Erin Brockovich on Saving the World

Brockovich has also writ­ten a mem­oir and, this year, ser­ial envi­ron­men­tal thrillers star­ring an activist sin­gle mom named AJ Palladino who Brockovich admits is a lot like her­self — only AJ is bet­ter at speak­ing her mind: “I love where she’ll roll her eyes, or the lit­tle com­ments that’ll come out of her mouth,” Brockovich says. “I still kind of tend to bite the inside of my lip and not let com­ments roll out like that.”

Rock Bottom, released ear­lier this year, chron­i­cled AJ’s fight against mountaintop-removal min­ing in West Virginia. The sequel, Hot Water, has AJ look­ing into a con­tro­ver­sial nuclear-research facil­ity. Brockovich calls the book a “cause novel.” “It’s some­thing that’s fun to read,” she says, “but when you close the book, you think, ‘Maybe I should become proac­tive, maybe [these prob­lems are] in my own backyard.’”

You could call Hot Water (writ­ten with author CJ Lyons) an envi­ron­men­tal thriller — a bit breath­less and heavy-handed, but unde­ni­ably a page turner, its plot pro­pelled around twists and turns by cliff-hanging chap­ter closers like: “Half a mil­lion dol­lars … Enough to send David to any col­lege he wanted, to bankroll our com­pany for the next decade, to be able to work on projects that really mat­tered … All I’d have to do was betray every­thing I believed in and let myself be bought.”

We caught up with Brockovich to ask about her lat­est novel and what else she’s been work­ing on.

Q. Why did you decide to focus on nuclear research in this book?

A. There’s still a lot of secrecy behind our nuclear facil­i­ties. That’s why we decided to make this one about nuclear.

There [are] some issues, def­i­nitely, with nuclear prob­lems in and around the coun­try. I mean, there’s stud­ies out there now about babies that have radioac­tive mate­r­ial in their teeth. They call it the Tooth Fairy study. Really, that’s what they call it. And we’re just not that aware.

I think we have con­cerns about nuclear melt­downs, espe­cially after what hap­pened in Japan. We’re not fac­ing a cri­sis like in [Fukushima], but I think what’s hap­pened is we’ve got­ten either com­pla­cent or for­got­ten about nuclear, [about] what could hap­pen if some­thing goes wrong. There are new ways to find and har­ness our energy; [nuclear] has the poten­tial, if some­thing goes wrong, to be quite dan­ger­ous, and some­thing we can’t take back.

I’m hop­ing that the book will strike a chord in a reader’s mind, so maybe they can become more aware, they can be more out­spo­ken, about how and where we’re going to get our energy from.

Q. What advice do you have for some­one who, like you did, makes a dis­cov­ery of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or cor­po­rate wrong­do­ing and isn’t sure what to do with the information?

A. The first thing that per­son needs to do is just look at the prob­lem, ask some ques­tions, [and] talk to [their] neigh­bors. A lot of times, we don’t know what [infor­ma­tion] we can get. You can go under [the Freedom of Information Act]; it is your busi­ness to know what com­pany is in your town and what it’s doing. A lot of times in sit­u­a­tions like this, [com­mu­nity mem­bers] don’t ask, because someone’s going to say, “You’re not a doc­tor, you’re not a sci­en­tist, you’re just try­ing to cause prob­lems.” Don’t be deterred by that. A lot of times infor­ma­tion is just sit­ting there that no one knows is there. It hap­pened to me in Hinkley.

I’ve had a woman con­tact me from Middletown, Ohio. They live around AK Steel. And they’re con­cerned because they’ve had one or two peo­ple that had glioblas­tomas. Well, she started talk­ing to her neigh­bors; she started call­ing old neigh­bors that had moved away. She found 59 glioblas­tomas. Fifty-nine! All because she started ask­ing ques­tions. I had [another] woman con­tact me, and she and her girl­friends — there’s about 30 of them from high school and col­lege that were quite close — they all con­nected again because of Facebook. But they all had can­cer. And we were able to place them back, all of them, to one source that had a landfill.

If you’re not cer­tain where to start, send me an email. I have tens of thou­sands of peo­ple email me a month with dif­fer­ent issues, mostly envi­ron­men­tal. Let me know where you live, and we can track if there’s a facil­ity near you. I’m in dis­cus­sions with Google; we’re cre­at­ing the People’s Reporting Registry, [so peo­ple can report] what they think are too many can­cers in their area, or if there’s some­thing going on, whether it’s ground­wa­ter con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or soil vapor intru­sion; it could even be nuclear. As soon as we get this map up, you’ll be able to check it, and you might be able to start answer­ing your own ques­tions a whole lot quicker.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.