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Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret Audiobook
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Publisher Description
The MacArthur grant–winning “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 Mercy
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.
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.
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“Catherine’s story and her work in Lowndes County should motivate all of us to ensure that environmental injustice will no longer be America’s dirty secret.”
— John Kerry, 68th US Secretary of State
Quotes
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“This is a book about justice long overdue.”
— Naomi Klein, #1 New York Times bestselling author -
“Making the case for investment in America’s rural population.”
— New Yorker -
“Its straightforward faith in the possibility of building a better world, from the ground up, is contagious.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A gripping, eye-opening story about the lack of access to basic sanitation in parts of the United States.”
— Smithsonian -
“Exposes the true injustice of the situation and how it can be remedied, from both sides of the political spectrum. This is a powerful and moving book.”
— Booklist -
“A real page-turner…This book is a stunning eye-opener.”
— Jane Fonda, actor, activist, and author
Awards
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A Smithsonian Magazine Pick of Top 10 Science Books of 2020
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A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
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About Catherine Coleman Flowers
Catherine Coleman Flowers is the former founder and director of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise and since 2008 has been the rural development manager at the Race and Poverty Initiative of the Equal Justice Initiative. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.
About Karen Chilton
Karen Chilton is a New York–based actor and writer and an accomplished voice-over artist and narrator. She has narrated dozens of audiobooks, won three AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2020 won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narration. Her voice can be heard on numerous national network television, radio, and Internet advertising campaigns.