”

“As a region which has a very deep and rich history and strong cultural presence here of Indigenous communities and Native tribes, I think that there's chronic issues with mainstream folks acknowledging the contributions to society by Native communities.”

Access to culturally important foods only stands to get more difficult as climate change creates increasing frequency and intensity of rainfall, with more flooding. Rain washes toxins, oil, and heavy metals from the many impervious surfaces of our built environment into the Sound and Duwamish.

Meanwhile, climate migration is happening, with people more severely impacted by climate change moving from other parts of the country and world to the Pacific Northwest. And yet, access to affordable housing is creating yet another barrier. “We get to enjoy the amazing representation of a myriad of different cultures. But we know that access to affordable housing is a challenge here.”