Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret *EPUB
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. Read more
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Why Must Read Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret?
Catherine Flowers is no doubt an environmental justice warrior. She has fought hard for the people of her hometown for decades and it shows. This book was very insightful about the extent of the wastewater crisis in rural America, but I did have a hard time getting through it. About half the book is about herself (not an exaggeration). There is nothing inherently wrong about this but I wish the book had been branded as an autobiography and not an EJ book. Additionally, she does a lot of unnecessary name dropping. It almost felt like she wrote down the name of every person she had ever met in her life. The overwhelming majority of these people were mentioned once and then never mentioned again. It became tiresome. The rest of the time she would simply name people without explaining who they are at all. Overall, the book still was a valuable read for me because I'm interested in activism and find such biographies beneficial. I do wish we could have heard more about the waste water problem itself though.
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