Virtual: Bookmarks Presents Erin Brockovich

Bookmarks is thrilled to host Erin Brockovich, New York Times best-selling author and internationally renowned environmental advocate, on virtual tour for her long-awaited new book, Superman’s Not Coming. She will be in conversation with North Carolina-based journalist Justin Catanoso.
Erin Brockovich gained national attention after uncovering evidence of groundwater poisoning by PG&E in Hinkley, CA, leading to the largest medical settlement lawsuit in US history – later adapted into an Oscar-winning film.This event will be broadcast live on Crowdcast – please make a note of the Eastern time zone.
This is a pay-what-you-can event. Attendance is available to those who purchase a copy of Superman’s Not Coming or make a donation to Bookmarks below.
About Erin Brockovich:
Erin Brockovich is the president of Brockovich Research & Consulting and the founder of the Erin Brockovich Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to educate and empower communities in their fight for clean water. She is the coauthor of Take It from Me: Life’s a Struggle but You Can Win and has her own show on PodcastOne.
About Justin Catanoso:
Justin Catanoso is a North Carolina-based journalist, Wake Forest University educator, and Pulitzer Center grantee with more than 30 years of experience covering climate change, health care, science, economic development and business. He is the winner of the Science-in-Society Award and N.C. Press Association award for public service for his coverage of fraud in the tobacco industry in the early 1990s. Since 2015, he has been a regular contributor to Mongabay, an international environmental news organization, for which he covers climate change and climate policy. After 13 years as founding executive editor of The Business Journal in Greensboro, N.C., Catanoso is now Professor of Journalism at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
About Superman’s Not Coming:
From the environmental activist, consumer advocate, renowned crusader, and champion fighter whose courageous case against Pacific Gas and Electric was dramatized in the Oscar-winning film—a book to inspire change that looks at our present situation with water and reveals the imminent threats to our most precious, essential element as it shows us how, in large and practical ways, we can each take action to make changes in our cities, our towns, and our villages before it is too late.
In Erin Brockovich’s long-awaited book—her first to reckon with conditions on our planet—she makes clear why we are in the trouble we’re in and warns us that if we’re waiting for someone to save us, Superman isn’t coming. Nor is the government or the environmental agencies. No one is going to solve this for us. It is up to us, we the people, and Brockovich shows us how.
She shows us what’s at stake (the average American uses nearly one hundred gallons of water each day, for everything from drinking to cooking to bathing), writing of the unreported cancer clusters, of plastic pollutants in our tap water (we produce more than three hundred million tons annually of plastic in the world, and half of all plastics created for disposable items such as water bottles), of the fraudulent science that disguises these issues.
She identifies and describes the most toxic chemicals in everyday products, from shampoos and baby lotions to cell phones and Tupperware, with only a few hundred under regulation, among them asbestos, lead, mercury, radon, and formaldehyde.
She describes the saga of PG&E that continues to this day, and how her work in Hinckley, California, far from being a oneoff situation, opened up a rabbit hole bigger than anyone could have imagined, leading Brockovich to all of our backyards. We see the communities and people with whom she has worked and who have helped to make an impact: the water operator in Poughkeepsie, New York, who changed his system to create some of the safest water in the country; the moms in Hannibal, Missouri, who became the first citizens in the nation to file an ordinance prohibiting the use of ammonia in their public drinking water; the woman in Tonganoxie (Tongie), Kansas, who fought to keep a massive, $320 million Tyson chicken processing complex out of her town (population: 5,300).
Throughout, Brockovich, ever inspiring, empowers us, urging us to act on what we know is right: to ask questions, to scrutinize our water professionals; showing us ways to protect our health, our families, and our lives; to storm our city halls, to use local media, town hall meetings, etc., until our water is safe for everyone to drink. Whether we have PhDs, or degrees in science or in law; whether we’re politicians, or government or agency officials, Brockovich shows us how we can each take baby steps to make a difference that can, and will, and must change the world.