Waste

One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret

By: Catherine Coleman Flowers

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

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.

Worsened by climate change, poor sanitation threatens to bring new public health crises; already, the tropical parasite hookworm, long eradicated in the South, is back. Yet policymakers on all levels have mostly failed to act. Flowers aims to change that. 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 on a world stage. 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.

©2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers (P)2020 Recorded Books

Eye opening and yet hopeful

This book provides an education in the waste water problems of the rural poor but it also provides an education in activism. Well written and well read!

Great listen

The information is urgent and critical for all people to hear! Can’t recommend highly enough.

If you need water, read this book

Revelatory! A deep dive into the thick, dirty and infested world of social injustice through waste water and the congested public policies that proliferate the injustice throughout the US. A must read for all and a call to action and involvement.

More autobiography than exposé

I came to this story hoping to learn about the issue, what solutions had been attempted but failed and why, and what else might be done. Unfortunately, any such learnings are buried in an autobiography that is neither particularly engaging or well presented. Perhaps there are other books out there that address the problem, how widespread it may be, and with a focus on the issue rather than on one person and one county in Alabama.

We flush, forget, and take it for granted.

Flowers exposes something that not only most Americans aren’t aware of, but the rest of the world is astonished by; there is an America that is forced to live in its own waste. She walks us through her career that is anchored by drive to get rural America the equality it deserves. Her story is amazing and her work on water and waste is unmatched.

The book did have some faults. The book was way too much about the author. It really kinda went on and on about how great her educational and career experiences were. This pretty much took over the narrative and made the book more about her and not the issue. Still a good listen.

Interesting and informative

An incredibly powerful story about an often under discussed issue in America. The story is thoughtful and intriguing and the narrator does a terrific job.

An ode to the author’s career

This book is an autobiography disguised as an educational nonfiction book. Wastewater is not discussed until about 60% of the way through, and even then only sets the scene while the focus stays on the author’s career. Absent is any meaningful discussion on how prevalent this issue is (aside from a single statistic) and what solutions can be implemented to address this problem (simply calling for more money and bipartisanship is not sufficient)