num_pages: 208
description: The MacArthur grantwinning Erin Brockovich of Sewage tells the riveting story of the environmental justice movement that is firing up rural America with a foreword by the renowned author of Just MercyMacArthur genius Catherine Coleman Flowers 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 Flowers's life's work. It's 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 book 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.Flowers's book is the 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. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards and not only those of poor minorities.
language: English
title: Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret
publisher: The New Press