黑水

首先，不得不承认这是一部好电影，作为一名业余化学爱好者的我，观影体验是很不错的。

正是因为有一点化学基础的我，观影后明显感觉到了不对劲。

那就是这部电影刻意地混淆了特氟龙和PFOA的区别，以至于误导了很多观众，结果是很明显的，就连被豆瓣顶到榜首的科普贴对特氟龙的认识都是错误的混淆！！！！

特氟龙是高分子聚合物，本身是无毒的(绝大部分高分子化合物人体是吸收不了的，包括高分子营养物，所以不要相信那些补充蛋白的广告)，这个世界还没有堕落到让一种电影中体现的剧毒物在现实中如此普遍的使用，我们家家户户都在使用的特氟龙不粘锅大多数是不会让胎儿畸形的。

有毒的是生产特氟龙的过程中用到了一种分散剂--PFOA(全氟辛酸胺)或者叫C8, 这种东西不是杜邦发明的，是3M发明的。

是杜邦向3M采购的PFOA，而3M也告知过杜邦PFOA的毒性。

(补充一下这段科学，特氟龙在合成过程中会产生极高的热量甚至有爆炸的风险，最好的方法是在水中合成以及时冷却，但氟化物原料又有很好的驱水性，使得它不能很好的分布在水中，这样就需要一种亲水亲氟化物的分散剂。

然后，已经因为安全问题被废弃的3M家的PFOA就重新找到了用武之地)。

另外，杜邦公司多年来一直强调他们生产的特氟龙成品已经过滤掉了PFOA. 我觉得这应该不会有假，因为世界上有上万亿件特氟龙制品，世界各国都有权威检测机构，你要是情愿花钱也可以把你家的不粘锅拿去检测，要是有超标，杜邦公司早就被打脸了！

但我不是说杜邦是无罪的，杜邦错就错在没有有效处理PFOA废料，导致工业污染坑害了当地居民和生产工人。

事实上的诉讼案针对的是工业废料污染伤害居民，如果杜邦明知道特氟龙有毒，还把他送进家家户户的厨房，美国ZF还偏护他这种灭绝人类的行为，各国监管今天还在放任不粘锅，那我严重怀疑各国监管人员是不是外星人派的卧底！

回头看一下电影，推敲台词，不难看出编剧明显是知道这个区别的，甚至引入了3M公司的梗。

可是电影还是刻意去混淆特氟龙和C8的概念，以至于非专业的观影群众很多都以为有毒的，致畸的，致癌的是特氟龙，搞得回家纠结该不该扔掉厨具了，弄不好要闹出家庭矛盾。

电影为什么要这么做？

我觉得很可能是想加强震惊的效果，让我们每个人都感觉到是受影响的一份子，加大电影的推广性，因为如果只是局部的污染案件，民众的关注性肯定不会太高。

电影的立意本身是很好的，刻画颂扬了一些敢于为弱势群体挑战高度权威的政商结合体。

他们确实是值得赞赏的，可是为了增强电影的观赏性和推广度去刻意地扭曲和混淆科学事实，那就不应该了，正如电影里批评杜邦的那样—“cross line”，越界了！！

最后，根据观影后的一些资料搜集，大体可以科普安利一下大家。

由于PFOA是曾经是生产特氟龙的助剂，成品里面可能也会有微量残留，所以买厨房用品一定要买大品牌的，不要贪小便宜。

大公司的提纯工艺和检验标准至少比小公司靠谱，而且现在已经有PFOA替代助剂了，大公司一般会走在行业技术的前列，小企业就难说了。

对于PFOA的警惕，国内目前都没有开始针对，就连PFOA和PFOS都没有专用的海关代码，原材料包装也不会做危险物警示，很难想象生产使用他的工厂是如何防止污染的，基于国内的工业管理现状，这才是真正值得广大人民担忧的。

但愿，电影立意的精神能影响到我们更加多的去保护自己，去影响ZF管制工业污染。

至于家里那口锅，不要过于纠结了。

《黑水》一位农民，一个集团，一位律师，开启了一段维权的故事，如果说纯粹是维权也不合适，不如说是维护家园的故事。

很多事实摆在眼前，可还有很多人视而不见，那些人不是良心坏了，是因为钱比良心重要，否则他们的良心比谁都好。

提出环保的是他们，破坏环境的也是他们，不知道是资本控制了权利还是权利的终极目标是资本。

试想一下，一个区域，资本和政权狼狈为奸，又设立了一个让大家信服的司法机构，这个机构还是由政权建立的，资本来给他们发工资，试问这个司法机构是独立的吗？

那么这个区域是不是比黑水所描述的更肮脏，更黑暗。

就像罗翔老师说的一句话“没有监管的权利就是最大的恶”。

故事到最后很扎心，一位农民这么说“这个世界没有人会帮我们，包括科学家，法律，政府，能帮我们都只有我们自己”，我们这个社会需要像罗这样的人，也需要那些能站出来敢于发声的人，他们维护的才是真正的和平和正义，一个社会的稳定不正需要这些吗？

我们唯一能做的就是支持。

4⭐↑

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesBy Nathaniel Rich Jan. 6, 2016Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White.White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White’s grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ‘‘It just felt like the right thing to do,’’ he says today. ‘‘I felt a connection to those folks.’’The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft’s headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm’s glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft’s founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ‘‘He didn’t show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,’’ says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott’s supervisor. ‘‘Let’s put it that way.’’Terp joined Bilott for the meeting. Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them as children. They had seven cows then. Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money.DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named after the creek that ran through it. The same creek flowed down to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows. Not long after the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. At the sight of a Tennant they would amble over, nuzzle and let themselves be milked. No longer. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged.Wilbur fed a videotape into the VCR. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. Images jumped and repeated. The sound accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror movie. In the opening shot the camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding forest, the white ash trees shedding their leaves and the rippling, shallow water, before pausing on what appears to be a snowbank at an elbow in the creek. The camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth.‘‘I’ve taken two dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,’’ Tennant says in voice-over. ‘‘The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’’The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ‘‘This is what they expect a man’s cows to drink on his own property,’’ Wilbur says. ‘‘It’s about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans.’’At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. Patches of its hair are missing, and its back is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Another blast of static is followed by a close-up of a dead black calf lying in the snow, its eye a brilliant, chemical blue. ‘‘One hundred fifty-three of these animals I’ve lost on this farm,’’ Wilbur says later in the video. ‘‘Every veterinarian that I’ve called in Parkersburg, they will not return my phone calls or they don’t want to get involved. Since they don’t want to get involved, I’ll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I’m going to start at this head.’’The video cuts to a calf’s bisected head. Close-ups follow of the calf’s blackened teeth (‘‘They say that’s due to high concentrations of fluoride in the water that they drink’’), its liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ‘‘I don’t even like the looks of them,’’ he says. ‘‘It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before.’’Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows’ eyes. ‘‘This cow’s done a lot of suffering,’’ he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.‘‘This is bad,’’ Bilott said to himself. ‘‘There’s something really bad going on here.’’Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. It was, he says again, ‘‘the right thing to do.’’ Bilott might have had the practiced look of a corporate lawyer — soft-spoken, milk-complected, conservatively attired — but the job had not come naturally to him. He did not have a typical Taft résumé. He had not attended college or law school in the Ivy League. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Germany. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a junior, he received a recruitment letter from a tiny liberal-arts school in Sarasota called the New College of Florida, which graded pass/fail and allowed students to design their own curriculums. Many of his friends there were idealistic, progressive — ideological misfits in Reagan’s America. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. ‘‘I learned to question everything you read,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t take anything at face value. Don’t care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.’’ Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis about the rise and fall of Dayton. He hoped to become a city manager.But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. ‘‘It seemed like it would have real-world impact,’’ he said. ‘‘It was something you could do to make a difference.’’ When, after graduation, Taft made him an offer, his mentors and friends from New College were aghast. They didn’t understand how he could join a corporate firm. Bilott didn’t see it that way. He hadn’t really thought about the ethics of it, to be honest. ‘‘My family said that a big firm was where you’d get the most opportunities,’’ he said. ‘‘I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could. I don’t think I had any clue of what that involved.’’At Taft, he asked to join Thomas Terp’s environmental team. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known as Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. Superfund was a lucrative development for firms like Taft, creating an entire subfield within environmental law, one that required a deep understanding of the new regulations in order to guide negotiations among municipal agencies and numerous private parties. Terp’s team at Taft was a leader in the field.As an associate, Bilott was asked to determine which companies contributed which toxins and hazardous wastes in what quantities to which sites. He took depositions from plant employees, perused public records and organized huge amounts of historical data. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. ‘‘I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you defend these claims,’’ he said. He became the consummate insider.Bilott was proud of the work he did. The main part of his job, as he understood it, was to help clients comply with the new regulations. Many of his clients, including Thiokol and Bee Chemical, disposed of hazardous waste long before the practice became so tightly regulated. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. A colleague on Taft’s environmental team, observing that he had little time for a social life, introduced him to a childhood friend named Sarah Barlage. She was a lawyer, too, at another downtown Cincinnati firm, where she defended corporations against worker’s-compensation claims. Bilott joined the two friends for lunch. Sarah doesn’t remember him speaking. ‘‘My first impression was that he was not like other guys,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m pretty chatty. He’s much quieter. We complemented each other.’’

The road to one of the Tennant farms. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesThey married in 1996. The first of their three sons was born two years later. He felt secure enough at Taft for Barlage to quit her job and raise their children full-time. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as ‘‘a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough.’’ He was a model Taft lawyer. Then Wilbur Tennant came along.The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position. The law firm was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. The prospect of taking on DuPont ‘‘did cause us pause,’’ Terp concedes. ‘‘But it was not a terribly difficult decision for us. I’m a firm believer that our work on the plaintiff’s side makes us better defense lawyers.’’Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a West Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle — one of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia — though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft.‘‘His taking on the Tennant case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’’Bilott, for his part, is reluctant to discuss his motivations for taking the case. The closest he came to elaborating was after being asked whether, having set out ‘‘to make a difference’’ in the world, he had any misgivings about the path his career had taken.‘‘There was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants,’’ he said after a pause. ‘‘It was a great opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.’’Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’ In other words, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault.This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to suffer the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburg’s main employer. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. ‘‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’’ they said, when confronted. Four different times, the Tennants changed churches.Wilbur called the office nearly every day, but Bilott had little to tell him. He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients — pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. ‘‘We were getting frustrated,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I couldn’t blame the Tennants for getting angry.’’FURTHER READINGFor more about DuPont's FPOA pollution, see ‘‘The Teflon Toxin’’ by Sharon Lerner (The Intercept, Aug. 17, 2015) and ‘‘Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia’’ by Mariah Blake (The Huffington Post, Aug. 27, 2015).With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: ‘‘PFOA.’’ In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Taft’s in-house library. The chemistry expert that he had retained for the case did, however, vaguely recall an article in a trade journal about a similar-sounding compound: PFOS, a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard.Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. But there was nothing. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them. Against DuPont’s protests, the order was granted. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Taft’s headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted by DuPont scientists. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. Bilott spent the next few months on the floor of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. He stopped answering his office phone. When people called his secretary, she explained that he was in the office but had not been able to reach the phone in time, because he was trapped on all sides by boxes.‘‘I started seeing a story,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I may have been the first one to actually go through them all. It became apparent what was going on: They had known for a long time that this stuff was bad.’’Bilott is given to understatement. (‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated,’’ his colleague Edison Hill says, ‘‘is an understatement.’’) The story that Bilott began to see, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ‘‘I was shocked,’’ he said. That was another understatement. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. The company appeared not to realize what it had handed over. ‘‘It was one of those things where you can’t believe you’re reading what you’re reading,’’ he said. ‘‘That it’s actually been put in writing. It was the kind of stuff you always heard about happening but you never thought you’d see written down.’’The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people in all.Bilott learned from the documents that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A year later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA’s peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the E.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M — which continued to serve as the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations — found that ingestion of the substance caused birth defects in rats. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of seven births, two had eye defects. DuPont did not make this information public.In 1984, DuPont became aware that dust vented from factory chimneys settled well beyond the property line and, more disturbing, that PFOA was present in the local water supply. DuPont declined to disclose this finding. In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public.(In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. during those decades. When asked for evidence, it forwarded two letters written to West Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links between PFOA exposure and human health problems.)By the ’90s, Bilott discovered, DuPont understood that PFOA caused cancerous testicular, pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA damage from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. DuPont at last hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that ‘‘for the first time, we have a viable candidate’’ that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time. Discussions were held at DuPont’s corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it. The risk was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important part of DuPont’s business, worth $1 billion in annual profit.‘His taking on the Tennant case, given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a low-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly.By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. DuPont’s scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants’ remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later — the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. Bilott had what he needed.In August 2000, Bilott called DuPont’s lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. It was a brief conversation.The Tennants settled. The firm would receive its contingency fee. The whole business might have ended right there. But Bilott was not satisfied.‘‘I was irritated,’’ he says.DuPont was nothing like the corporations he had represented at Taft in the Superfund cases. ‘‘This was a completely different scenario. DuPont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway. These were bad facts.’’ He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking water had done to cattle. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? What did the insides of their heads look like? Were their internal organs green?Bilott spent the following months drafting a public brief against DuPont. It was 972 pages long, including 136 attached exhibits. His colleagues call it ‘‘Rob’s Famous Letter.’’ ‘‘We have confirmed that the chemicals and pollutants released into the environment by DuPont at its Dry Run Landfill and other nearby DuPont-owned facilities may pose an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment,’’ Bilott wrote. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft.DuPont reacted quickly, requesting a gag order to block Bilott from providing the information he had discovered in the Tennant case to the government. A federal court denied it. Bilott sent his entire case file to the E.P.A.‘‘DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them,’’ says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who later joined Bilott’s legal team. ‘‘For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. is an extraordinary remedy. You could realize how bad that looks. They must have known that there was a small chance of winning. But they were so afraid that they were willing to roll the dice.’’With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. Though nominally representing the Tennants — their settlement had yet to be concluded — Bilott spoke for the public, claiming extensive fraud and wrongdoing. He had become a threat not merely to DuPont but also to, in the words of one internal memo, ‘‘the entire fluoropolymers industry’’ — an industry responsible for the high-performance plastics used in many modern devices, including kitchen products, computer cables, implantable medical devices and bearings and seals used in cars and airplanes. PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.

Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill.‘‘Rob’s letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater,’’ says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiff’s lawyer in West Virginia who works with Bilott. ‘‘Before that letter, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated.’’ Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.It was especially damning to see these allegations against DuPont under the letterhead of one of the nation’s most prestigious corporate defense firms. ‘‘You can imagine what some of the other companies that Taft was representing — a Dow Chemical — might have thought of a Taft lawyer taking on DuPont,’’ Larry Winter says. ‘‘There was a threat that the firm would suffer financially.’’ When I asked Thomas Terp about Taft’s reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, not quite convincingly, that he didn’t recall one. ‘‘Our partners,’’ he said, ‘‘are proud of the work that he has done.’’Bilott, however, worried that corporations doing business with Taft might see things differently. ‘‘I’m not stupid, and the people around me aren’t stupid,’’ he said. ‘‘You can’t ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think. I perceived that there were some ‘What the hell are you doing?’ responses.’’The letter led, four years later, in 2005, to DuPont’s reaching a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A., which had accused the company of concealing its knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and presence in the environment in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act. (DuPont was not required to admit liability.) At the time, it was the largest civil administrative penalty the E.P.A. had obtained in its history, a statement that sounds more impressive than it is. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year.Bilott never represented a corporate client again.The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. In all ways but one, Bilott himself was in the ideal position to file such a suit. He understood PFOA’s history as well as anyone inside DuPont did. He had the technical and regulatory expertise, as he had proved in the Tennant case. The only part that didn’t make sense was his firm: No Taft lawyer, to anyone’s recollection, had ever filed a class-action lawsuit.It was one thing to pursue a sentimental case on behalf of a few West Virginia cattle farmers and even write a public letter to the E.P.A. But an industry-threatening class-action suit against one of the world’s largest chemical corporations was different. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Taft’s bottom line. This point was made to Terp by Bernard Reilly, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, according to accounts from Bilott’s plaintiff’s-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to demand that Bilott back off the case. (Terp confirms that Reilly called him but will not disclose the content of the call; Bilott and Reilly decline to speak about it, citing continuing litigation.) Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.A lead plaintiff soon presented himself. Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ‘‘low concentrations,’’ but that it was not a health risk. Kiger had underlined statements that he found particularly baffling, like: ‘‘DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health.’’ The term ‘‘support confidence’’ seemed bizarre, as did ‘‘protective of human health,’’ not to mention the claim that DuPont’s own data supported its confidence in its own guidelines.Still, Kiger might have forgotten about it had his wife, Darlene, not already spent much of her adulthood thinking about PFOA. Darlene’s first husband had been a chemist in DuPont’s PFOA lab. (Darlene asked that he not be named so that he wouldn’t be involved in the local politics around the case.) ‘‘When you worked at DuPont in this town,’’ Darlene says today, ‘‘you could have everything you wanted.’’ DuPont paid for his education, it secured him a mortgage and it paid him a generous salary. DuPont even gave him a free supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used as soap in the family’s dishwasher and to clean the car. Sometimes her husband came home from work sick — fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting — after working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. Darlene says the men at the plant called it ‘‘Teflon flu.’’In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. Darlene would remember this six years later when, at 36, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy and again eight years later, when she had a second surgery. When the strange letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, ‘‘I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. I asked myself, what does DuPont have to do with our drinking water?’’

Joe called the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (‘‘They treated me like I had the plague’’), the Parkersburg office of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (‘‘nothing to worry about’’), the water division (‘‘I got shut down’’), the local health department (‘‘just plain rude’’), even DuPont (‘‘I was fed the biggest line of [expletive] anybody could have been fed’’), before a scientist in the regional E.P.A. office finally took his call.‘‘Good God, Joe,’’ the scientist said. ‘‘What the hell is that stuff doing in your water?’’ He sent Kiger information about the Tennant lawsuit. On the court papers Kiger kept seeing the same name: Robert Bilott, of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, in Cincinnati.Bilott had anticipated suing on behalf of the one or two water districts closest to Washington Works. But tests revealed that six districts, as well as dozens of private wells, were tainted with levels of PFOA higher than DuPont’s own internal safety standard. In Little Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.But Bilott faced a vexing legal problem. PFOA was not a regulated substance. It appeared on no federal or state list of contaminants. How could Bilott claim that 70,000 people had been poisoned if the government didn’t recognize PFOA as a toxin — if PFOA, legally speaking, was no different than water itself? In 2001, it could not even be proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking water caused health problems. There was scant information available about its impact on large populations. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown?The best metric Bilott had to judge a safe exposure level was DuPont’s own internal limit of one part per billion. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, it announced that it would re-evaluate that figure. As in the Tennant case, DuPont formed a team composed of its own scientists and scientists from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. It announced a new threshold: 150 parts per billion.Bilott found the figure ‘‘mind-blowing.’’ The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Within two years, three lawyers regularly used by DuPont were hired by the state D.E.P. in leadership positions. One of them was placed in charge of the entire agency. ‘‘The way that transpired was just amazing to me,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘I suppose it wasn’t so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the system there. But it was to me.’’ The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had become the government regulators responsible for enforcing that limit.Bilott devised a new legal strategy. A year earlier, West Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. A plaintiff needs to prove only that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. In these cases, should a plaintiff later become ill, he or she can sue retroactively for damages. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action suit in August 2001 in state court, even though four of the six affected water districts lay across the Ohio border.Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilott’s research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public — anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. The E.P.A. was particularly alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American blood banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. By 2003 the average concentration of PFOA in the blood of an adult American was four to five parts per billion. In 2000, 3M ceased production of PFOA. DuPont, rather than use an alternative compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, N.C., to manufacture the substance for its own use.Bilott’s strategy appeared to have worked. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. It agreed to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts if they wanted them and pay a cash award of $70 million. It would fund a scientific study to determine whether there was a ‘‘probable link’’ — a term that delicately avoided any declaration of causation — between PFOA and any diseases. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont.

The chemical site near Parkersburg, W.Va., source of the waste at the center of the DuPont class-action lawsuit.A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would move on. ‘‘In any other class action you’ve ever read about,’’ Deitzler says, ‘‘you get your 10 bucks in the mail, the lawyers get paid and the lawsuit goes away. That’s what we were supposed to do.’’ For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his firm a fortune. But now Taft received a windfall: Bilott and his team of West Virginian plaintiff lawyers received $21.7 million in fees from the settlement. ‘‘I think they were thinking, This guy did O.K.,’’ Deitzler says. ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a raise.’’Not only had Taft recouped its losses, but DuPont was providing clean water to the communities named in the suit. Bilott had every reason to walk away.He didn’t.‘‘There was a gap in the data,’’ Bilott says. The company’s internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to factory employees. DuPont could argue — and had argued — that even if PFOA caused medical problems, it was only because factory workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong.Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? ‘‘Class members were concerned about three things,’’ Winter says. ‘‘One: Do I have C8 in my blood? Two: If I do, is it harmful? Three: If it’s harmful, what are the effects?’’ Bilott and his colleagues realized they could answer all three questions, if only they could test their clients. Now, they realized, there was a way to do so. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 check.The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire population’s personal data and infinite resources available to study them. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested.It was assured that the panel would return convincing results. But Bilott could not predict what those results would be. If no correlation was found between PFOA and illness, Bilott’s clients would be barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. Because of the sheer quantity of data provided by the community health study and the unlimited budget — it ultimately cost DuPont $33 million — the panel took longer than expected to perform its analysis. Two years passed without any findings. Bilott waited. A third year passed. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Still the panel was quiet. Bilott waited.It was not a peaceful wait. The pressure on Bilott at Taft had built since he initiated the class-action suit in 2001. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the firm’s money and was unable to attract new clients, he found himself in an awkward position.‘‘This case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘regardless of how hugely successful it ends up, will never in the Taft firm’s mind replace what they’ve lost in the way of legal business over the years.’’The longer it took for the science panel to conduct its research, the more expensive the case became. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled frequently to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories about PFOA. ‘‘We were incurring a lot of expenses,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, we’d have to eat it all.’’

Land where Tennant cattle once grazed. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesClients called Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. When would they get relief? Among those who called was Jim Tennant. Wilbur, who had cancer, had died of a heart attack. Two years later, Wilbur’s wife died of cancer. Bilott was tormented by ‘‘the thought that we still hadn’t been able to hold this company responsible for what they did in time for those people to see it.’’Taft did not waver in its support of the case, but the strain began to show. ‘‘It was stressful,’’ Sarah Barlage, Bilott’s wife, says. ‘‘He was exasperated that it was lasting a long time. But his heels were so dug in. He’s extremely stubborn. Every day that went by with no movement gave him more drive to see it through. But in the back of our minds, we knew that there are cases that go on forever.’’His colleagues on the case detected a change in Bilott. ‘‘I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him,’’ Winter says. ‘‘Rob had a young family, kids growing up, and he was under pressure from his firm. Rob is a private person. He didn’t complain. But he showed signs of being under enormous stress.’’In 2010, Bilott began suffering strange attacks: His vision would blur, he couldn’t put on his socks, his arms felt numb. His doctors didn’t know what was happening. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. They struck suddenly, without warning, and their effects lasted days. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. ‘‘Nothing different than normal,’’ Bilott told them. ‘‘Nothing it hadn’t been for years.’’The doctors ultimately hit upon an effective medication. The episodes ceased and their symptoms, apart from an occasional tic, are under control, but he still doesn’t have a diagnosis.‘‘It was stressful,’’ Bilott says, ‘‘not to know what the heck was going on.’’In December 2011, after seven years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a ‘‘probable link’’ between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.‘‘There was relief,’’ Bilott says, understated nearly to the point of self-effacement. ‘‘We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. Especially since, for all those years, DuPont had been saying that we were lying, trying to scare and mislead people. Now we had a scientific answer.’’As of October, 3,535 plaintiffs have filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. The first member of this group to go to trial was a kidney-cancer survivor named Carla Bartlett. In October, Bartlett was awarded $1.6 million. DuPont plans to appeal. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartlett’s case: Hers is one of five ‘‘bellwether’’ cases that will be tried over the course of this year. After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. Or DuPont can fight each suit individually, a tactic that tobacco companies have used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890.DuPont’s continuing refusal to accept responsibility is maddening to Bilott. ‘‘To think that you’ve negotiated in good faith a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a point where certain things were to be resolved but then remain contested,’’ he says. ‘‘I think about the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or have died while waiting. It’s infuriating.’’In total, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.As part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased production and use of PFOA in 2013. The five other companies in the world that produce PFOA are also phasing out production. DuPont, which is currently negotiating a merger with Dow Chemical, last year severed its chemical businesses: They have been spun off into a new corporation called Chemours. The new company has replaced PFOA with similar fluorine-based compounds designed to biodegrade more quickly — the alternative considered and then discarded by DuPont more than 20 years ago. Like PFOA, these new substances have not come under any regulation from the E.P.A. When asked about the safety of the new chemicals, Chemours replied in a statement: ‘‘A significant body of data demonstrates that these alternative chemistries can be used safely.’’Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that have replaced PFOA. PFOA and its replacements are suspected to belong to a large class of artificial compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals; these compounds, which include chemicals used in the production of pesticides, plastics and gasoline, interfere with human reproduction and metabolism and cause cancer, thyroid problems and nervous-system disorders. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology research has found that even extremely low doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. Among the Madrid scientists’ recommendations: ‘‘Enact legislation to require only essential uses of PFASs’’ and ‘‘Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick.’’When asked about the Madrid Statement, Dan Turner, DuPont’s head of global media relations, wrote in an email: ‘‘DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to introduce its alternatives. Extensive data has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and have improved health safety profiles. We are confident that these alternative chemistries can be used safely — they are well characterized, and the data has been used to register them with environmental agencies around the world.’’Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the West Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ‘‘provisional’’ limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. In response to Bilott’s most recent letter, the E.P.A. claimed that it would announce a ‘‘lifetime health advisory level for PFOA’’ by ‘‘early 2016.’’This advisory level, if indeed announced, might be a source of comfort to future generations. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents’ blood, your children’s blood, your lover’s blood. How did it get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have drunk tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott’s class-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Most residents appear not to know this.Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.‘‘We see a situation,’’ Joe Kiger says, ‘‘that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now it’s everywhere, it’s global. We’ve taken the cap off something here. But it’s just not DuPont. Good God. There are 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there right now. We have no idea what we’re taking.’’Bilott doesn’t regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. But he is still angry. ‘‘The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long,’’ Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, ‘‘that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing. That’s 14 years of this stuff continuing to be used, continuing to be in the drinking water all over the country. DuPont just quietly switches over to the next substance. And in the meantime, they fight everyone who has been injured by it.’’Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When it concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.A correction was made on Jan. 24, 2016:An article on Jan 10. about legal action against DuPont for chemical pollution referred incorrectly to DuPont’s response in the 1970s when the company discovered high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of workers at Washington Works, a DuPont factory. DuPont withheld the information from the E.P.A., not from its workers. The article also misstated the year DuPont agreed to a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A. It was 2005, not 2006. In addition, the article misidentified the water district where a resident received a letter from the district noting that PFOA had been detected in the drinking water. It was Lubeck, W.Va. — not Little Hocking, Ohio. The article also misidentified the district where water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. It was Little Hocking, not Lubeck. And the article misidentified the city in Washington State that has fluorochemicals in its drink-ing water. It is Issaquah, not Seattle._________Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow.’’ He lives in New Orleans and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

首先要告诉大家事实，然后再给大家做选择.这是一个zf、企业、科学家要做的事情。

科学带来便利、快捷这是毋庸置疑的，但同时带来的副作用也是数不胜数，至今还有6万多种的化学成分是还没有对人体是否有危害的检测报告。

一个物种最终走向自我灭亡，都是从内部的溃烂，而消失。

所以请人类慢一点，科技慢一点，发布慢一点，赚钱慢一点，再慢一点。

也许生命延续也会慢一点。

首先要感谢这部电影的制作团队，感谢你们把真相告诉了世界。

其次要感谢律师罗伯，感谢你为揭露真相付出的努力，没有你也就没有这部电影。

为什么要感谢这部电影，因为这部电影所讲述的东西离我们都很近，因为他告诉我们一些事情的真相。

电影根据律师罗伯的真实故事改编，讲述了浩克饰演的律师罗伯和杜邦公司打官司的过程。

不得不说这个过程很漫长，漫长到跨度十几年。

但庆新的是这个漫长的等待是值得的，最后等到了杜邦公司的为他犯下的错买单。

罗伯在和杜邦斗争的过程不仅漫长，还很艰难。

你要知道以一己之力去对抗一个世界500的企业，没有坚韧的毅力和正义的心，很容易被击垮。

不说别的，就说罗伯梳理的杜邦公司所提供的一堆的资料，都够让人放弃的。

还不说杜邦公司可以凭借其财力和势力去对你做出各种骚扰，比如去到证人家搜证据，比如利用自己的影响力勾结行业专家，比如申请禁令不让你去作证等等。

这些都不算，杜邦还能在证据确凿后翻脸不认。

电影虽然是讲的罗伯和杜邦的事，但对我启发最大的还是电影关于对PFOA的曝光，这东西太恐怖了。

首先这东西能致病，而且还是像癌症那种高死亡率的病。

其次这东西覆盖范围太广泛了，几乎存在于地球上每个生物的血液中，包括99%的人类。

而且这个东西是不容易分解的，可以在人体内留存40几年，等到积累到一定的量就会致病。

虽然这东西现在被全球大部分国家所禁止，但在禁止前我们已经使用了几十年。

这些年人类患各种病的人越来阅读哦，是否跟这个有关呢？

电影中的3500多人因为这个患病是不幸的，但他们又是幸运的，幸运的是还有罗伯这样的律师去帮他们，还能得到杜邦的赔偿。

那现实中还有很多可能因为这些而致病的人，又能去告谁，找谁去赔偿，甚至连找谁去帮忙都不知道。

就算是因为PFOA致病的，也不知道是因为这个，只是怪自己命不好。

从来没有想过不是自己命不好，而是有人为了利益，不顾普罗大众的健康——《黑水》首发于微信公众号“看世界电影”，欢迎朋友们关注

你也许没有听说过Participant Media——参与者传媒，但你一定听说过去年大火的奥斯卡最佳影片《绿皮书》。

当然，如果你关注奥斯卡的时间再长久一些，你肯定还会了解2016年的奥斯卡最佳影片《聚焦》、18年的提名作品《华盛顿邮报》、以及刚在年底新鲜出炉的冲奥力作《黑水》。

而它们的背后都有一个共同的名字，那就是出品方——Participant Media(参与者传媒，以下简称“Participant”)。

关注每年年底的欧美颁奖季已经是我雷打不动的观影习惯之一。

每年这个时候，总有很多优秀电影通过在电影节上映，提名颁奖季等方式走进我们的视线。

颁奖季在商业片占据了影视行业的聚光灯几近一年后，人们终于将视线重新转回艺术片，得以让那些在视听上不那么绚丽夺目，却在人文表达上格外动人的艺术片在大浪淘沙的影视市场中脱颖而出，有机会在千万人眼中绽放它们的光芒。

而在这几年的颁奖季上，Participant绝对是其中的大赢家和佼佼者，提名无数，获奖众多，各种“小金人”拿到手软。

别的不说，手握的两座奥斯卡最佳影片奖就足以让它骄傲上一阵子了。

2016年，participant出品电影获奖现场但今天我们要讨论的，不是Participant的功绩或者工业化水准，而是它出品的一类重要作品——聚焦民主权益的长篇电影，以及它背后传递出的深刻的价值观。

在2016年的颁奖季中，我第一次关注到Participant的相关作品——也就是当年的奥斯卡最佳影片——《聚焦》。

那时候我还不了解Participant，甚至对这个名字闻所未闻，观看《聚焦》也纯粹是因为它有奥斯卡最佳影片这顶桂冠。

然而，当时我才16岁，浅薄的思想和学历并不能理解影片中表现出的精神内核。

尽管如此，但我看完这部电影，仍会意识到这是一部伟大而深刻的作品。

但它伟大的地方在哪儿？

它深刻的地方在哪儿？

我不知道。

但我知道，时间会给我答案。

时间也的确给了我一个答案。

当2017年底，在偶然的情况下，我重看了《聚焦》这部电影。

这一次，我完全地陷入了这个真实事件改编的故事里。

也是在那次观影后，出于对电影的兴趣，我开始了解影片的幕后故事。

也是在那是，我第一次认识了Participant，了解到这个有深刻价值观的出品公司。

《聚焦》讲述了一个并不复杂的故事:由“绿巨人”马克·鲁弗洛和瑞秋·麦克亚当斯为代表的“聚焦”栏目独立调查小组，毅然决然对抗美国宗教界，克服重重困难，最后将宗教人士性侵孩童的惊人真相公之于众。

但这样一个简单的故事，却传递出十分动人的精神内核，那就是记者群体对于真相的追求、系统的拷问和新闻自由的不懈追求。

美国是一个以基督教为国教的国家，宗教界具有极强的势力，因此才能数十年包庇性侵孩童的宗教人士，使“聚焦”小组的调查之旅步履维艰。

他们在法律界碰壁，在宗教界碰壁，在新闻业上级碰壁，甚至要承载受害者们“为时已晚”的指责。

但对于正义和真相的坚守，让他们赢得了最终的胜利。

可喜的是，影片没有把所有的成果都归功于“聚焦”这个调查小组，将其打造成一个英雄主义式的故事，而是从一个更宏观的角度，去抽丝剥茧地审视在这个现代版“螳臂当车”的社会故事里的每一个角色，每一道光影，试图阐述更高层次的概念。

这样的处理方式，在Participant之后出品的另外两部电影——17年的《华盛顿邮报》和19年的《黑水》——中，完美地承袭了下来。

从宏观的角度看，Participant的这三部作品有其异曲同工之妙。

这三部电影都是由真实事件改编，讲述小人物与大制度、大系统、大财阀对抗，寻求正义、公平和真相的故事。

《聚焦》讲述的是调查记者与宗教势力的对抗。

《华盛顿邮报》讲述的是媒体行业与政府的对抗;《黑水》讲述的是律师群体与垄断集团的对抗。

而这三部影片，也大多围绕新闻行业和法律行业来展开，目的昭然若揭:新闻和法律，是民众捍卫自身权益的重要武器。

只有活着的新闻行业，才能逼迫当权者吐露真相;只有活着的法律行业，才能逼迫当权者认错赔偿。

而在Participant出品的这三部电影中，我们看到的新闻业和法律行业，是活着的:调查记者们愿意相信受害者的“片面之词”，毅然开始对宗教系统的调查;报社主编愿意冒毕生事业毁于一旦的风险，不畏强权，将政府的丑闻公之于众;良心律师愿意为一群“不知好歹”的无辜百姓，对抗垄断大公司20年，只为讨回公道。

在他们眼中:

在影片中，主角们在捍卫弱势群体的权益，但在我们看来，他们更是在捍卫自己，捍卫这个国家的民主权益，他们在捍卫言论自由，捍卫新闻和出版自由，捍卫法律意识。

相信着言论自由和法律良知的信念推动着他们去对抗世界，而这个世界也用最后的成果回报他们，在我看来，这是一个美好如童话的良性循环。

但正如影片所表达的那样，建立一个公平公正公开的社会环境，不仅需要这些满怀赤子之心的工作者们，更需要一个对各方权力有所制衡和牵制的制度。

假如国家机器或者大财阀可以轻而易举地扼杀言论，甚至伤害这些追求正义与真相的有志之士，使“天下之人，不敢言而敢怒”，社会噤若寒蝉，那影片中美好结局也就无从谈起了。

而从影片内容回归现实世界:当你打开这三部电影的豆瓣主页，你会发现观众对这三部影片的评价都非常相似:“非常工整，四平八稳”“题材不新颖，情节没有水花”“太过主旋律，追求政治正确”。

也许在部分人看来，Participant出品的这几部影片像是一张张完成度极高，却不带感情色彩的“好莱坞答卷”，但我的看法却有所不同。

在我看来，这样的表现形式正是Participant有意而为。

在漂亮地完成剧本和表演之余，Participant展现出一种难能可贵的克制。

无论是《聚焦》也好，《华盛顿邮报》、《黑水》也好，影片都没有利用激昂的配乐和情节的冲突去刺激观众的情绪，而是让观众在一种冷静而克制的状态下，设身处地，一步步了解事情的真相，直至最后触碰到它内核时，情绪依然是平和的。

但当你回过头去品味，影片中展现的那种对民主、对自由、对平等的追求和向往，却在平静中显得更加深刻，动人，深入人心。

Participant的官方网页上，有一段“关于Participant”的介绍:Participant Media——参与者影业，是一家前沿的传媒公司，致力于激发和推动社会变革的娱乐活动。

也许Participant的电影，体现的也正是它自身的核心价值观:使电影不仅仅是娱乐，更是激发和推动社会变革的工具。

以铁肩扛道义，以妙笔著文章。

进入Participant的网站的每个人，都会首先看到这样的一行字:You are not a viewer. These are your stories. You are a Participant.Just act.你不是观众。

这些是你的故事。

你是参与者。

行动吧。

Participant，翻译过来便是“参与者”，也许这个小小的传媒公司，从名字就在向我们传达着一个讯息:我们每个人都是故事的参与者、戏中人，没有人能永远冷眼旁观，隔岸观火。

德国著名神学家兼信义宗牧师马丁·尼莫拉写过一首举世闻名的小诗，诗名叫《我没有说话》。

诗中是这样写的:起初纳粹杀共产党时，我没有出声——因为我不是共产党员；接着他们迫害犹太人，我没有出声——因为我不是犹太人；然后他们杀工会成员，我没有出声——因为我不是工会成员；后来他们迫害天主教徒，我没有出声——因为我是新教徒；最后当他们开始对付我的时候，已经没有人能站出来为我发声了。

迫害就像海上蔓延的雾，你永远不能期待它会在你面前停下来。

所以，也许保护自己最后的方式，不是独善其身，而且从一开始，就把自己当做一个参与者，把自己当成最初的那个共产党人，那个犹太人，那个工会成员，那个天主教徒，最后，当你把自己当成自己时，也会有千千万万的人站出来，把自己，当成你。

If the big companies inflict damage on the public for their own interests, will there be an administrative institute entitled to regulate and punish them？

If the authority fails their duties and biases in favor of the companies instead of protecting the citizens, will there be a way to protest it?If the local government cracks down the report media and the protestors, will there be the access to a higher level？

If you read the paragraph above in English, you should have figured out why I had to put it in English and what I have tried. That gives me another reason why we should learn English well. When you can’t speak out in your mother language, you have another language option.给我留下深刻印象的是Taft律所高级合伙人Tom在会上遭遇其他合伙人反对做这门起诉杜邦的官司时怒吼道：“We should want to nail DuPont. All of us should. American business is better than this, gentleman. And when it’s out, we should hold them to it. That’s how you build faith in the system. We’re always arguing that companies are people. Well, these people have crossed the line. To hell with them！

”Law、News、Media、Whistleblower，就是监督这些可能会为追求利益而损害公众社会的武器。

如果武器一个个失效，那保护人民群众的就真的只剩下了Rob Bilott在得知杜邦经过7年的监测后食言的时候的充满愤怒的呐喊“They are a titan of industry. They can do everything they want. Nothing else matters.”… “The system is rigged. They want us to think it’ll protect us. But that’s a lie. We protect ourselves. We do. Nobody else. Not the company, not the science, us. ”中国不是没有这样的英雄，我记得《新京报》（好像是这家报纸）曾有一位退伍军人专业的记者揭露了一家污染环境的地方企业，揭露偏远贫穷地区的少数民族的孩子要上学的艰难等等，他受到了来自各方的很大压力，但这些报道的影响并不能制止还有企业在污染环境的事实。

他们还在污染，因为他们受到的惩罚太轻太轻，不足以痛改前非。

我们中国需要做的还有很多很多。

马克·鲁弗洛 Mark Ruffalo扮演的律师，出于真正的良心，顶着巨大的职业、生活、经济压力坚持了十几年打这场官司，做出这样牺牲的英雄值得敬佩！

Mark Ruffalo就是那种忍辱负重、百折不悔、沉默寡言、爱家爱国的好男人形象。

他不能演也不会演花花公子、富家子弟、上流人士，他就是全心全意为家、为人民、为社会而宁愿牺牲自我的忠诚男人。

他本人是坚定的长期环保人士，抵制大公司开采自然资源，也是本片的制片人。

他那总是有些忧心忡忡又选择承担所有责任和后果的脸就给人特别踏实的感觉，你知道他说的都是实话，不会骗你，这就是他的气质。

安妮·海瑟薇 Anne Hathaway的表演比较一般，有着之前表演的说话和表情模式，没有任何意外的惊喜。

倒是好久不见的蒂姆·罗宾斯 Tim Robbins一头白发的形象，让人有些感慨他已经这么老了吗？

今年他已经62岁了，自从豆瓣和IMdB排名第一的《肖申克的救赎》之后，再没有看过他主演的影片。

在这部戏里，他演得还是不错。

好了，回到题目的问题——看完这部电影，你还会用不粘锅炒菜吗？

对我来说，答案就是能不用就不要用了，我还有铸铁锅。

《黑水》一位农民，一个集团，一位律师，开启了一段维权的故事，如果说纯粹是维权也不合适，不如说是维护家园的故事。

很多事实摆在眼前，可还有很多人视而不见，那些人不是良心坏了，是因为钱比良心重要，否则他们的良心比谁都好。

提出环保的是他们，破坏环境的也是他们，不知道是资本控制了权利还是权利的终极目标是资本。

试想一下，一个区域，资本和政权狼狈为奸，又设立了一个让大家信服的司法机构，这个机构还是由政权建立的，资本来给他们发工资，试问这个司法机构是独立的吗？

那么这个区域是不是比黑水所描述的更肮脏，更黑暗。

就像罗翔老师说的一句话“没有监管的权利就是最大的恶”。

故事到最后很扎心，一位农民这么说“这个世界没有人会帮我们，包括科学家，法律，政府，能帮我们都只有我们自己”，我们这个社会需要像罗这样的人，也需要那些能站出来敢于发声的人，他们维护的才是真正的和平和正义，一个社会的稳定不正需要这些吗？

我们唯一能做的就是支持。

4⭐↑

作者衣公子，微信公众号：公子的酒01Wilbur Tennant很小就被父亲抛弃，留给他的只有：4个弟弟妹妹、1个破农庄、7头奶牛。

经过几十年的艰辛耕耘，Tennant才过上好日子，农庄发展成了600英亩（约3600多亩），奶牛也增加到了200头。

这是那个年代典型的美国梦。

不幸，是悄然降临的。

弟弟Jim加入化工企业杜邦（Dupunt），随后，染上了一种神秘的病，糟糕的健康状况急需钱。

Jim就把自己名下的66英亩土地卖给了老东家。

杜邦将这块土地用作化工废料的掩埋，并且向Tennant一家人保证，一切都是安全的。

尽管，66英亩只占Tennant全部农庄的1/10。

但是恐怖的事情接连发生。

新生的小牛牛蹄内翻，成年的奶牛接连发疯。

原本温顺如宠物的奶牛，发疯似地冲顶主人，再痛苦死去，血从牛的鼻子和嘴巴流出来。

Wilbur Tennant解剖尸体，发现可怕的病变：肿瘤肿大得令人作呕，牛的器官有些是黑色，有些是绿色。

Wilbur Tennant严重怀疑这一切都是因为杜邦。

经过几轮申诉、举报和上访，环保局E.P.A（Environmental Protection Agency）终于来了调查组。

不过，调查的结论，差点气死Tennant。

调查报告把奶牛的死亡归咎于管理糟糕、营养缺乏、兽医投入不足和缺乏苍蝇控制。

what？！

Wilbur Tennant几乎气疯了。

”我养了一辈子牛了，还要你教我怎么养牛吗？

”巨大的肿瘤，畸形的小牛，绿色的器官，从鼻子眼睛流出来的血，怎么可能仅仅是因为饲料和苍蝇？

这调查报告完全就是睁着眼睛说瞎话。

02Rob Bilott看上去并不是适合帮助Wilbur Tennant的律师。

他供职的Taft Stettinius & Hollister律所历史久远，成立于1885年，创始人之一是美国第27届总统William Howard Taft的亲戚。

小伙子刚晋升合伙人，风光得意马蹄疾，一日看尽长安花。

Bilott的确是环境律师（environmental lawyer），但是客户都是大公司，更确切地说，是化工巨头，其中就包括杜邦。

律所办公室里来来往往都是西装革履，皮鞋瓦亮的成功人士，Rob Bilott是典型的资本家代言人。

当穿着牛仔裤、格子法兰绒衬衫、棒球帽的Wilbur Tennant出现在律所，显得那么格格不入。

奈何尘世繁杂，人间万象，你看到什么，什么就是你的命。

Bilott在看完资料后决定接下这个案子。

因为他觉得这是对的事。

没有料到，随着Bilott调查的深入。

他发现，这并不是Tennant一家人的不幸，而是一场长达40年，面向全人类，充斥谎言和掩盖的灾难。

03杜邦是谁？

化工业巨头，世界500强。

历史悠久，和中国清政府做过生意；成绩彪炳，参加过美国原子弹的“曼哈顿计划”。

杜邦有多强大？

这么说吧，美国环保局E.P.A为杜邦开出了创历史的巨额罚单，但是所谓的创历史罚单还不到杜邦单类产品年利润的2%。

作为复合材料领域绝对的领导者，杜邦积累的工艺数据，是中国已经掌握的25倍以上。

毫无疑问，Bilott是在以卵击石。

杜邦的优势至少有以下3个方面。

第一，垄断标准。

当你问，XX化学物质有没有毒？

政府部门的标准应该够权威吧。

可是美国环保局E.P.A从1976年才开始监管化学物质，在百年历史的杜邦面前像个学生，遇到问题常常要请杜邦拿主意。

第二，国家荣耀。

化工业领先是美国国力的重要标志。

一直到今天，美国化工都是中国最难追赶的领域之一。

杜邦不但为二战胜利做出贡献，在现实中也是大量工作岗位的提供者，可谓即得庙堂点赞，又迎江湖民心。

显然，揭露杜邦，就是反对美国，迎接你的是“不爱国”、“愤青”等标签。

第三，现实利益。

作为当地最大且最好的雇主，杜邦的员工仅凭工作证就可以贷款买房。

杜邦提供的慷慨的薪资是人们还房贷、供子女上大学、过中产阶级的生活的保障。

一个与我们无关的农民正在反杜邦？！

这会影响每个小镇人的职业和收入！

nononono！

当地人开始主动排斥Wilbur Tennant。

当大象面对蚂蚁的挑战，有一万种方式弄死你。

大象拉坨屎蚂蚁都扛不住。

Bilott不是向法庭申请杜邦公开资料吗？

行啊，都拉给你。

杜邦送来了整整一屋子的纸箱。

横跨半个世纪的文件，打开纸箱先吃灰；11万页资料全是专业术语+行业黑话，从小化学不好的Bilott惨遭精准打击，身心摧残。

迎接Tennant的是整个小镇的歧视，光顾多年的餐厅不再接待他，多年的好友在街上相遇也当作不认识。

做礼拜的教堂，他换了4次。

随后，藏在家中作为证据的奶牛病变器官样本，不翼而飞。

直升飞机在他家上空盘桓。

Tennant握着猎枪，惶惶不可终日。

这是一场鸡蛋和岩石的较量，是以卵击石。

但是别忘了，岩石再坚硬也是死的。

鸡蛋再脆弱也是活的生命。

岩石最终会风化成细沙，而鸡蛋会孵化出生命越过岩石。

04经过大海捞针、抽丝剥茧，Bilott找到了罪恶的源头：PFOA。

PFOA，全氟辛酸，全称为Perfluorooctanoic Acid。

因为有8个碳原子成链，在杜邦内部又称其为C8。

PFOA最早由另一家化工巨头3M发明，最著名的用途，是杜邦生产的特氟龙（Teflon）。

因为特氟龙防水防油的特性，早期用于坦克涂料。

随后军用转民用，逐渐走进全世界居民的生活，其最典型的产品是平底锅。

1962年，特氟龙上市，杜邦名声大振。

广告中，美丽的姑娘正在烹饪，因为不粘锅，所以格外轻松欢愉。

但是广告背后，是另一个色调完全相反的故事。

特氟龙生产线的工人大量出现发烧、恶心、腹泻、呕吐等症状，员工们私下把这称作“特氟龙感冒（Teflon Flu）”。

杜邦为了印证自己的猜想，把少量特氟龙卷进香烟里给工人抽。

果然，抽烟的工人都病了。

3M很明确地告知杜邦，PFOA非常难降解，一旦进入人体，会通过血液循环到达每个器官。

杜邦相关生产线工人血液中的PFOA明显升高。

杜邦知道这些吗？

杜邦知道。

整个40年里，杜邦都知道。

杜邦以猴子做实验。

猴子器官逐渐肿大，最后死于癌症。

用老鼠做实验，老鼠生下一窝眼睛畸形的小老鼠。

杜邦也追踪了7名怀孕的女工，结果发现，其中2名女工诞下的小孩眼部畸形。

那么杜邦做什么了吗？

杜邦什么都没有做。

除了掩盖。

特氟龙生产线上所有年轻女员工被要求回家，但是没有被告知原因。

有一个负责清洗设备的女工，生下一个眼睛畸形，只有一个鼻孔的男婴。

她问杜邦，为什么把我调离这个工作，是因为特氟龙导致我孩子畸形的吗？

杜邦说，No别多想。

随后她的资料被抹去。

长大后的Bucky Bailey，在电影《黑水》（Black Waters）中出演自己燃烧的粉尘直接从烟囱排出，工业用水没有特殊的处理，工业废料只进行常规的掩埋。

于是，我们回到故事的开头。

Jim Tennant先成为杜邦的劳工，其工作是掩埋特氟龙的废料。

随后，Jim得了怪病，需要钱。

杜邦趁机买了Jim的地，继续掩埋特氟龙的废料。

污染进入水循环，导致Tennant一家的奶牛发疯。

最后才是Wilbur Tennant不依不饶，找到Bilott。

真相大白的一刹那，悲凉入骨。

05Tennant选择和杜邦和解。

他需要钱。

需要钱，搬离那个死亡农场。

需要钱，因为他和妻子已经检查出了癌症，事实上仅仅7年之后他和妻子就陆续入土。

还是需要钱，尽管自己这一生已经完了，但是他需要钱给两个孩子一个未来。

抉择到了Bilott一个人身上。

这已经不是Tennant一家人的悲剧。

PFOA和特氟龙，已经走向全世界，从平底锅，到布料、雨伞、靴子，再到自行车润滑剂、网球拍、通信电缆、防污沙发和橱柜，以及电影院装爆米花的纸袋、餐厅里装披萨的纸盒。

杜邦公司在特氟龙一项产品上的收益有多少？

一年10亿美元的利润。

Bilott整理了资料，寄给了所有相关的部门，包括环保部和美国司法部长，告知公共安全正遭受即刻且实质的危险（imminent and substantial threat）。

他还亲自去华盛顿作证。

Bilott的揭发导致E.P.A给杜邦开了其历史上最大的罚单，1650万美元。

这个数字不到特氟龙这一项产品年利润的2%，相当于6天的利润，1.5天的收入。

与此同时，由于杜邦废料进入地下水，整个城市的居民正在一个接一个地死去。

于是，最巅峰的一战，来了。

在那个战场上，公平、正义、真相，这些你我习以为常的单词，被检视出真正的重量。

062004年，Bilott代理受到水污染影响的7万居民，以集体诉讼（class action lawsuit）的方式起诉杜邦。

这本应是一场简单的诉讼。

PFOA在饮用水中安全浓度应该是多少？

E.P.A没有规定，但是作为行业权威的杜邦，内部有规定：十亿分之1个单位（1 part per billion）。

而这些居民饮用水中PFOA的含量，超标6倍以上。

法官大人请看，杜邦连自己的规定都没有执行，赶紧败诉赔钱吧。

出征之前，律所的管理合伙人做了激情澎湃的讲演，士气爆棚。

他们不是去打官司，他们是去拯救美国的商业文明！

演员Tim Robbins（还记得《肖申克救赎》吗？

他越狱26年了）可是，杜邦花天价聘请的王牌律师团也不是吃素的。

在法庭为Bilott准备了出乎意料的一记闷棍。

杜邦请州政府的环保部门高级官员出庭作证。

官员说，之前没有指定标准，疏忽了，秉着对人民负责的态度，现在临时指定了标准：十亿分之150个单位（150 part per billion）。

西弗吉尼亚E.P.A高级官员在诉讼的前夜，州政府突然把行业标准提高了150倍，以至于原本违规的杜邦，一夜之间完全合规。

看来无论在哪里，有权势，就可以只手遮天。

Bilott的举证责任瞬间指数级增长。

原来他只需要证明杜邦“不符合规定”，现在要证明“这个规定就是不合理的”，换一个方式说，要证明“去TMD规定，现有饮用水中PFOA就是会致病”。

前者是个法律问题，后者是个科学问题。

晕，这怎么证明，科学家都在为你杜邦工作啊！

在一番斗智斗勇后，原告和被告达成一个协议：杜邦为居民安装净水系统，再赔付7000万美元（特氟龙生产线3天的收入）。

以上都是小问题。

最焦点的事项在于：成立一个独立的科学家评估小组（independent science panel），由独立的科学家来评估目前PFOA的计量是否增加了居民患病的几率。

如果结论是肯定的，杜邦将提供医疗监测（medical monitoring），也就是说，从此往后，这些居民只要患了相关疾病，都可以得到赔偿和救治，由杜邦承担责任。

这项措施会让杜邦掏出2.35亿美元的真金白银。

当然，如果结论是否定的。

那么，就没有赔偿，各自回家。

附加一项条件，在结果出来之前，任何人不得单独起诉杜邦。

07电影《黑水》中，Mark Ruffalo饰演了主角Rob Bilott。

他更为人熟知的角色是漫威电影中的绿巨人（Hulk）。

这张还真像绿巨人曾经漫画中的英雄，今天现实中的英雄。

两者最大的区别，大概是，后者要承受真实的等待的煎熬。

大多数人以为战争是由拼搏组成的，其实不是，战争是由等待和煎熬组成的。

科学评估小组的结论迟迟不出来，一年。

二年。

三年。

四年。

五年。

六年。

Bilott对于真相的控诉，不是得罪了杜邦，是得罪了整个化工行业。

这位曾经顶级律所的明星环境律师，在起诉杜邦后，再也没有接到过企业客户。

一度，整整3年时间内，Bilott没有为公司创收一分钱。

由于和杜邦的诉讼还在不断支出费用，他自己的薪资一减再减。

为了给科学评估小组提供数据，需要采集这些区域内居民的血液。

杜邦说，每位来抽血的居民，给400美元，我买单！

很快，中年夫妇带在三个孩子，一家五口来抽血。

2000美元的补贴，能让他们过个不错的圣诞节。

他们对Bilott说，杜邦是好人，你得不到你想要的东西，走着瞧吧。

舆论也倒戈，陆续出现声音质疑Bilott。

律师总是搞事情，整天盯着那些为美国做出贡献的大公司，谁不知道你们的律师费和赔偿金挂钩，有巨额赔偿，你们才能年入百万。

这是吃人血馒头！

你看啊，别有用心，这帮学法律的，他们一点都不爱国，总是盯着社会的阴暗面。

由于这场诉讼，杜邦缩减了在这个区域的投资。

作为最大最有影响力的雇主，小镇的失业率急速上升。

民意需要罪人，需要有人承受他们的怒火。

Bilott这一方的原告、证人，每每上街，常被骚扰得不堪其辱。

另外，发病的居民相继死去，肾癌、睾丸癌……当Bilott正陪着家人在餐厅就餐，突然有人走过来指着他问，你说的赔偿呢？

你答应帮我们争取的钱呢？

我哥哥已经死了，他的小孩比你的孩子都年幼。

你答应我们的事情呢？

于是，Bilott重重倒下了。

他得了短暂性脑部缺血（TIA，transient ischemic attack）,每次发作类似中风，一种因压力超载产生的神经疾病。

08其实，在我看来，Bilott很不像个英雄。

首先，他不够帅。

既不威武高大，也没有眉目轩豁，说话也做不到纵横捭阖。

其次，他没奇遇。

Banner博士因为接触伽马辐射变成绿巨人，Tony从小就在智商和财富上爆表所以成为钢铁侠。

相比之下，Bilott一生很平淡，读着差不多的大学（不是常春藤），做着差不多的事（多年没有客户，赚不到钱，也不能全怪这场诉讼，自身肯定也有问题吧）。

这样的人设，是很难涨粉丝的。

再次，他常常懦弱胆小。

去杜邦给CEO录像做口供，害怕被灭口，启动车子的时候手都在发抖。

家庭生计的重担压到妻子的肩上，他既不会分担责任，也不会哄女人。

（扮演他妻子的可是女神安妮·海瑟薇啊！

）最终，他被压力压垮，摔在地上癫痫。

（哎，那些因为杜邦染上癌症的人还没倒下呢。

）这些都让我觉得Bilott不是英雄，他更是个群众。

一如你我。

于是，让我想起了另一个人，那位戴着口罩，生命定格在35岁的眼科医生。

身前，他喜欢看球，喜欢明星，喜欢追剧，经常在微博转发抽奖的链接。

除去那些特别的时刻，除去那些勇气的决定，他们都是群众，平凡得一如你我。

但是，正如莫泊桑所说，人的脆弱和坚强都超乎自己的想象。

有时，你可能脆弱得一句话就泪流满面；有时，又发现自己咬着牙走了很长的路。

所以啊，最后让你能够撬动这个世界的，不是你的技能，而是你的使命。

电影《黑水》中，当Bilott在法庭上遭遇杜邦的闷头一棍，大家都知道，这是一场持久战了。

面对记者的采访，Bilott的队友说，他们制定的标准是谎言，我们一定会赢得这场诉讼的，对！

我们会的！

如果西弗吉尼亚州政府不能制止杜邦毒害这里的居民，那么，我们，我们居民，会亲自阻止他们。

这段话说得太好了，但是也有一点我想补充。

州政府确实失职，主要原因有两个。

首先，根据1976年的相关法案，只有当明确证据证明某项物质有害时，E.P.A才能开展监测。

（Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. ）其次，无论是美国还是中国，由于创新总是先发生在企业，政府的专业性本来就会略微滞后。

《黑水》中，州环保局E.P.A的滞后表现在PFOA，现实生活里，监管部门的滞后可能表现在大数据、网络贷款、智能手机上的隐私信息、或者某类新出现的病毒。

天地良心，衣公子并不是要为美国州政府洗地。

而是想说，电影《黑水》背后所展现的系统，值得我们思考和借鉴。

什么系统？

就是当监管滞后时，一个允许群众关心群众、允许群众保护群众的系统。

更实在地说，虽然E.P.A的监管缺位，但是律师能够自由地开展调查，法庭能够独立地受理审判。

虽然，杜邦控制和圈养了大多数学者，但是全美国还是能找到独立且专业的学者。

虽然新出现的物质风险没有被完整地评估，但是医生一旦根据自己的专业判断得出了结论，也可以放心地说出来，医护和市民现在开始就要重视，开始防护。

美国第35届总统肯尼迪（John F. Kennedy）在就职演说中说过一句话，被反复引用。

“不要问你的国家能为你做什么，而要问你能为你的国家做什么。

“其实美国人一直不太同意这句话。

有关国家和个人的关系，弗里德曼有过补充：既不要问国家能为你做什么，也不要问你能为国家做什么，而要多想一想，个人通过国家能做什么。

09电影的结尾。

正义终究还是来了。

科学评估小组成立7年之后，得出结论，饮用水中PFOA会增加患病的几率。

PFOA至少诱发六种病变，包括肾癌、睾丸癌、甲状腺疾病、先兆子痫、高胆固醇、溃疡性结肠炎。

（there was a probable link between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.）Bilott集体诉讼里已经有3635人患了以上的病，将来还有人陆续发病。

消息传来，显然是宣布Bilott胜利的哨响。

这下总该欢庆了吧？

可惜还是没有。

杜邦不认账，撕毁之前的承诺，抵制评估小组的结论，拒绝集体诉讼的赔偿。

他们想告诉世界，there is no use fighting，反抗没用的，这个系统就是我操控的。

由于集体诉讼中止，要向杜邦讨个公道，受害者只能以个人名义提起诉讼。

电影结尾，Bilott苦逼地开始为一个一个家庭提起个人诉讼。

等待他去完成的案子，还有3535起。

此时，距离Tennant走进他的办公室，已经过去整整20年。

电影之外，2013年，六家公司停止生产PFOA，其中也包括杜邦。

不过，由于50多年间，PFOA不受限地广泛应用，目前已经进入全世界人类的身体。

美国血库中就有PFOA。

疾控中心CDC，2007年的调查显示，99.7%的美国人体内都存在PFOA。

这个人工合成的物质距离发明仅仅50年，接下来它会通过母乳，通过脐带血在全世界人类身体里传承下去。

除了PFOA，仅美国目前还有6万种化学物质，没有被监管。

电影结束了。

男主角Mark Ruffalo参加崔娃（Trevor Noah）的脱口秀节目the Daily Show。

崔娃问他，你怎么给一个这样的结局？

而不是happy ending，超级英雄打败坏人，王子和公主从此幸福地生活在一起的那种。

Mark Ruffalo说，因为这就是生活。

生活里，其实很多问题都没有解决。

那么，问题怎么解决呢？

我们。

Mark Ruffalo说道。

作者衣公子，微信公众号：公子的酒

看完电影很想了解原型人物的现状，于是就做了点功课。

因为剧中提到rob被降薪，也没有客户。

很怕他养不起三个孩子。

但想想应该也不会，毕竟赢了那么一大笔诉讼费，应该为律所赚了很多钱。

事实果然是这样，由于在发现和披露被称为PFAS的“永久化学品”（每氟烷基和多氟烷基化物质）对环境的影响，以及与杜邦公司长达数年的诉讼，Robert Bilott获得了享誉国际的知名度。

从2005年-2022年，Rob一共获得了20个来自美国国内的重要律师奖项，其中包括，2005年由公共司法审判律师基金会提名的，美国年度最佳审判律师；以及环境领域最重要的——2017年 正确生活方式奖（The Right Livelihood），也称诺贝尔替代奖(Alternative Nobel Prize)或诺贝尔环境奖。

如今Rob依然是Taft的合伙人，而且经常被邀请在世界各地的法学院、大学、学院、社区和其他组织发表演讲，同时也被邀请在美国联邦和州国会、欧盟、英国以及联合国委员会的一些诉讼上作证。

Rob在律所Taft官网上的个人简介至于Rob所在的律所Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP在2020年与总部位于明尼苏达州明尼阿波利斯的Briggs & Morgan进行了合并。

合并后的后的Taft共有律师675名，业务也遍及全美。

在美国知名法律媒体《国家法律杂志》（National Law Journal）公布了一年一度的2021 The NLJ 500排名中，由2020年的第102位上升至84位。

看来经过这个事件，Rob和律所的现状都还不错。

这也让观影的我稍感一点欣慰吧。

毕竟还是希望那些勇敢站出来的吹哨者，可以不寒心的生活。