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

The MacArthur grantwinning environmental justice activists riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for Americas 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 thats been called Bloody Lowndes because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today its Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowerss lifes worka 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 Americas 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 Stevensons Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyardsnot only those of poor minorities.