Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret

The "Erin Brockovich of Sewage" tells the riveting story of the environmental justice movement that is firing up rural America, with a foreword by the renowned author of Just Mercy

"Catherine Flowers] is a shining example of the power individuals have to make a measurable difference by educating, advocating, and acting on environmental issues . . . and a] firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us."
--Al Gore

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. Worsened by climate change, poor sanitation threatens to bring new public health crises
already, the tropical parasite hookworm, long eradicated in the South, is back. Yet policymakers on all levels have mostly failed to act. Flowers aims to change that.

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 on a world stage. 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.