This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail | Erin Brockovich

Chevron is accused of polluting the Amazon for 26 years. The only people who've paid the price are a human rights lawyer and those whose land was poisoned

Most people have probably heard of Chernobyl, or the BP oil spill. You may also know about my legal battle over contaminated water in California, dramatized in the movie Erin Brockovich. Yet far fewer people have heard about what transpired in the Ecuadorian Amazon - though it's considered by some activists, journalists, and members of US Congress to be one of the world's worst environmental disasters.

What if I told you that a multinational oil company allegedly polluted the Amazon for almost three decades? And that the oil company has spent even more years refusing to accept liability? Or that a US attorney who agreed to represent thousands of Ecuadorian villagers in a lawsuit against that oil company has lost his law license, income, spent hundreds of days under house arrest in New York, and in 2021 was sentenced to six months in prison?

Erin Brockovich is an environmental advocate and author of the book Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It. She is a Guardian US columnist