Never Forget Where You Came From Part 1

Catherine Flowers is an environmental activist and the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ). She was recently named a MacArthur Foundation fellow, also known was the “genius grant.”

In this episode Catherine Flowers discusses her upbringing in Lowndes County, the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement and Voting Rights Movement. She shares with us how the Black Power movement influenced and shaped her activism in high school and how that continues today.

She is bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in rural communities in the United States. She grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama. With a deep understanding of the historical, political, economic, and physical constraints that impede the implementation of better infrastructure in the region, she has engaged collaborators across a broad range of disciplinary expertise to document how lack of access to sufficient and sustained waste treatment and clean water can trap rural, predominantly Black populations in a vicious cycle of poverty and disease. Flowers is broadening the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities and galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities in rural areas across the United States.

Learn more about her work with the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice here: https://www.creej.org/history

Pre-order her book, Waste One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret https://thenewpress.com/books/waste