You’d think with Jackson being the home of the state capital that leaders would prioritize its well-being. Instead, they’re looking for cheap and easy fixes to a problem that actually requires a complete overhaul of the city’s infrastructure. With climate change here, cities need resiliency, not a band-aid, said Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, which focuses on water and sanitation issues in rural America.

“You can’t repair something that’s failing over and over again,” she said. “It needs to be replaced. We have to change the mindset in communities of color and poor communities where we think cheap is best instead of finding something that is resilient and sustainable and works long term.”

Connecting voting rights to environmental justice, Catherine Flowers — a longtime advocate who sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council — joined Regan today to highlight wastewater inequity.

“Most Americans couldn’t imagine raw sewage pooling in their yard just outside the kitchen window, or worse, backing up into their home when it rains too much,” said Flowers, who founded the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice.

Environmental activists, who have urged federal officials to take a more active role to assist these regions for years, said the initiative was welcome but would not work long-term unless the White House remained engaged indefinitely.

“I think this is the beginning, and just a first step, not an end in itself,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an Alabama native and MacArthur fellow whose 2020 book “Waste” highlighted the sanitation crisis in Lowndes County.

Catherine Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, who has focused on how sewage issues disproportionately impact poor, rural areas, said the new pilot program is a big step for people who live in places like Lowndes County.

“Hopefully out of what is getting ready to happen we’re going to find remedies so these things will not continue to happen,” she said.

Environmentalists are calling upon leaders and Alabamians to be more conscious of the state’s carbon emissions. This is after the Supreme Court issued a ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. With each day seemingly hotter than the next, activists say climate change is here, and they’re worried. Catherine Flowers founded the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. “Heat index of 110 will become more common if we do not reduce emissions,” Flowers predicts, adding that the Supreme Court’s decision that limits the EPA’s regulatory power over carbon emissions won’t help with that reduction.

The Accidental Environmentalist: Catherine Flowers is a short documentary that was released in 2018 and follows the story of Alabama activist Catherine Flowers. The film explores her discovery that the diseases that were appearing in her community were due to sewage treatment problems and then follows her to Washington D.C. and even Switzerland in her journey to help solve these problems. The 10-minute film is available to watch for free at Southern Exposure Films here.

In April 2022, the Earth in Color Editorial Team spoke with MacArthur Fellow and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Catherine Coleman Flowers to discuss the ways in which land and place have been foundational to her work as an environmental justice advocate. Catherine describes her connection to land as a multi-faceted, cross-racial dive into self-exploration. From land-based roots to genealogical beginnings, she shares with us a thorough connection to the beauty, history, childhood, and hardship of her birth land in Lowndes County, Alabama as well as the various lands of her ancestors. This is her story of self-discovery.

The offer is long-awaited relief to residents like McNeil, and it works to right an environmental injustice that’s been allowed to spiral for far too long. “Does anyone genuinely believe that what’s happening in Mount Vernon would be happening in one of the richer, predominantly white communities also in Westchester County, in the shadow of New York City?” asked NRDC Chief Counsel Mitchell Bernard and board member Catherine Coleman Flowers in a 2021 New York Times op-ed. About 62 percent of Mount Vernon, a city of roughly 68,000, is Black. By comparison, the whole of Westchester County’s population is around 17 percent Black.

Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, advocates for rural communities of color who are facing environmental challenges and believes environmental racism is at play in Jackson.

"It really changes the way we operate," Flowers said. "It also means that those people that can't afford bottled water are put in a position where they can't wash their hands on a regular basis like they should. And now with diseases like Covid, it is very important that you have access to water because water is a part of sanitation. It really makes people far more vulnerable."

Lowndes County, Alabama, which sits between Selma and Montgomery, was once called Bloody Lowndes for its central role in the struggle for civil rights. Today people in Lowndes are fighting for another basic right: access to sewage treatment. By some estimates more than half the impoverished, rural residents have raw sewage running into their yards and even their houses. Catherine Coleman Flowers, a White House adviser and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, is turning a spotlight on this long-standing public health failure. She says it's a problem, found in other parts of Alabama and all over the country, which even the millions of dollars in new infrastructure spending are unlikely to fix. Flowers brought us home to Lowndes County to see what she calls America's dirty secret. We warn you, it can be hard to watch.

Does anyone genuinely believe that what’s happening in Mount Vernon would be happening in one of the richer, predominantly white communities also in Westchester County in the shadow of New York City?

America’s Dirty Divide launched with an in-depth look at Centreville, Illinois - the majority Black town where sewage runs in the streets, and a profile of one of the nation’s top sanitation experts, Catherine Flowers. In the coming days the series will feature explainers on how a warming planet puts children of color at risk, a story that examines the lack of diversity within environmental justice groups in Jacksonville, Florida, and more.

Catherine Flowers remembers the moment she realized the environmental justice movement had entered a new era of acceptance and recognition.

It came last spring, the environmental justice activist said, when then-candidate Joe Biden snatched the Democratic nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders and shortly afterward announced the creation of a joint task force to shape climate change policy. “He talked about environmental justice,” said Flowers, recalling her sense of amazement.

For almost two decades, residents in the majority Black city of Mount Vernon have lived with raw sewage backing up into their homes, flooding their streets, and polluting local waterways. In just the past three years, the city has experienced 900 sewer backups. Light rain is enough to overwhelm the city’s sewer pipes, leaving residents to vacuum up the waste that enters their homes themselves with a wet vac, with little redress from city officials.

“I’ve been to New York many times and was shocked to see that 20 minutes away from NYC, Third World conditions are impacting this city,” Catherine Flowers, vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said in a press conference last week, calling on the Biden administration to provide relief.

Catherine Flowers, who serves on Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and long has advocated for clean water and sanitation systems in rural areas, is concerned for places like predominately Black Lowndes County, Alabama, where many residents have to release their wastewater directly into the environment.

“When people talk about environmental justice, they never talk about sanitation,” she said. “The assumption was that rural communities have always had it, and that’s not true.”

Mejia has worked to quell hookworm disease in Ecuador, Mozambique, the grassy plains of northern Argentina. Now, he and partners are leading efforts to control the outbreak in rural Alabama. We talked with him by telephone about the disease and the various struggles the U.S. has keeping it under control compared with resource-poor countries. His answers have been lightly edited for space.

“How do you say we are going to give people solar when they cannot even put a new roof on their house?” said Catherine Flowers, one of the founders of Energy Well Texas, which provides consulting services on energy options for communities. “When we talk about equity, that means giving people exactly what they need, not just what we want to give them.”

Families like those of Dizzie Maull, who died in May aged 81. He was active during the 1965 marches, which renders his passing not just personal, but epochal. “We’ve lost a lot of history,” said Catherine Flowers, an environmental justice campaigner whose group CREEJ has its roots in Lowndes county.

“I’d thought I’d seen it all, but today I’m truly shocked,” Catherine Coleman Flowers, vice chairperson of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said after hearing about the sewer problems Monday. She added: "What I’ve seen today illustrates why we have to address infrastructure needs and why we have to address it now because it will get worse with climate change."

Experts have warned us that COVID-19 is just one example of climate change-related diseases on the rise. And while climate disruption, environmental health and the current pandemic may seem like three distinct problems, to those in the health and environmental justice field, that’s not the case.

How are heat, lack of sanitation, and other environmental issues killing Americans in underserved communities? A conversation on what happens when climate, health, and poverty converge.