Erin Brockovich is back: The activist Hollywood turned into a heroine is now taking on Meta and Google

Twenty-six years ago, her story of environmental activism and advocacy for community rights became the basis for one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office successes. Erin Brockovich, the film directed by Steven Soderbergh and released in 2000, grossed nearly $260 million and made its star, Julia Roberts, the highest-paid actress in history at the time: she earned $20 million for the role and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.

But the real Erin Brockovich, the woman who took on Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) with unwavering determination, did not remain just another heroine fashioned by Hollywood’s capitalist, and often patriarchal, storytelling instincts.

The powerful California gas and electric utility had spent years contaminating the groundwater in the desert town of Hinkley with hexavalent chromium, a highly carcinogenic chemical. Brockovich, who had no college degree, was a single mother of three and was still coping with the severe physical and psychological aftermath of a car accident, took on the corporate giant.

Against all odds, she won. The lawsuit culminated in a landmark 1996 settlement worth $333 million, to be divided among roughly 600 current and former residents.

Often dismissed as “the environmentalist with cleavage,” Brockovich frequently saw her blonde hair and striking looks turned into weapons against her. She had been crowned Miss Pacific Coast in 1981 at just 21 years old, and her appearance was repeatedly used as a pretext for the sexism and condescension directed her way.

Yet Brockovich, who by then had already gone through two divorces and was working as a legal assistant at a small law firm, had been raised by parents who instilled in her an extraordinary sense of resilience and self-confidence: her father was an industrial engineer, her mother a journalist and sociologist. It is one reason she has become such an enduring feminist role model.

An ecofeminist icon against Big Tech

Today, nearly three decades later, Brockovich has herself become the kind of U.S. phenomenon the country loves to celebrate: a celebrity activist with television shows, bestselling books and a lucrative speaking career. Yet she is back in the spotlight once again, offering a reminder that, whether or not she has been absorbed into the machinery of pop culture that so often consumes its heroines, her achievements were never fiction. Nor have they ever felt more relevant.

If in the 1990s she took on the powerful PG&E, today she has turned her activism toward the rapid and opaque expansion of artificial intelligence data centers across the United States. Armed with a more sophisticated operation, a strong social media presence and the infrastructure of her own environmental consultancy, Brockovich Research & Consulting, she has once again set her sights on a formidable target.

She has also launched Brockovich Data Center Reporting, an interactive citizen-reporting platform designed to gather information about the large-scale rollout of these facilities by technology giants such as Meta, Google and Microsoft. Brockovich has questioned the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the acquisition of vast tracts of land for projects that can span thousands of acres, as well as the enormous demands they place on energy and water resources.

Much of the water used in cooling systems does not immediately return to the local water cycle, as it evaporates during the process, reducing the effective availability of groundwater. She also points to other potential harms, including around-the-clock noise pollution, the use of persistent chemicals known as PFAS, the generation of electronic waste and the relatively limited number of quality local jobs created compared with the amount of land these facilities occupy.

But Brockovich’s impact as an environmental activist is only part of her legacy. Her significance as a feminist role model is equally important. This is despite the fact that she has always preferred to describe herself as an advocate for consumer rights and women’s health rather than as a feminist, let alone an ecofeminist.

Today, demanding transparency from the giants of Silicon Valley requires the same courage she showed when she stood up to gas-industry executives in Hinkley in the 1990s. That is why her story still resonates today. Brockovich proved that she did not need to alter her body, her wardrobe or her way of speaking to conform to the norms of corporate masculinity in order to defeat a major company. Her example continues to undermine the stereotype of the conventional activist: her feminism, and her ecofeminism, were born not from theory or academia, but from instinct, working-class pride and lived experience. But born they were, and in remarkable fashion.

Alicia H. Puleo, a renowned philosopher and co-director of the University of Valladolid’s online course Ecofeminism: Thought, Culture and Praxis, which has run for six editions and has been replicated at universities across Latin America, argues that Erin Brockovich is indeed a feminist role model. And an ecofeminist one too, even if she has never described herself that way. “She is part of this movement because she has fought, and continues to fight, to defend the Earth, the common home we all share,” Puleo says. “She also rejects the androcentric nature of authority and values emotion and the ability to empathize with people who have suffered.”

Eva Saldaña, executive director of Greenpeace Spain, makes a similar point. She argues that women’s leadership in climate and environmental activism is not a biological matter, as some claim, since that would amount to “an essentialist view.” Rather, many of these forms of leadership stem from women’s structural position in society because “the burden of care work and sustaining life has historically fallen on them.” She explains: “They are often the first to detect and experience the consequences of environmental degradation. They are characterized by putting life at the center, seeking to protect the environment and promote collective well-being, in contrast to models of domination and oppression that place the interests of a few above people, the planet and democracy.”

Charles Barthold, a lecturer at the Open University in the United Kingdom, a researcher in human resource management and organizational studies, and a PhD graduate of the University of Leicester, has also examined Brockovich through an ecofeminist lens. Together with David Bevan and Hervé Corvellec, he co-authored the 2022 paper An Ecofeminist Stance in Critical Practice: Challenging Corporate Truth in the Anthropocene, which analyzes three ecofeminist figures: U.S. environmentalist Rachel Carson and her campaign against DDT; Indian activist Vandana Shiva and her opposition to genetically modified organisms; and Erin Brockovich and her fight against hexavalent chromium.

Barthold argues that Brockovich embodies ecofeminist principles because “there is an inherent connection between feminism and environmentalism, particularly through an ethic of care that recognizes the interdependence of human beings and their environment. Patriarchy, by contrast, is grounded in an ontological dualism that separates human beings from the rest of nature.”

The legitimacy of lived experience

Without ever intending to, the environmental activist shattered many of the stereotypes traditionally associated with environmental campaigners. In return, she faced no shortage of criticism and discrimination. Partly because she was a woman and projected a form of femininity that many considered more suited to a Hollywood actress than an environmental advocate. But she was also dismissed because of her lack of formal academic credentials. During the Hinkley case, a number of lawyers and legal professionals sought to discredit her work, even refusing to treat her as a valid interlocutor.

But Brockovich showed, and continues to show, that empathizing with a community’s suffering and bringing to light health problems and harms that have been deliberately overlooked can be just as valuable as earning a stack of academic degrees. She demonstrated that lay knowledge, meaning the everyday, intuitive understanding rooted in personal experience, can be every bit as legitimate as expert or specialized knowledge.

“What she teaches us,” says Alfredo Menéndez Navarro, professor of the history of science at the University of Granada, “is that the experience of affected communities can help identify problems that have not yet been recognized by scientific or administrative institutions or by experts. Brockovich’s case can be understood as part of the process of democratization of knowledge about risk, in which communities and citizens do not merely demand the right to know, but acquire the capacity to investigate, produce knowledge and challenge established definitions of risk.”

Menéndez Navarro, author of the 2011 academic article The Claim for Lay Knowledge in the Defense of Public Health, which draws on the film Erin Brockovich, notes that although Brockovich had neither scientific nor legal training, “she was able to listen to those affected, connect individual experiences, gather documentation and relate that local knowledge to official records and expert evidence.” In his article, he describes this approach as a form of “human-scale epidemiology.”

For her part, Alicia H. Puleo also highlights Brockovich’s self-taught background, arguing that her lack of scientific training in no way diminishes the value of either her work or its results. “Ecofeminism is both a theory and a practice,” the philosopher says, affirming Brockovich’s practical achievements.

Eva Saldaña of Greenpeace Spain likewise points to Brockovich as “an example of how empathy and outrage in the face of injustice can be transformed into a force for political change.” “We live in a world dominated by technocratic and patriarchal knowledge that makes ecological and social impacts invisible in favor of economic growth at all costs,” she argues.

Saldaña maintains that “you do not need to belong to any political elite to stop destruction; rather, resistance from citizens and community bases where it most often originates, should be legitimized, while fully defending our right to protest.”

She also stresses the importance of “citizen knowledge”: the understanding that emerges from everyday experience, caregiving, ties to local communities and places, observation of one’s surroundings, mutual-support networks, and the collective effort to solve real-world problems affecting specific communities.

Breaking the hegemony of expert knowledge is particularly relevant in an age of misinformation and fake news. “We cannot invoke the defense of lay knowledge as a way of legitimizing disinformation,” warns Alfredo Menéndez Navarro. “There is a fundamental difference between the situated knowledge of a community, which is tested, seeks evidence and engages in dialogue with scientific knowledge, and a false claim presented as truth simply because someone shares it based on personal experience or conviction.”

Do we need more role models like Brockovich?

For Puleo, the answer is clear: “Figures like hers are even more necessary today than they were in the past. Despite the fact that we are heading toward ecological and civilizational collapse,” she says, noting that some commentators now speak of a “Pyrocene” because of the growing number of major wildfires around the world, “society seems increasingly dominated by indifference and a narcissistic hedonism focused on living in the moment, without thinking about the future or about others. Nor do people think about their own lives or those of other creatures on Earth. “Many people do care, but the vast majority do not recognize the danger here and now; it is not something that belongs to the future.”

Puleo believes younger generations could learn a great deal from Brockovich, particularly from “her sense of justice, born out of outrage at deception and the violation of rights.” They could also learn “the value of perseverance, because perseverance in the pursuit of justice is essential. Without it, everything becomes mere posturing.”

Saldaña also stresses the importance of role models like Brockovich “at a time of overlapping crises, with seven of the planet’s nine boundaries already breached.” Brockovich, she argues, like many other women, communities and grassroots movements leading struggles today, offers younger generations a set of essential values: “the determination to challenge authority when it threatens life, the importance of community action, and the understanding that defending nature also means defending human rights and social justice.”

“Younger generations could look to Erin Brockovich and ecofeminism as sources of intellectual inspiration, both ethically and in terms of how they understand the world,” suggests Charles Barthold.

He argues that they can learn from an activist practice capable of combining radical convictions with tangible results achieved through legal victories, avoiding the twin pitfalls that often characterize contemporary activism: rigid ideological purity on the one hand and pragmatic co-optation on the other.

Barthold also notes that “leadership tends to be perceived as inherently masculine while women tend to be sidelined. This is a real problem for democracy and could be one reason climate action is not taken seriously enough.”

Or, as philosopher, professor and writer Puleo concludes: “We need more Erin Brockovichs.”

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