This isn’t a book I planned to read. From my perspective, Brockovich’s activism is more relevant to American readers and I’d be better off reading Maude Barlow’s Whose Water Is It Anyway? (2019).
In some respects, this is true. Brockovich does present some detailed information and updates about water pollution and scarcity in specific communities and regions in the United States.
But even when that’s true, there’s a much broader truth alongside. With just a handful of pages, I decided to read on. Consider this: “In Hinkley, and everywhere since, the problems I work on start with a lie – something we are all taught about as kids growing up.”
In this era of “alternative facts”, each of us bears a renewed responsibility to investigate and educate ourselves. When Rachel Carson was questioning the indiscriminate use of pesticides in the United States in the mid-20th-century, she was vilified and attacked by industry representatives. (Even though she did not advocate for those substances to be banned, only to be tested, and she even recommended their use in some situations—in areas struggling with malaria, for instance.)
Decades later, little has changed. The Union of Concerned Scientists has revealed how often and devastatingly corporations have interfered with the scientific process to prioritize profits over safety and sustainability. Brockovich shares specifics, but generally speaking, corporations can manipulate and control the scientific process by: terminating and suppressing research, intimidating or coercing individuals; manipulating study designs and research protocols, ghostwriting scientific articles, and engineering publication bias (i.e. only revealing data which supports their desired outcome). She’s talking about water, but it doesn’t end there.
And why do we care? That’s a question that Brockovich urges us to answer—why. For her, it’s her grandkids. “I think of their sweet, innocent faces and my love for them. Then I think of all the children who need our voices and need us to fight for their future. I think of their happiness and for a healthy, clean world for them to live in and enjoy. It keeps me motivated, especially when the work seems daunting. Think about your why and let that fuel your fighting spirit.”
So, yes, she does list the top six water contaminants (with varying nomenclature). And she does discuss changes in staffing levels at the Environmental Protection Agency (and the recent impact of #45’s administration too). And how the recurring harmful algae bloom (HAB) in Florida used to be an issue between October and February but, in 2018, its impact stretched through ten of the twelve months (killing sea life and birds).
But she’s also down-to-earth and forthright, even inspiring: “None of us need a Ph.D. or a science degree, or need to be a politician or a lawyer to be aware and to protect our right to clean water. I’ll take you step by step through how to take these actions to save your family and community.”
Here’s a brief excerpt of one of the denser elements, with a lot of information in a small space, but all clear and comprehensive and it ends on your dinner plate, so the relevance is clear and immediate:
“Chicken is big business in our country. Americans eat more chicken than any other country in the world, according to the National Chicken Council. Each year, the chicken industry (which consists of about thirty-five large companies) raises and slaughters almost 9 billion chickens for food. At the top of that chicken chain is Tyson, which processes and sells more than $11 billion worth of chickens each year and leads in the production of ready-to-cook poultry products. The company has a long record of criminal prosecutions for both pollution and labor practices. Tyson was the second-biggest polluter of our waterways from 2010 to 2014, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, ranking only behind AK Steel and just about the U.S. Department of Defense. Tyson and its subsidiaries’ processing plants dumped more than 104 million pounds of toxic pollutants into waterways during that time, more than Cargill, Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil combined. Think about that the next time you’re shopping for chicken at your grocery store.” (This was prepared for print pre-Covid, but there are fresh horrors every week for their workers, too. Just last week, for instance: here.)
When’s the last time you read a book about the state of the planet?
Even if you haven’t opted to read it, what’s the last book on the subject that you considered reading?
And, if you’ve never read one, what would convince you to do so?
And, yes, I’m really asking: I really want to know!
This sounds great! Like you, I’m wary of books with a strong US focus, but this seems to have a broader relevance. Water problems are everywhere. Here in rural Serbia, the water has arsenic, among other contaminants. I think the problem here is about lack of resources to build treatment plants, though. It’s more depressing when the funds exist, but corporate influence prevents the right thing from being done. Even after all these years of seeing it happen, I still can’t fathom the idea of human beings sitting around a table in a conference room, deciding to poison people for the sake of some extra profit. I just don’t know how it happens. Maybe that’s why corporate jargon is often so impenetrable: to shield the people making those decisions from the reality of what they’re doing?
I think the hard part about food in the U.S. is that we’re constantly told we eat like garbage. So, doctors recommend things like lean meats and grains. And then we read books about how the production of lean meats and grains is killing everything, so we feel guilty and stop. But then we’re back to where we started: being told what we eat is wrong. So, we start to wonder if we eat chicken in our own households, surely that doesn’t add up. Surely someone else will eat less chicken or no chicken, because we need to eat that bird for our heath because Americans eat like garbage!
I know this sounds like a rant, but there is a WILD circle of food shaming that exists in America. There’s sugar in almost all food, even foods you wouldn’t think of, a lot of butter, poor animal treatment, health problems and lack of health care, etc. In the U.S., it feels like I can’t be healthy and save the planet, too. I listened to an audiobook by philosopher Peter Singer called Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter: Why Our Food Choices Matter. In it, he made this argument that poor people shop at Wal-Mart and buy lots of processed food, meat, and dairy. People with more money were willing to try being vegan. But then at the end of the book he totally crapped on the poor family he followed, saying they could shop at more expensive, ethical stores if they just didn’t waste all their money on soda.
Thanks for your spirited comment, Melanie. Books like Brockovich’s are meant to inspire discussions, I’d say–and, then, action, of course. One point you make here strikes me as true: that we often choose what to do and not do based on our feeling that someone else will/should do something other than what we’re doing. But I know for myself that the wider the gap between what I intuitively feel is what I want to do (in shorthand, the “right” thing) and my actions, the more troubled and, ultimately, helpless I feel. When I can narrow that gap, I feel more like it’s worth trying to narrow it further and, when I lose that momentum, it’s hard to readopt the pattern. Now you’ve got me wondering about the word ‘shame’, but I think the overwhelming feeling for me is helplessness?
I’ve read that Singer book (or one with a similar title, anyway?) but I don’t remember that detail. It does remind me of a disagreement that resurfaces with someone in my life though, who claims to be all about equality and justice but declines to drink fair-trade coffee (because it costs more) whereas they could simply choose to drink less of it. (But, other people are at Timmy’s several times a day. And still OTHER people can afford to do the right thing more easily. Other people.)
Most of us are making that “soda choice” somewhere in our lives, electing to spend/dedicate resources to something that we know is morally reprehensible (e.g. supporting slave labour practices) or unhealthy (e.g. processed sugars). Maybe if we temporarily set aside the idea of a “perfect solution” and just concentrate on one change at a time, maybe that would feel less defeatist? There are so many times that, even when I believe I’ve made a good (i.e. fair) choice in the marketplace, that I uncover another piece of information that throws that belief to the winds. sigh
“Just the facts ma’am.” ;<)
Why this book, and many others of the ilk, are important reads.
What do Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, E. O. Wilson, Elizabeth Kolbert, and many others have in common?
They all wrote factual, logical, (mostly) easy to read books on aspects of environmental degradation relative to human sustainability that were/are widely applauded. And with each humanity continues business as usual, painting ourselves ever more perilously in a corner.
Why? We are, like all creatures, subjective beings, and the consequences of our proclivities are inconvenient problems that too many deal with by ignoring. We learn by experiencing, by taking risks, which is essential to getting through life, but don’t for the most part have enough foresight to recognize the degree of fatality in.
We are also in good part easily swayed, not necessarily recognizing the intent of those engaged in manipulation.
As our environmental problems escalate, we are seeing more literature addressing such in varying ways, and more readers developing an interest. Not so much though it seems, that we are seeing a meaningful dent in subjective literature.
In theory, humans’ tendency to be easily swayed should also work in favour of making positive changes.
What is it–convenience? apathy? a lack of self-regulation?–that makes it so easy to mimic patterns that lead to devastation rather than restoration. Simply that it’s more work perhaps.
In one sense, these books are easy to read, in that they are created with the non-science-y reader in mind. But they remain difficult reads in another sense.
It’s interesting how many discussions can spin off that basic question “What’s the motivation?” (A question that also leads to quality fiction, too, of course. If characters are sketched without the author determining their motivation–their “why”–they’re not believable in the end.)