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In the mid-’90s, when he was 10 years old, Mark Lopez walked around his home of East Los Angeles, knocking on doors to tell people about the dangers of lead in their house paint. Lopez’s grandmother had, in 1986, helped to found the advocacy group Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), which made it their mission to protect their community from harmful practices of the state or local corporations. When Lopez was an infant, he rode in a stroller as MELA successfully protested the development of a new state prison in East L.A.; by the time he was old enough to take action himself, the issue was lead poisoning.
But as Lopez–now the executive director of the local advocacy group East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ) and a winner of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize–would learn over the next 20 years, the issue of lead in Los Angeles could not be eradicated through protest alone. As Lopez was going door-to-door as a child, his mother and grandmother requested a tour of the 15-acre lead-battery recycling plant, owned by Exide Technologies, at the edge of East L.A. As they moved through the facility, “the Exide folks were trying to tell my family that everything was fine, there was nothing to worry about,” Lopez tells Fast Company. “So my grandmother responded by saying that if there was nothing to worry about, why did they make her put on protective gear—and why aren’t the workers wearing any?” At that moment, Lopez says, “there was an understanding that if the company would put its own workers at risk, it would not hesitate to put its surrounding community at risk.”
But when it came to community remediation, Lopez turned to the governor’s office. Framing the lead poisoning of East L.A. as “Jerry Brown’s Flint,” he and EYCEJ lobbied the state to funnel $176 million from the general fund into testing and cleaning up the contaminated properties in the area. It’s not enough, Lopez says–to reach every one of the 10,000 homes affected by Exide, it will take half a billion dollars–but it’s a start.