TBLI Talk:MacArthur Foundation Genius fights for environmental rights in Rural America

Often called The “Erin Brockovich of Sewage” tells the riveting story of the environmental justice movement that is firing up rural America.

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.

Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this powerful book, Waste, 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.

TBLI Talk:Knowledge that Inspires