Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret
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15
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Average rating4
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
If you're interested in environmental justice, sustainability, environmental engineering, or fighting poverty criminalization, then this book is for you.
It was part autobiography, which was more interesting than some autobiographical books I've read, but still not something I'm very interested in ever, about anyone.
The crux of the book is about failing wastewater infrastructure in rural Alabama and one woman's journey to try and stop cops from throwing people in jail for being too poor to fix the problems, and instead getting money to fix the problems.
We claim to be the richest, most powerful country on earth. And yet we literally have people who live next to open sewage, and are too poor to fix the problem. For some reason, this country thinks throwing poor people in prison for being poor is somehow a solution.
A good country, a civilized country would create a universal floor of basic services (UBS) for every person living in the country. That way we don't have things like people living next to open sewage and getting infected with hookworm, a tropical parasite that was previously thought to have been eradicated in the mid 1900's.
While the previous president was trying to stop immigration from “shithole countries” we have people in this country literally living next to shit holes.
Good book. Fairly short. Extremely important. Highly recommended.
