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Title :

Waste : one woman's fight against America's dirty secret / Catherine Coleman Flowers ; foreword by Bryan Stevenson.

Title:

Waste :

Author:

Flowers, Catherine Coleman

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

xi, 208 pages ; 23 cm

ISBN:

9781620976081

Production / Publication Information:

New York : The New Press, 2020.

Summary:

"Catherine Flowers 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 Flowers's life's work. It's 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 book 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. Flowers's book is the 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. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities"--

Language:

English

Added Author:

Stevenson, Bryan

Geographic Term:

United States -- Environmental conditions.

Personal Subject:

Flowers, Catherine Coleman.

Subject Term:

Sewage disposal -- United States.

Sanitation -- United States.

Poor -- Health and hygiene -- United States.

Public health -- United States.

Environmental justice -- United States.

Environmental policy -- United States.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	363.728 FLO	31330008974101	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Billerica Public Library	363.728/FLOW 2020	33934004373651	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Burlington Public Library	363.728 FLO	32116003766959	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	363.728/FLOW	31480011419725	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	363.72 FLO	31549004810544	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	363.7284 FLO	32128003893956	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Reviews (3)

Kirkus Review

An environmental activist with the Equal Justice Initiative exposes an alarming rate of hookworm in an Alabama county with inadequate wastewater management. Imagine that your septic system fails after you lost your job because of Covid-19 or another disaster. Your yard turns into a sewer, and you don't have thousands of dollars for a new tank. Flowers shows that if your state enforces laws that criminalize the failure to maintain a legal septic tank, you could also get arrested. She sees such tragedies frequently among the mostly poor, Black residents of Lowndes County, where "an estimated 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems." In an imperfect blend of memoir and reporting, the author recalls her years of work to ease conditions so unsanitary a U.N. official said he hadn't seen them "in the first world." With admirable tenacity, Flowers cultivated reporters; got help from Jane Fonda; took Cory Booker to visit a man whose backyard "held a pit full of waste piped straight from his toilet"; and persuaded Baylor doctors to conduct a study of the region, which found that 34.5% of tested residents had hookworm, a disease of poor sanitation that many people thought the U.S. had eradicated. Similarly dire sewage problems, she shows, exist in places from Appalachia to the San Joaquin Valley. In a largely chronological narrative, Flowers tends to present facts in the order in which she learned them--not when readers most need to know them--and slows the pace with overlong digressions into her earlier years and unedifying passages on topics such as "turning lemons into lemonade" and the effect of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on her life. The urgent message of the book, however, transcends its writing lapses, and it should raise much-needed awareness of a public health catastrophe. A useful primer on why America's treatment of raw sewage doesn't pass the smell test. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

While clean water has long been considered a right in the U.S., the citizens of Lowndes County, Alabama, find the opposite to be true. Lowndes County bore witness to the revolutionary Civil Rights marches in the 1960s, yet oppression of its citizens, particularly African Americans, has persisted. The county's outdated systems for handling waste water are archaic and subpar, while the price for fixing them has proven punitive to Lowndes County residents. Ninety percent of households lack adequate wastewater systems, and tropical diseases have been spawned in the region's stagnant mires of muck. Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers has been actively engaged in civil rights work since her adolescence. With the people of Lowndes Country forced to live in squalor, and burdened by an unaffordable fix, Flowers exposes the true injustice of the situation and how it can be remedied, from both sides of the political spectrum. This is a powerful and moving book that deserves wide readership.

Library Journal Review

Who pays serious attention to the millions of Americans living with or near conditions such as raw sewage, toxic water, and poisonous air? Flowers does. The founder and director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ) uncovers the unsettling details of living standards in stretches of her native Alabama as well as the urban Midwest, central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, Hawaii, Native American reservations, and elsewhere. Her account follows her activism that received attention for social justice work, from high school in Lowndes County through college to teaching at public schools in Washington, DC, Fayetteville, NC, and Detroit, and then back to Lowndes County to organize around environmental justice issues. She describes leading CREEJ to help address both immediate and systemic impacts of inadequate sanitation, health disparities, and poverty in communities marginalized because of who lives there--people who policymakers and society at large dismiss as not worthy of respect, she notes. The book includes a foreword by Bryan Stevenson. VERDICT Mixing memoir, civil rights history, and polemic, this blunt litany by Flowers delivers a call to action for all concerned about sustainable solutions to the shamefully inadequate environmental infrastructure, policies, and practices in the United States.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe