Sanitation is a nation-wide issue for rural communities. America’s dirty secret is that there are third-world conditions in the richest country in the world. Lowndes County, Alabama is home to the original Black Panther Party, also known as the Lowndes County Freedom Party. 34 percent of its residents tested positive for hookworm, known as a disease of poverty. Catherine Coleman Flowers, a native to Lowndes County and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), was cultivated and inspired by her community to begin her activism at a young age. Tune in to hear the sacred meaning of water, how women of color have led movements, and why it’s important to tell our stories.

Catherine Coleman Flowers is the Founder and Director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2020 for her work researching and documenting America’s waste water failures.

Globally over two billion people are without sanitation. People often think this is a problem that only affects developing nations; however, straight piping, failing septic systems, and broken treatment systems that bring sewage into yards and homes are present throughout America – and throughout Alabama.

This piece was also featured on AL.com.

In parts of the American south, many homes don’t have access to working waste treatment – something activist Catherine Flowers is fighting to change.

There has long been a lack of political will to protect the communities most harmed by pollution – and the climate crisis could exacerbate these inequalities, as well as create new ones.

That is why today the Guardian is launching America’s Dirty Divide, a year-long series that will delve into US environmental racism and its history. And we are partnering with Nexus Media, a non-profit news service that focuses on climate change, to produce video documentaries about environmental justice issues.

Catherine Flowers stumbled upon the defining cause of her life by accident. She was working as an economic consultant for Lowndes county, the historic African American community through which the Selma to Montgomery marchers passed in 1965, lighting a flame under the civil rights movement.

The conditions that Centreville’s residents live with are “shocking”, said Catherine Flowers, an environmental justice campaigner who co-authored a 2019 study on raw sewage issues in low-income communities across the US. Flowers hails from central Alabama, where many households lack proper plumbing and rivers of wastewater flow through back yards. “The Centreville problem ranks as one of the worst I have seen,” she said.

Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, notes that Biden brought environmental justice community leaders into policy meetings early in 2020. “The first step to solving any problem is recognizing there is a problem,” says Flowers, who served on the climate task force convened by the Biden campaign last summer. “To find solutions, people from the communities have to be engaged,” she says. The Biden team’s seeking that engagement “shows a shift.”

Catherine joins a group of experts to share concrete ideas to address some of America’s deepest problems.

Rural communities should no longer be left behind. Congress must begin addressing this problem now while also looking at technological solutions for a new future reclaiming and reusing household wastewater.

Remember when Flint, Michigan garnered international attention because water in the city was making people sick? Well, there are communities like that around the country and the world. And while Flint gained attention because of its failing infrastructure, there are places where water and sewage infrastructure is absent.

Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent some of her childhood in Montgomery. But mostly, she grew up in rural Lowndes County, where, she has written, "Indoor plumbing was a luxury," and children walked long distances to pump water from a well – water "that was so fresh and delicious" the effort seemed worth it.

Flowers told me that she wanted readers to see the issues in her book as problems that can get much worse if governments in this country don’t invest in better infrastructure for basic necessities, like access to modern plumbing. She worries that future infectious diseases will spread even more as climate change scrambles weather patterns in the South.

“Waste” is both a study of the horrific sanitation problems in rural Lowndes County and a memoir, the story of a very determined Alabama woman.

Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship this year for her pioneering work on waste and water crises in rural communities, described the ways that structural racism interacts with the environment.

It is easy to turn away from what Ms. Flowers calls America’s dirty secret. But don’t. Especially not now, not when the country is in the throes of a profound reckoning about its inequities.

“Waste” is both a study of the horrific sanitation problems in rural Lowndes County and a memoir, the story of a very determined Alabama woman.

Here's activist Catherine Coleman Flowers speaking to the Poor People's Campaign.

CATHERINE COLEMAN FLOWERS: She showed me how she was living. She also told me about the predatory lending that she and her family were victim of. I asked her, would she mind sharing her story with people that I would bring there who could potentially help her? And I thought then that Pamela's story was really a stark view of inequality in this nation.

Catherine Coleman Flowers wants to find a new way to deal with waste.

Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Ala., where many communities fall outside the range of municipal sewage systems, resulting in untreated waste and illnesses that are rarely seen in developed nations, our colleague Sarah Kaplan writes. Now an environmental activist and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” awardee, Flowers is working to build a new type of septic system that will clean and recycle waste. This month, she launched the Wastewater Innovation and Environmental Justice Lab at Columbia University, which will serve as a hub for activism and research related to sanitation policy.

Untreated sewage is coursing through this rural community, a consequence of historic government disinvestment, basic geology and recent changes in the soil. On rainy days, foul effluent burbles up into bathtubs and sinks, and pools in yards. Some residents have hookworm, an illness rarely seen in developed nations. It’s America’s “dirty secret,” Flowers said, a problem stretches beyond one county in central Alabama.