“Love your community” was the overriding message from East Side Los Angeles-based community environmental activist mark! Lopez.
mark! [spelled as written] was the third guest of the Cal State LA Public Health Department’s annual Book Read project. Love, he said, is the first concrete step that anybody can take to help protect and support their community. But it is also the hardest step because communities are often filled with a lot of pain. This message resonated with our audience. 
Previously, in this series on climate change, public health, and hope, our speakers emphasized how every little bit helps in the fight against climate change. They acknowledged how fighting climate change can feel like moving a mountain, where we, as individuals, only have one shovel. But they (and mark!) helped us understand that if we love our community and work together, we can move these impossibly stubborn mountains.
You can view our complete conversation with mark! Lopez.
East Yard communities
Over the years, mark! has served as a general member, staff member, lead organizer, co-director, executive director, community organizer, and special projects coordinator for the community-based organization East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. The organization is known as East Yard for short. From going door-to-door as a kid in his community to hosting town hall meetings with East Yard, mark! has been a key player in catalyzing an already growing community-driven environmental movement.
The “East Yard” name comes from the Union Pacific rail yard on the Eastside of Los Angeles. mark! explained how this formerly “sleepy” rail yard faced a tremendous boom after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement increased foreign imports in the country. As a result, tens of thousands of trucks and trains began moving through these East Yard communities on a daily basis, increasingly concentrating air pollution in cities like Commerce, Vernon, Maywood and Bell.
In an effort to find solutions, community members organized and advocated with city councils, the county board of supervisors, the regional and state air boards, and the federal government. While doing so, they built connections between communities affected by shipping and trucking nationally and internationally. East Yard was formalized in 2001, in part, from the networks that community members had built.
As an organization, they have three guiding questions that steer the organization through local, regional, state, national, and global levels of advocacy: What is the problem, how does it affect us, and what can we do about it?
The challenge of Exide
East Yard has been involved in many community environmental efforts. Among their most prominent work was a complex advocacy and legal battle with a battery recycling plant operated by Exide in the city of Vernon. Their work was essential in identifying and advocating for the remediation of tremendous amounts of ambient lead (and other heavy metals) in the surrounding community. mark! recounted this story in our session together, and you can learn more here. From this experience, he shared several lessons:
Lead with solutions
First, mark! discussed his perception of how government agencies seem to be “allergic to [automatically doing] the right thing”. He argued it’s crucial to create a path for agencies to walk by laying out solutions, not just pointing out problems. He emphasized how communities can be good at identifying what they don’t want and what they want to stop. But they often do not have the time and space to think about what they do want. It is hard to develop a vision and dreams for a community, and then figure out how the community is going to get there. He added that it’s important to demonstrate just how dedicated and persevering a community can be.
“Homie, do the math!”
Second, mark! argued that communities should pay close attention to data. Averages, he suggested as an example, can create the appearance of safety, but hide environmental risks. He discussed how the Department of Toxic Substances Control told local school principles that they did not have to worry about the lead. Once East Yard looked at the data, they realized that the averages presented were not telling the full story.
Members of East Yard believed the agency had used samples that were low to dilute the samples that were high to say that overall, these schools were clean. East Yard talked to school board members to review the raw data. The data, according to mark!, showed that their schools were contaminated with lead. East Yard urged them to request the documents themselves to confirm these findings.
By paying close attention and helping school board members obtain their own data, East Yard helped protect those schools. He urged everyone in attendance at our session to expand their data skills to read charts, tables, and graphs. This would help us understand how to represent data and to identify how people manipulate it to support different narratives. 
When it comes to environmental exposures, he offered a twist on the proverb “trust, but verify. He proposed instead: “don’t trust, and you better go verify.”
Act locally, impact globally
Third, addressing environmental challenges–like climate change–doesn’t always require grand gestures. It can start locally, with understanding and supporting our communities. mark! explained that true community involvement involves sharing resources with one another. He gave the example of growing fruit trees; trees are pillars of our community and fruit is a resource. Growing and sharing these resources demonstrates our ability to nurture and enhance our community’s well-being. mark! suggested that we should expand such forms of community organization.
When we act locally, we not only address the needs of our neighborhoods, but contribute to a larger global movement. Small actions can contribute to a ripple effect that extends beyond our community. [Our previous speakers delivered a similar theme]. If we don’t know where to start in our communities, we can recognize the small things we already do. Maybe we already share rides with neighbors, or walk our kids to school in a group. Although we may not see all of the larger impact of our efforts, participating in our communities can be a starting point for greater impact against climate change.
mark! closed by suggesting that “climate change starts in our bodies”, meaning that the effects begin with our ourselves and our neighbors. In order to truly understand how we can take collective action against climate change, we have to work together and take incremental steps one at a time. Climate change will not end by itself; it requires us to change what is possible within our communities, starting with the love we have for them.
The climate series continues
This series on climate change, public health and hope continue soon with insight from environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. Also, be sure to check out earlier parts in this series, including conversations with climate journalists Sammy Roth and Caleigh Wells.
If you want to read more about why The Medical Care Blog is focusing on climate this year, check out its consensus statement on climate.
You can also read more about Cal State LA’s department-wide book-read events focused on public health leadership from last year.
In the meantime, love your community!
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