In Catherine Coleman Flowers’ new book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret she writes, “Too many Americans live without any affordable means of cleanly disposing of the waste from their toilets, and must live with the resulting filth. They lack what most Americans take for granted: the right to flush and forget.”

Environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers has spent 20 years bringing attention to what she calls “America’s d­irty secret.” Residents in poor, rural U.S. communities like Lowndes County rely on septic systems to dispose of household wastewater. But as Flowers, founder and director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, explains in an interview with Yale Environment 360, these systems are expensive to install and maintain — the cost of a new septic system can exceed $20,000, more than many low-income households earn in a year.

Author Catherine Coleman Flowers told Hill.TV that poor sewage infrastructure in some rural parts of the United States are comparable to problems seen in the developing world.

MacArthur fellow Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in rural Alabama and has spent 20 years calling attention to the problem of people living with inadequate sanitation systems, resulting in human waste collecting in their yards and sometimes seeping into their homes. Her new book is 'Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret.'

Eder discussed the future of climate activism during the Biden administration and beyond with co-panelists Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and Kiera O’Brien, founding president of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends,. The discussion was moderated by Janet McCabe, professor of practice at the IU McKinney School of Law and director of the IU Environmental Resilience Institute.

MacArthur grant recipient Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental health advocate and founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, was featured at the event. She said climate change and environmental justice are closely related with government and civics.

The Alabama Department of Public Health estimates 40 to 90 percent of homes have either inadequate or no septic system. And half of the septic systems that have been installed aren’t working properly.

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in rural Lowndes County, Alabama — which is often called “Bloody Lowndes” for its violent, racist past — where her ancestors worked the land as slaves. This legacy has left its mark on her and on the county in the form of low wage jobs, lack of sanitation infrastructure, and enduring poverty.

This is not an uncommon sight in Lowndes County, Alabama: a stream of sewage waste flowing out of a crude pipe and into the surrounding yard of a resident who just flushed a toilet inside their home. More than 10% of the county’s population, which is three-quarters black, lacks access to a comprehensive plumbing system.

Coleman Flowers, who was raised in the unincorporated Hick Hill community and lives in Montgomery, is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She’s been a longtime advocate for communities struggling to manage wastewater and environmental issues that have exacerbated health and income disparities throughout the South and Black Belt region.

Before Catherine Flowers won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and even before she brought national attention to disease-breeding wastewater issues in rural Alabama as the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), she was a proud country girl from Alabama’s Black Belt, Reckon reports.

If Catherine Flowers ever received a calling to take on a career in environmental activism, it likely came in the form of mosquito bites.

In 2009, Flowers was doing economic development work in her hometown of Lowndes County, Ala., where raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents who lacked access to a municipal sewer system.

Doctors couldn’t diagnose the rash spreading across Catherine Flowers’ legs and body. But the activist thought it had to do with the day she wore a dress during a visit to a family whose yard featured “a hole in the ground full of raw sewage.” “I began to wonder if third-world conditions might be bringing third-world diseases to our region,”

Catherine Coleman Flowers knew nothing about tropical parasites when she started raising questions about the raw sewage plaguing Lowndes County, Alabama, where she lived. But she sensed something was seriously wrong.