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

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

Current price: $18.89
Publication Date: March 29th, 2022
Publisher:
New Press
ISBN:
9781620977132
Pages:
224
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

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.

About the Author

Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and since 2008 has been the rural development manager at the Race and Poverty Initiative of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2020, Flowers was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.