Waste
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret
by Catherine Coleman Flowers
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Pub Date Nov 17 2020 | Archive Date Nov 17 2020
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Description
The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable
A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020
Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.
In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781620976081 |
| PRICE | $25.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
nathan h, Reviewer
An instant classic that belongs aside works like Carson's Silent Spring.
Flowers is a true crusader, and this book outlines just how her discipline, drive, and heart have brought to the forefront the needs of those who don't have the means and/or power to speak to the right set of ears. Call it true Christianity, if you will, but it's also what should pass for the bedrock-level of empathy we should all have toward our fellow people.
It's a special kind of poverty that we force people into when we expect them to foot bills for luxuries and amenities that they cannot receive. Sewage-soaked back yards and the presence of certain parasites thought virtually impossible to be found within US borders is a reality for some, and that in and of itself makes this an exceptionally sobering read.
Despite the dour subject matter, Flowers writes fluidly so that the pages fly by, her interesting and event-filled life notwithstanding, which further adds to the accessibility of this work's content and allows it to be easily digestible for readers who might feel intimidated by a book that dips in and out of civil rights and environmental justice.
I'm admittedly low-hanging fruit for subjects such as this, but I'm forever changed by Catherine's book. A stellar book, and I hope that I remain keenly aware of others as she appears to do.
Many thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for the advance read.
Tina C, Educator
This book provided me with a new insight to a previously unknown inequity. Waste treatment is something I've had the luxury to ignore, it has always been behind the scenes in my life. This isn't the case for the people who Catherine Coleman Flowers works with. I hope that this book of progress combined with setbacks shines a brighter spotlight on the challenges faced in many communities across the US and results in innovative, system level solutions. This is yet another example of the importance of shifting the burden from the individual to the collective, and this book provides perspective on both this particular issue and also broader issues facing anyone fighting for resources for marginalized populations.
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