How this grassroots environmental justice hero is leading his hometown resistance
The activist mark! Lopez didn’t attend his first march for environmental justice on foot. He was pushed in a stroller. A winner of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots “heroes”, Lopez has agitated alongside his family since childhood.In the late 1980s, when he was growing up in East Los Angeles, Lopez’s grandparents and others took down a proposed state prison, a toxic waste incinerator, and a pipeline planned to run near a school. The 32-year-old Lopez stepped up to help lead the battle against the Exide battery smelter — a factory just outside East L.A.’s borders that for decades spewed noxious chemicals, like lead and arsenic, into neighboring communities that are mostly inhabited by people of color. Activists in the area fought the company for years — citing public health concerns related to lead contamination, such as impaired neurological development in children and increased violence in exposed communities — and the plant officially closed in 2015. Cleanup, however, for which the state set aside $176.6 million, has barely gotten underway and has already hit roadblocks…
