Erin Brockovich - Fighting for Safe Water

This episode features Erin Brockovich discussing her ongoing advocacy for safer water systems and community empowerment to address environmental pollution.

1. Empowerment through self-advocacy is crucial in fighting environmental injustices.
2. Grassroots movements, especially those led by local communities, are effective in driving change.
3. Governmental and judicial responses to environmental crises are often slow and inadequate.
4. Individuals must take personal responsibility for their environment and community well-being.
5. Educating oneself and the community is a foundational step in addressing and resolving crises.

1. Introduction

Overview of Erin Brockovich’s background and her initial engagement with environmental issues. Focus on her discovery of water contamination in Hinckley. Erin Brockovich: "It dawned on me, it’s the water."

2. The Power of Community

Discusses the role of community organizing and local government participation in environmental advocacy. Erin Brockovich: "It actually changes at ground zero with you and organizing a community."

3. Challenges and Responses

Exploration of the limitations of the legal and political systems in addressing environmental crises, with examples from Brockovich's career. Erin Brockovich: "The judicial system isn't the answer."

4. Future Perspectives

Brockovich shares insights on the future of environmental advocacy and the importance of proactive measures rather than reactive responses. Erin Brockovich: "Superman is not coming; we have to be our own heroes."

1. Educate Yourself and Your Community: Understand the local environmental issues and potential dangers.
2. Participate in Local Governance: Engage in city council meetings and local elections.
3. Organize and Mobilize: Form or join community groups focused on environmental safety.
4. Demand Transparency and Accountability: Hold corporations and local governments accountable for environmental practices.
5. Document and Share Evidence: Collect evidence of pollution or misconduct and share it with the community and authorities.

Erin Brockovich became a household name when her crusade against the polluting power company PG&E in a small California town was dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts. But her mission to empower communities to fight for environmental justice didn't end there.
Erin joined host Jay Ruderman to share her journey from a Kansas childhood marked by dyslexia to becoming a pivotal figure in environmental advocacy. Jay and Erin talk about the immense influence of her parents and a crucial school teacher in fostering her dogged persistence, the necessity of community action and local involvement, and her ongoing efforts to address environmental crises in America.

People

Erin Brockovich, Jay Ruderman

Companies

PG&E

Books

"Superman is Not Coming" by Erin Brockovich

Guest Name(s):

Erin Brockovich

Content Warnings:

None

Jay Ruderman
So your point is? Stop waiting for a hero to show up. You are the hero. We can be our own heroes. You already are.

Erin Brockovich
You just gotta look at that person in the mirror and go, I'm gonna boss up today. In the year 2000, Erin Brockovich became a household name with the release of the film that highlighted her work on California water pollution. But her story didn't start in Hinckley. I have something they call dyslexia. I really didn't know.

We think. Every single mind is supposed to think, talk, act, look alike, do the same. It's just. It would be impossible. And dyslexics, we code differently.

I can read. I'm plenty smart, but I'm a very visual learner. Erin's findings in Hinckley set the stage for the rest of her career. And I just stood there and I was like, what is a common denominator that all of these people are utilizing? And it dawned on me, I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's the water.

Jay Ruderman
In the years since, Erin has used what she learned in Hinckley and her notoriety from the film to advocate for communities all around the country suffering from environmental pollution. We think it's going to trickle down from the top. It doesn't. It actually changes at ground zero with you and organizing a community and showing up. Erin's wealth of experience has led her to one conclusion.

We've got to be our own heroes.

Thank you so much for being my guest in all about change. I am really looking forward to this discussion. Let's start with your childhood, growing up in Kansas, who instilled in you your persistence and your sense of right and wrong. So there was three really instrumental people. My mom was a huge inspiration to me.

Erin Brockovich
She was as a journalist and a sociology major. Very interesting combo. And then my dad was an engineer, and he ran and built pipelines for industry. He was a mechanical and industrial engineer. And both of them were instrumental in my life for a plethora of reasons.

My mom in particular, because I'm a dyslexic. So school was very difficult for me. And my mom would always tell me, you gotta find your stick to itiveness. I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought it was a made up, you know, Kansas slang word.

And she ended up reading me the definition. And its definition is noun. A propensity to follow through in a determined manner. Dogged persistence born of obligation and stubbornness. Now, see, this I understood.

I am stubborn. I'm very dogged. But it helped me almost focus those feelings and those emotions. I was always playing outside. I was following the creeks, chasing the water, amazed at the environment.

Everything about it was teaching me what I didn't want to learn in school, and I understood it, but I just didn't want to learn it in school. So my dad is the one that taught me about respect of the environment. He is the one, and I know he saw things about what would go wrong with the water and promised me in my lifetime, I would see water as a scarcity, as a commodity. And those two were the main key characters. The other would be a school teacher.

Jay Ruderman
So I just wanted to dig down on that a little bit more. You know, I have a child with ADHD, and school has been a complete disaster for him. So do you think when you were growing up that dyslexia was understood? Dyslexia, in my opinion, was terribly misunderstood, and I believe that it is still misunderstood today. I think we talk about it more, whether it's ADD or ADHD or what we call learning disabilities, dyslexia.

Erin Brockovich
I worry if we don't get out of this box of how is it that we think? Every single mind is supposed to think, walk, talk, act, look alike, do the same. It's just. It would be impossible. And dyslexics, we code differently.

I can read. I'm plenty smart, but I'm a very visual learner, and I recognize patterns, and so if I don't see those, I feel like that cat that has tape on its paws, and I'm like, where am I? But that wasn't allowed. So it was a school teacher. Her name is Kathy Borseth, and interestingly enough, she was my psychology teacher.

And one day, leaving class, she was passing out the exams. And I could see mine. I could see the big old f on there. And she said, well, erin, I'm interested here. You know, everything in class.

You're the one that always has your hand up. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. I know. But yet when we test, you fail. And so Kathy Warsaw said, well, if I gave you this test orally, do you think you could pass it?

I said, absolutely. And she just randomly went through there, and I knew everything. She goes, you do know? I go, yes, I do know. And it's, like, been stuck inside of me because nobody sees me, nobody hears me, nobody believes me.

To this day, I still get frustrated by that, and I get even more frustrated in my work when I see the same thing happening to communities. And so I can't help myself. It almost becomes a calling of, how do you push out? If a door closes? How do we go through a window?

Where do we go? So I want to go back to what propelled you to fame. The case against PG and e, the company that had contaminated the groundwater in Hinckley, California, and led to the movie that bears your name. Can you just give us a short recap of, for those listeners who may not be aware of the story of what happened? So I ultimately graduated high school, graduated from college, went on to have a family, and had three children.

Found myself being a single mom. And at the time, I was living in Reno, Nevada, and I had a car accident. And during that, before a trial, I moved down here and met somebody, was actually the biker dude, and still had a lot of problems going on. And he introduced me to Jim Vitato to help me in my car accident situation. And Jim Venoteau's partner was Ed Masri, the man played in the film by Albert Finney.

So we had a trial. I didn't win. I needed a job. This firm told me it would be okay. It wasn't okay.

So Jimmy had introduced me to Ed Masri, and I needed a job. I didn't come in with a law degree. I didn't come in with some PhD. I came in as a single mom. I came in with a really good skill set, and I had a really good.

I'm an empath in many ways, and I can feel things. And I know that sounds weird, but it's true. It becomes very vibrational for me, a connection. People will tell me their life stories. I want to hear it.

I get it. I understand that there's no box. There's no judgment. There's full on acceptance. I get it.

And so ed decided to hire me and put me in the workers compensation department, because I have that good skill set. And that's where I started my work with Mazarin Vitato. And one afternoon, if people haven't seen the film, he came into my office with a big archive box. See, I love my archive boxes. I still do.

It's a whole thought process that goes on here in my dyslexic mind. I have to touch it, feel it, see it. And there was a bunch of test results of children that piqued my curiosity. I was a young mom, 31 years old. I had a baby, Elizabeth, who was twelve months old, that I was taking up to Hinkley with me when I eventually started going out there.

But so I was intrigued that it was children. And all the blood tests were done in a bar. Graph again, I'm visual. So, see? I could clearly see.

Wow, this is out of range. So I went to this great box we had called Google, and I just started researching and learning myself. A lot of these test results were indicating disease, potential cancer. And I was really curious. If I saw a blood test like this on my kids, I'd want to know what the heck's going on.

So I asked Mister Masri if I could go out to Hinckley. And what happened for me there was the minute I honestly had my feet planted on that ground, it was a perfect storm that started to brew for me. Power of observation is great. I started noticing all the trees were dying, which I thought was weird. When I met neighbors, they would tell me about all the animals that were dying, or the dairy farmers and the cows covered in tumors, and they took me to see them.

I could see that something was really wrong, and I could feel it. All the trees were secreting this white stuff out of the little pine ends of them. And as I just stood there, I'm like, what is happening out here in this desert town, where people come for fresh air and clean well water and freedom of living and enjoying riding their horses? Everything's sick and dying. I couldn't understand it.

And I just stood there, and I was like, what is a common denominator that all of these people are utilizing? And it dawned on me, I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's water. And that set me out on my journey and ultimately discovering that a large utility, Pacific gas and electric, had knowingly been dumping hexavalent chromium into unlined ponds. And all these people had been drinking it. And one thing that I did recognize quickly was the mothers in particular weren't being heard.

They weren't being listened to. Here we go again. I'm back in the classroom. You aren't this. You aren't that.

You're being hysterical. You're not a doctor. You're not a lawyer, you're not a scientist. Let me tell you. Well, you don't need to be any of that to be a mom and to know something's wrong with your child.

And for me, it became a moment where I didn't have to be any of that to be a human and to tell you that I'm looking at two headed frogs and green water coming out of the tap, that something is wrong. And I, at that moment, thought of my dad about that respect, giving that respect to listening to these people, believing in these people. And it became a phenomenal response because I believed in them and they believed in me. And we began to work together collectively to really uncover what had happened to them and telling a true story. It's a very emotional film.

Jay Ruderman
I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. I want to bring you, Aaron, back to Hinckley. Is litigation a way to get people justice? That's an excellent question that over 30 years I have a different perception of, yes, the judicial system is part of something that we need to help find a form of justice. There is no amount of money ever, that could give them a child back or their health back or take away the fear that they're going to die of a disease or cancer that is related to something that was hidden to them and poisoning them for years and years and years.

Erin Brockovich
So the judicial system isn't the answer. I think we need to look at the up front of infrastructures and safety first. And being honest with communities. I have learned that people, they handle the truth. They never handle the lie.

None of us can make a choice if we don't know what the truth is. Right? You've devoted your life to this, and you've written a book called Superman is not coming. Talk about what's going on in this country and what the risks people are facing in terms of just drinking water. I began my work in Hinckley in late 1991, and I was a single mother of two toddlers and an infant today.

And I just want to kind of give that span up front again. I'm the visual one. So if I can help explain that, I'm going to be 64 this Friday, and I'm now the grandmother of four. Happy birthday. So it's been a.

Thank you. It's been a long career, and I've been able to observe a lot in that time about the law, about agencies, about the government, about companies. It's easier to kick the can down the line to the next CEO, to the next president, to the next governor. And all of this is just built up and built up and built up and built up and built up. And I think now we're seeing a huge impact of things that happened 30 years ago that were starting to work up against a wall and we got nowhere else to go.

And for me, it's astounding, because that timeframe that I presented for you from 31 to 64, do the math. Not much has changed. I got smacked by all of it in my 30 year span. I think I've been through six administrations, both Democrat and Republican, and we still got the same result. We haven't accomplished much.

I don't think the finger pointing of right or left is where we need to be when we are going to talk about our environment and most specifically our water, most necessary element to sustain all of life is in huge jeopardy. And I believe that climate change is going to be water issues. I've said this for a long time. We are watching that happening right now. We're going to live it too much, too little, none at all.

We see here in America, we see flooding going on right now in Florida. You know, we're seeing scarcity of water. Aquifers are going to run out of water. We see droughts. We're going to see huge interruptions to the supply chain.

We'll see more vector diseases. We'll see migratory pathway changes. We'll see municipalities when they get flooded. You can't just turn these systems back on. You can't get air in those lines.

You're going to have all kinds of bacterial outbreaks. We're seeing it now. I think the real issue that we need to be paying extraordinarily close attention to is going to be our water supplies or the lack of water supplies. And while we continue to argue about climate change, which is here, you don't have to call it anything. I think if you would just educate yourself and take a look around, things are different.

We need to stop the fighting and start having a legitimate plan, being realistic about the goals, because we're not going to switch these things tomorrow. This will be decades in the making and start getting prepared for what is in front of us. So, Aaron, I have to ask you, if the political system is not addressing this vital issue and if industry is not policing itself, by and large, and if the justice system can be helpful but is slow and limited, what is the way forward? How do people in communities across America make sure that their water is safe? What can they do?

Well, what I have seen from Hinckley through Flint, Michigan, through whenever there's a big crisis like that, I'm usually the first one that they come to. And what I have learned is that the change comes from within you. The change will never happen with us sitting here and going, it's your fault and you fix it. And that's supposed to be your job. So I encourage communities and the mothers, when they get organized, you know, you got a group of moms, they've got stick to it and it's like nobody's business.

Jay Ruderman
Right? And for them, they'll stay in it as long as they have to until there's a resolve oftentimes we don't go to our very own local city councils. That's where actual changes about your local municipalities exist. We think it's going to trickle down from the top. It doesn't.

Erin Brockovich
It actually changes at ground zero with you and organizing a community and showing up doesn't matter. You don't have to know all the science in the world. Just show up. People always say, what action can I take? Just show up.

Just ask a question at city council. One of the stories, and I want to share it here real quick, is exactly what I'm talking about. I share in the book, and it happens to be in Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain. And they had lead levels, their system, higher than what we were seeing in Flint. Now, that was bad.

So the community came to us, and myself and Robert Baucock, who's a water expert and watermaster, and we worked with the community on what they could do. So first of all, they understood why. Understand why you are having a water problem. In their situation, it was lead. They had all this lead because the municipality was using chloramines.

They started adding ammonia to the system, and that created a huge corrosive water system inside lead pipes. So all the lead was leaching out of those pipes into the distribution system and was being delivered to the tap. You can't smell lead in the water. You can't see lead in the water. So we educated the moms, and they got very organized about why they had lead in the water, and they started going door to door and informing their other neighbors.

And what they started learning was they, too, had sick children, skin rashes, their hair was falling out. They didn't understand. Their attention wasn't there. They didn't seem to be learning the same. The teachers were reporting it, so they became very informed, and they chose, you know what?

I want to learn what's going on. These mothers, I'm not kidding. You would have math equations on their drywall in the house because they could look at it and study it. Long story short, a couple of the ladies said, we need to do more. They were having local city council elections.

They ran for office, city council. And they won. They won. And now here they are, informed as community members on city council what was happening, and they created an initiative that they wanted to put to vote. Now that everyone understood, do you want to add ammonia to your system?

Yes or no? Unanimously, community voted no. It went all the way to the state, and they won their referendum and their amendments, and they stopped adding ammonia to the system. Wow. And I'm so thrilled to tell you, as of March 2020, that community has lead free water.

Jay Ruderman
That's awesome. That's the power to the people. That's the power to you. That's the power to the individual. And I think we're finding ourselves now, and that is key.

Erin Brockovich
And when we do, I truly believe that we'll look at ourselves again and see, I do have the courage, and I do have the brain. I have the ability. I am a mom. I can see. I can feel.

I can tell you something's wrong. And that's really the power of how and where it happens. And again, I've been doing this for 30 years, and I can assure you 100% of the time, that is what makes the greatest outcome of all. Whether there's a lawsuit or not, they can change their circumstances. They can begin to protect themselves, prepare themselves when they're informed, when they know the truth, when they organize as their neighbors and have that respect for each other, their community, their environment, that if they make more change than the United States EPA.

Jay Ruderman
So your point is that stop waiting for a hero to show up. You are the hero. We can be our own heroes. You already are. You just don't know it.

Erin Brockovich
You just got to look at that person in the mirror and go, I'm going to boss up today. Right. That's powerful. I want to talk about something much more recent. In 2023, there was a train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, and it set off a chain of events that caused a lot of harm to people that were living miles around.

Jay Ruderman
You visited the crash site. You were there. What did you experience when you showed up there? Exactly what I always experienced. They weren't seen, they weren't heard, they weren't respected.

Erin Brockovich
They were lied to. And it's very upsetting. You know, I. I never want to say you've come to expect a big corporation to lie, but, you know, when they're in trouble, they tend to possibly do that. But I don't want to make a broad stroke about that, because I do believe that there are well intended companies that.

That want to do the right thing. But with Norfolk, it was kind of a whitewashed, a situation that never needed to have happen, that quickly got covered up, that created a lot of chaos. We. Oh, my gosh, we don't believe and we don't listen to, and we have no empathy for those that are living it, breathing it, drinking it, experiencing it. That can't possibly be.

No, the science isn't here. That has to be made up. You're being hysterical. I go. I go nuts when I'm out there.

And I can't imagine how these people feel, but it's there. I don't want to use words like gaslight, because I. Now, I guess everything could be seen as that, but that's exactly what happens to them. You're trying to tell them what they didn't expect, what they experienced, they didn't really experience, and it's maddening. So I was out there several times, and I didn't come back because I was being exposed myself.

Jay Ruderman
You got sick. I got sick. And so even the CDC had people getting sick. First of all, you could smell it. You could smell it.

Erin Brockovich
And everybody else was standing there that were reporters too. Their eyes were burning. And so there was multiple occasions, whether it was the people I was working with, whether it was the media, they would tell me they could smell it. Their eyes were watering, but yet nobody was doing anything. I'm like, this is B's.

And so I'd go home. I kept coming back. And around the fifth visit, I started having my lacrimal and my goblet cell on. My eyes were burnt away and I was sick. I always believed these people, but most people wouldn't.

And so I stopped going out there. I tried to work with people remotely, and I still do, and I'm still in touch with some. And I was very disturbed and very taken back, that during many of my community meetings one evening, somebody sent to me report from Yahoo that I had been returned into a homeland security fusion center as a potential terror threat. Wow. So you think you were getting blackballed?

Well, you want to talk about a good way to silence somebody, put them on a list like that? Yeah, it still upsets me. I have not often been able to talk about it. Homeland Security created these fusion centers after 911 for a good reason. And it makes me wonder that are we now utilizing that as a way to silence an activist or activism that a company or somebody may not like to silence a community's voice?

I would find that extremely concerning. I still haven't got all the answers as to how it happened. I'm learning more and more about the fusion centers, but it would be terrifying that it could have been a situation where I would be on a list or I couldn't fly or I couldn't travel. So I see it as a way to silence people, and that's disturbing. And what about the Environmental Protection Agency?

Jay Ruderman
Isn't that this why this agency was created, to protect our environment? Are they doing anything to improve the situation? No. So there was a lot of things that went wrong in East Palestine starting in the beginning. And I listen, I'm not taking any accolades for this, but we watched and I'm thinking, day after day after day, did anybody not, like, see the fireball that looked like an atomic bomb throwing up in the sky that people were reporting on, but nobody was talking about it.

Erin Brockovich
Talk about an elephant in a room and everybody's just walking around. But locals were like, on their own cameras. They're like, what is no. Why is no one talking about this from the get go?

This was a cover up. And we now learn that the railroad had days why it was burning. They're the ones that decided. And how this got by the state or state agencies, I still don't really know. But they dug a trench and they bled out the chemicals in the rail cars and lit it on fire.

I think second grade science might tell you that's not a really good idea. So for me, it's like, whoa, what are you hiding that you just blew up and has now gone everywhere? The EPA was slow to respond. Agencies were slow to respond. There was lack of information, lack of communication.

There was chaos. There was cover ups. There was senators asking questions. And people were asking, actually, where was department of transportation? Where was the EPA?

Who was out here? Where was FEMA? Where are you going to put these people? It was a shit show. I don't know what else to say.

I hope I can say that on your podcast. I apologize. They were absent, and even stories are coming out today, and the media was there in the beginning. But once it settles down, these people are still left with the problem. We do know the CDC had sick people.

They called them off. We do have several occasions where the United States EPA came out and said, well, there's some levels. If it was my kids, yeah, I wouldn't let you play around the creek. Well, that would have been helpful information months beforehand, even today, that they're now admitting that they are finding pockets of vinyl chloride. So it's like the whole situation's happened.

There's a settlement now they're kind of coming back in to go, oh, wait a minute. Maybe we're wrong. And that's the problem. That's the problem with the EPA. You're letting all of these chemicals into the stream of commerce first.

And then when there's an accident like this, they get studied through us, and it takes decades to do that, to finally come to a conclusion. Oh, yeah, oops, we made a mistake. We've got to stop that. That's what I was talking about earlier. We have got to put safety and people first.

Jay Ruderman
Right. You should know what these chemicals do before they ever enter the environment. And again, if we talk about the Norfolk Southern railroad situation, they had infrastructure failures on the line that they knew about. But once again, we don't want to fix those infrastructures. This is going to boil down to even when we really get to water, it's going to all be about our infrastructures.

Erin Brockovich
They're antiquated, they're outdated. And if we don't shore up those infrastructures, we will continue to have disasters like this. And that is what happened in Norfolk. These things don't need to happen. We allow them to continue to happen because we put profits and money first, health and safety last.

That's not working out so well for any of us. So the $600 in a class action might not get spread too far. It will get spread, but the dollar value will be less and less and less to the families, and that will be up to the courts and the laws to figure out that structure. I'm definitely not a part of that, like I was a part of, you know, knowing precisely in Hinckley and Kettleman and these other pg and e cases what was going on. But I can assure you, at the end of the day, I talked to these communities and they would tell you, I do believe the law wants to help make it whole, but that the justice in a settlement isn't a solution.

I would like to see the law look at more legislative changes, look at more policies. I think at the EPA, you know, we don't necessarily need a bunch of new rules on the book. What we need is better oversight, better enforcement, better follow through so we can catch these things before they happen. Yeah. The money is not solving the issue.

Jay Ruderman
But let me ask you just to sort of leave this with the listeners who might be saying, what's going on with my own water? How do they look into it? How do they, you know, ensure that they and their families are safe? If we will accept that, maybe not somebody else has got our back or is watching this, maybe I myself will take part in it. Just your observations again and again and again and again.

Erin Brockovich
And this is another story I talk about in Superman's not coming. In upstate New York, where they were turning the ammonia feed on, and the waterkeeper, the head of the municipality, made an observation. Every time he turned on the ammonia feed, his customer started calling him, my skin is burning. I have a funny rash. My children's eyes are burning.

And this water operator figured it out. He goes, wait a minute. Every time they call, I'm turning on a pneumonia feed. He ultimately shut it off. So use the power of your own observation.

Don't be afraid to call your own municipality. Show up to a city council, talk to your neighbors. You know, it's funny, we don't do that anymore, yet we live right next door to somebody. You know, hey, how are you? Are you experiencing this?

But we don't want to do that because, and I see communities, the minute they do, somebody else is going to tell them, you shouldn't be saying anything. Or you could drive our property values down, or what do you know? And they then we retract.

Look, your gut is your second brain. That's science. It talks to us, but we ignore it. That's why I say bring it home. And if you're living it and breathing it and experiencing it, and you're seeing it happen and you're seeing it happen to your child, you can email me, make a phone call to the municipality.

If you're not getting any answers, show up at city council, go down to city council, voice your concern, sign a petition, take an action, and pay attention to what's going on around you. I think we all see it and we don't have to demon a name or climate change. It is, something's wrong. And don't assume that somebody else is taking care of it. And this is why I created my community health book, a place for people to report to.

I wished I had it up because it is daunting. And we've put up live images of bath water, bucket water, kitchen sink, tap water, shower heads in the buckets. Oklahoma, Texas, Boston, North Carolina, South Carolina, California.

That is a representation of America's water supply. It's disgusting and it's shameful. And again, these municipalities, they've got budgetary problems. They've spin it wrong. They don't have the appropriate filtration system, and it costs $100 million on some filtration systems just to keep one chemical out of the water.

Just one. And so we have a lot of problems. We, every day I get lead reports. Every day we see more legionnaire outbreaks. Every day there's a whole host of reasons why your water's black, yellow, green, purple.

I can tell you if it's running green, I'm going to worry about a chemical called hexavalent chromium. If it's orange, we can tell you that you've probably got chloramines in the system. You have an acidic water source that's causing all the iron and the lead and the manganese that's precipitating out of the pipes is being delivered to your tap. Oh, my gosh. For heaven's sakes.

I was up the United States Capitol talking about lead. I went into the women's washroom and there was a sign, don't drink. The water contains lead. Are you for real? Took a picture of it.

It's in the book. So either we're normalizing this or there's an elephant in the room we still don't want to look at. And for me, the most important thing to say to everybody is please don't assume. And never assume and think that you can't, because you can. If you see it, if you smell it, if you're experiencing it, if you're sick, if a neighbor's sick, your child, ask a question, get on this great big brain thing we got called Google.

Make some phone calls, call the municipality, email me. Go to communityhealthbook.com. dot. Take an action, any action. And when I say show up, show up for yourself, because I don't think anyone else is going to do it for us.

Jay Ruderman
I want to thank you for your leadership, your national leadership on this issue. You've done so much. You're going to continue to do a lot. And thank you so much for being my guest and all about change. Thank you for having me.

Erin Brockovich
It's so hard to explain everything in a short time. You did a great job. And thank you. You know what? It'll be up to us.

But I listen. I always end on a hopeful note. And I know it may sound corny, but I believe in us, and I think we can change and we can see ourselves and we can join together again. And it seems very daunting. I'm experiencing it, too.

But I'm going to forever be an optimist. And I will go down fighting, and I will go down with hope. The change isn't over there in something magical. The change is going to happen within us, and when we find us, we prevail. Thank you so much.

Jay Ruderman
This was such a great conversation and I really enjoyed it. I'm a big fan. So thank you so much. It was nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Erin Brockovich's story has inspired countless individuals and communities to feel empowered, to ask questions and to advocate for themselves. To find or share information about your own water, you can head to communityhealthbook.com. that's it for today's episode. Join us two weeks from today for my conversation with actress and reproductive rights activist Tory DeVito. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Chasson with story editing by Yochai Maital and Mijon Zulu.

To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website, allaboutchangepodcast.com. if you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We'd really appreciate it. All about Change is produced by the Ruderman Family foundation in partnership with PodP People. That's all for now.

I'm Jay Ruderman, and we'll see you next time on all about change.

Erin Brockovich
But not goodbye.