Erin Brockovich Quotes

Atrazine - a herbicide often used on corn fields, golf courses and even lawns - has become one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water.

Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.

I simply can't believe nice communities release effluents.

If we could begin to look at water pollution as a human rights violation, and we could begin to look at criminal aspects of this, I think that could be a game changer for many companies who want to not be forthwith and think that they can just hold off in a lawsuit for 10 years, and in the meantime, people are still being poisoned.

I will end the lawlessness that's destroying our environment. I will take polluters to court, not to lunch.

Contaminated water is not a problem limited to Flint. Think of New Jersey, where school fountains were found to contain unsafe levels of lead. Or the EPA's 33,000 superfund sites, which are highly-polluted areas that require long-term clean-up operations. The problem is so large that it feels insurmountable.

I always say I stumbled on the information about the poison in Hinkley's drinking water because I was sort of stumbling about in my life at that time generally, as a single mother.

When we uncovered the Hinkley case, there were so many other cases like it, and they're just catching up. And we're just starting to see the damage. I was hoping by now there would be more transparency and less defeat and cover-up. I haven't seen much of that change.

We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits.

No Minnesotan should ever experience preventable health risks from breathing polluted air or from drinking unsafe water.

There was pressure on the EPA to come out with a drinking water guideline, which it did in 2016. And when that guideline came out, it spurred even more testing across the country, including by the Department of Defense.

GE is the biggest polluter of the Hudson.. years ago they killed all the fish dumping millions of lbs. of pcb's into our waterways. Now let's make them pay for the cleanup.

It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in one of the nine counties effected in West Virginia …what it’s like to not have any water except to flush commodes and put out fires….It has devastated this area … everything is closing … no restaurant is allowed to open…, the people are in their homes, the schools are closed. You’re not supposed to take showers and certainly not supposed to drink the tap water…. I smelled it and tasted it, and I knew something was very wrong.

I believe that we have a huge problem with the water in America. We don't want to make that connection that these chemicals, at varying levels, in our water supplies, over time, is, in fact, related to our disease process. And it concerns me greatly.

Ohioans need peace of mind that the water coming out of their tap is safe. It's as simple as that.

For me, being green means cleaning up the water. Water is the key. Start with water. You can't ignore the fact that that nearly 80% of US waterways are potentially poisoned - benzene, solvents, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals.

Glyphosate is only one of more than 80,000 registered commercially produced chemicals in the U.S. Some of these compounds, such as PFOA and the one I made my name investigating, hexavalent chromium, have also been convincingly linked to health crises - testicular cancer in the case of PFOA and lung cancer in the case of chromium-6.

I'm concerned that we don't address the water pollution problems in other countries. If we move forward and don't clean up the messes of the past, they'll just get swept under the rug.

The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.

Safe drinking water isn't just something to worry about on your tropical vacation. U.S. tap water is ridden with arsenic, lead, and pharmaceutical drugs. In short: Get a filter.

In the 1950s and '60s, America's natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation's most polluted waterways.

There are issues the EPA should be dealing with. When I talk about the EPA and its role with the states, it's not an abolitionist view, that we don't need that agency. It's that the agency should act within the outlines established by Congress.

My fear is that we are losing sight of how much we depend on the EPA to protect not just our environment but the people who live in it.