On this episode of Living Downstream, we meet Catherine Coleman Flowers. In 2020, she released her first book, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirtiest Secret. The book documents her two-decade crusade to expose the shameful conditions that many of her Alabama neighbors endure. Some Americans take for granted that when they flush the toilet their waste will travel to a place where it can be safely and effectively treated. But for others, the sewage may go only as far as their back yards, to become breeding grounds for insects and disease.
In 2020, Flowers became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow - an award colloquially known as the "genius" grant for her work in Alabama and around the world. She also is the founder of CREEJ, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and a current vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Flowers talked in January, and again in April, with Living Downstream host Steve Mencher. In this episode we'll also hear selections from the documentary about Flowers, called The Accidental Environmentalist, and a story about a distant cousin and friend of Flowers, Pamela Rush, used by permission of NPR's All Things Considered.
