Today I wanted to introduce you to the four leaders who are recipients of this year's Sentinel Awards for Environmental Stewardship.

At Thursday's virtual awards ceremony you'll hear from keynote speaker Winona LaDuke and help us recognize and celebrate the work of these four individuals (bios below).

→ Here's the link to save your spot, Thursday December 9th​

Okay, now let's get to know each of the recipients.

John Beard, Jr.

John Beard Jr. is a former oil & gas industry worker who now works to protect his Texas community from petrochemical pollution. He's the founder, chairman and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network (“PA-CAN”) of Port Arthur, TX, a community based environmental, social justice and community development organization.

John is also a former three term City Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem, having served his hometown of Port Arthur on numerous boards and committees. He has been active in public affairs for over 33 years, and is retired from ExxonMobil Corporation with 38 years of service in petrochemical refining.

Love Sanchez

Love was born and raised in the Corpus Christi Texas bay area where she co-founded the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend. A member of Karankawa Kadla Tribe of the Texas Gulf Coast, she is the mother of two boys and comes from a family of 6 girls.

For the past five years, Love has been working to stop the fossil fuel expansion in Corpus Christi, TX. She helped bring a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers & Enbridge to stop an oil export terminal expansion. Alongside other grassroots organizations in her area, she helped build a support base around stopping the development of desalination plants, which serve as a chokehold for the fossil fuel industry that needs more water for their production.

Love is now embarking on stopping the offshore Enbridge Seawall Pipeline between Houston and Corpus. Her work focuses on stopping the crude oil export expansion and petrochemical buildout in the Gulf Coast. She is passionate about building community, people power, and protecting the land and water for future generations.

Travis London

Travis is the cousin and former Secretary/Chief Financial Advisor to the late Louisiana activist, Alberta Hasten. He is a Community Organizing Fellow and Project Lead at Public Lab who has worked alongside Sharon Lavigne, Rise For St James, and a legal team to delay the construction of Formosa Plastics’ proposed $9.4 billion petrochemical facility in St. James, LA. Currently, Travis is leading a team alongside Public Labs and Healthy Gulf to challenge the Formosa project’s environmental impact statement. This year, he was also featured in the The Times Leader in Ohio for comments he made against the Mountainer LNG project.

In 2020, Travis helped organize a coalition of activists in Texas and Louisiana opposed to fossil fuel and petrochemical developments. He appeared in a Netflix series alongside Diane Wilson on the show Dirty Money: Port Comfort episode, highlighting how Diane Wilson won her lawsuit against Formosa Plastics, the largest settlement from an individual lawsuit in environmental history. He was also featured in a Climate Reality video entitled Economics Impacts of Plastic (A-Z Series).

As part of his volunteer activism, Travis has been featured in advertisements for the national PL+US campaign, which has won $15 wages and paid leave/sick leave for some minimum wage workers in the U.S, and he has represented the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization before the EPA. His upcoming work includes being featured in an Anthropocene River Campus webinar this month at Tulane University concerning Death Alley in Louisiana and in a forthcoming article about carbon emissions from Vox.

Veronica Coptis

Veronica Coptis grew up in western Greene County near the Bailey Mine Complex and is now the executive Director of Center for Coalfield Justice. Veronica Coptis joined the CCJ staff in March 2013 as a Community Organizer and is now serving as the Executive Director.

Before joining the CCJ staff, Veronica served on the Board of Directors for CCJ and organized with the Mountain Watershed Association. She received a bachelor’s degree in biology from West Virginia University. She enjoys hiking and geocaching at Ryerson State Park and other areas around Greene County with her husband and daughters.

RSVP for the Sentinel Awards Today!

I hope you'll join us in celebrating these 4 leaders in our movement.

❤️ If you've been to the Sentinel Awards, then you know how inspiring and heartfelt this event is. If you haven't, I really hope you'll register today so you can join us next week.

​→ Click here to save your spot​

Sincerely,
Ryan Clover
Halt the Harm Network