The beauty of different temperaments

A student of mine once told me about a girl they did not like at all. The girl was a little selfish, unfriendly and quick to anger. I thought straight away of Erin Brockovich, the enormously well-known and tenacious American environmental activist. I said, maybe one day she will save your life, the way Erin Brockovich once did.

Erin was an unemployed single mother, twice divorced, with three small children. She had no background in law, and yet she pulled off something historic that not one lawyer in America had managed.

Without her charm, her suppleness and her quick wits (or a touch of guile), Erin could never have exposed more than thirty years of criminal water pollution at Hinkley, California. The case led to the largest class-action settlement in American history at the time (1996): PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) had to pay out more than 300 million dollars to over 600 residents of Hinkley, winning justice for the families of people living there who had suffered liver, heart and respiratory failure, reproductive illness, cancers of the brain, kidney, breast, uterus and digestive system, and repeated miscarriages.

Erin’s story has been made into a film — do watch it.