Friday, 9 May 2003

NEW YORK, N.Y.

Those of you who’ve been reading these entries all week know by now that I’m something of a non-traditional environmentalist. I was especially reminded of this at today’s board meeting, where I meet new members and employees who asked how I had come to work at Environmental Defense. Yet strange as it may seem, my path has led me to this work all my life. Really!

I was raised in Montebello, Calif., a small, ethnically diverse city east of East Los Angeles. Later, I would learn that I grew up in a crucible of environmental justice issues. I spent my childhood in low-income South Montebello (separated from the north by railroad tracks), where industrial plants operated next to homes and diesel trucks idled adjacent to my school playground. In high school, we joked about the sickly sweet smell from “the dump” in North Montebello — which later became a Superfund site. On Labor Day weekend, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, my family was evacuated in the middle of the night when a nearby plant released a dangerous amount of ammonia.

Lopez Mendoza (right), with Environmental Defense colleagues Luis Flores de Luna and Misty Sanford, celebrating the release of their “Walking to the Park” report last summer.

I did not know enough then to characterize these experiences as a pattern of environmental degradation. To be honest, through college I believed environmentalism was for white people, not for a Chicana like me. What did I care about endangered species when kids in my community were battling to finish high school? I was dedicated to becoming a teacher and helping low-income youth in the classroom.

I graduated from college in 1990, just as the first Gulf War was breaking out. Knowing little about the potential global impacts, I attended a teach-in in San Francisco in January of 1991. There, I met Ellie Goodwin of the Natural Resources Defense Council who discussed environmental problems affecting low-income and minority populations — and a light went on in my head. Ellie was the first person of color I had ever met who discussed the human impacts of urban environmental problems and gave the movement a name: environmental justice.

My career goals changed as I learned more. I subscribed to Race, Poverty and the Environment, then a fledging publication. I read the Church of Christ Hazardous Waste Sites Study, reports from the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Conference, and the resulting dialogue in the environmental community. I became convinced that ensuring that low-income communities had clean air and clean water was more important than becoming a teacher.

Because I had a liberal arts background unrelated to anything environmental, I had great difficulty breaking into the environmental field. I got my chance in 1992, when I was hired by the Environmental Careers Organization to be the first minority opportunities program director. I helped develop environmental internships at grassroots and other organizations for college minority students. I learned more about environmental organizations and the work that was emerging in the field of environmental justice. Almost everyone I met recommended that I go to law school to prepare myself to make an impact on environmental justice problems.

Following that advice, I went to law school at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I took specific courses to advance my interest in environmental justice and pursued an internship with social workers at a health clinic in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles and another with economists at Rebuild L.A., an organization formed in response to the 1992 civil unrest in the city. I spent the summer of 1994 working with Luke Cole at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, focusing on environmental problems on Native American lands.

My work in law school confirmed what I already knew: I wanted to pursue a career in community-based environmental law. Following three years of litigation experience, and after making healthy inroads into my law school debt, I joined Environmental Defense in April 2000, and haven’t looked back since.

Partly because of my family history, I have never questioned that my life-work would focus on social justice and equality. My uncle was a civil rights attorney in San Diego. A police brutality case he won in the late 1970s was appealed by the San Diego Police Department all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and he won at each stage. He founded the Lawyering for Social Change Program at Stanford Law School and now teaches at New York University Law School. Both of my parents are social workers. My mother, a psychiatric licensed social worker, has coordinated mental-health services at nonprofit organizations for immigrant families, abused mothers and children, and at-risk teens. My father, a social worker for the state of California, has facilitated hundreds of adoptions.

This is Marta, tending her part of the Francis Avenue Community Garden.

By following these examples, I was able to find my calling in environmental justice. I believe there are no rights more fundamental than the rights to clean water, clean air, and healthy food. Beyond those rights, I believe that families should not need to earn a certain amount of money for their children to have access to parks and green spaces, safe pedestrian walkways, and a quiet night’s sleep without diesel trucks rumbling past or airplanes screeching overhead. I plan to work to ensure that low-income and minority community members have a fair hearing before decision-makers — a luxury usually reserved for professional lobbyists.

Every day, I am excited by the work I do with community partners and residents. I recognize the challenges of working on environmental justice from within a “big green” group as opposed to a grassroots organization. But from reading this week about what we do, you can see we do this work as respectfully as we can. We’ve really tried to use the resources of Environmental Defense and apply environmental justice principles to work in coalition with diverse community-based organizations and residents to achieve the goals and objectives we have set together.

I plan to spend my life here in Los Angeles ensuring that environmental rights are protected for all people. Too often, poor people and people of color are doubly impacted by environmental degradation — both by a lack of access to the decision-making process, and by suffering the burden of environmental problems. I know my work is cut out for me in Los Angeles, home of urban sprawl, tense race relations, water wars, lack of green space, and vast disparities in income and wealth. But I also know we’ll succeed.