NY Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 27, 2020
How the Problem of ‘Waste’ Affects the Rural Poor
By Anna Clark
WASTE
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret
By Catherine Coleman Flowers
208 pp. The New Press. $25.99.
Pamela Rush didn’t get the home she deserved.
She tried. In 1995, Rush bought a trailer for about $113,000, near the
woods in Lowndes County, Ala. It had sloping floors and gaps in the
walls stuffed with rags to keep opossums and other wild animals out. To
make it more of a sanctuary for her two children and herself, she bought
secondhand couches and chairs, arranging them in a semicircle around the
television. She displayed framed prints on the walls, and a mobile with
three brown-skinned angels. “Angels live here,” it read.
Over the next quarter-century, Rush also hosted an astonishing array of
people at her home, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They were among many influential leaders
who toured the rural community. Rush wanted them to understand what it
was really like, so she took them out back. That’s where stinking raw
sewage dotted with toilet paper poured out of an open pipe.
Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental activist who was recently
awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, tells Rush’s story in “Waste: One
Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.” The book spotlights an
unpleasant and complicated problem — the lack of proper waste sanitation
in rural America — and the phenomenal toll it takes on public health and
dignity. Rush’s home had no septic system. It would have cost at least
$15,000, a price she couldn’t afford. Moving wasn’t an option; she still
owed $13,000 on a trailer that was essentially worth nothing. They were
stuck.
In Lowndes County, a swath of rural land between Selma and Montgomery,
as many as 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate systems
for managing wastewater. This is structural poverty, Flowers writes, and
it’s hardly a localized problem. From rural Appalachia to the suburbs of
St. Louis to Allensworth, the California town that was the state’s first
to be founded by African-Americans, “Waste” follows Flowers as she
discovers that the failure to invest in infrastructure is pervasive
nationwide. The consequences are life-threatening, but often invisible
to those who live and work in communities with more political clout.
Such conditions appear to have reintroduced hookworm to the United
States, a tropical parasite thought to be eradicated from the country
with the advent of modern plumbing. A study by researchers at Baylor
College of Medicine, catalyzed by Flowers after she developed a
mysterious rash, found evidence of hookworm in 34.5 percent of 55 people
tested.
On top of all that, it’s not uncommon for people to face eviction and
even arrest because of this scarcity of resources. Not having a septic
system put Rush at risk, and her sister had faced criminal charges some
years earlier.
The title “Waste,” then, has a double meaning. It signifies both the
literal fact of waste and the loss of so much time, energy, money and
even lives. What potential might be unleashed in a world where people
have their needs met?
Flowers brings an invigorating sense of purpose to the page. “Waste” is
written with warmth, grace and clarity. Its straightforward faith in the
possibility of building a better world, from the ground up, is contagious.
As eye-opening as it is as a chronicle of the rural sanitation crisis,
“Waste” is at least as much the autobiography of an environmental
justice advocate. Flowers shares the extraordinary story of her own
life, in all its detours, leaps of faith, luck, strange turns, hard work
and her ever-rising social consciousness.
Flowers’s parents were activists, and her childhood home in Lowndes
County was a haven for civil rights leaders. She eavesdropped on
front-porch strategy sessions with the likes of Stokely Carmichael and
Bob Mants of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “At the
time, I did not realize I was not among common men,” she writes.
Her own organizing skills were first put to use when she campaigned
against terrible educators at her high school, leading to the removal of
her principal and superintendent. In college, she learned to mobilize
large groups, especially in the fight to protect Alabama State
University, a historically Black college, from a merger. She left school
for the Air Force, and then returned to her studies as a newlywed at
Fort Sill. On her first day of class, her husband of two months was
injured in a freak accident during field training. His head injury
resulted in amnesia, which pushed Flowers into her next great battle:
agitating for health care and occupational rights on behalf of her
husband, while simultaneously reintroducing herself to him. This proved
taxing.
She finished her studies while advocating and caring for her husband in
the hospital. “I had finished my degree program,” Flowers writes. “I
also had learned an unforgettable lesson about the audacity needed to
challenge structural racism no matter where it appears.” As she moves
through Washington, D.C., Fayetteville, Detroit and finally returns to
rural Alabama, Flowers has far more adventures than can be described
here. But her growing vision for a more just future is always rooted in
history, from her attunement to the ghosts in place names to the annual
march from Selma to Montgomery that becomes a recurring site of
connection and mobilization for her.
Robert Caro, chronicler of the lives of Robert Moses and Lyndon B.
Johnson, has said that he never wanted to write biographies; he wanted
to write about political power. “Waste” is something like that. It is
one woman’s story of how she built power through her advocacy for waste
treatment, despite it being an issue that many would prefer to ignore.
That work includes pragmatic coalition building. Flowers found early
allies in Bob Woodson, the conservative founder of the Woodson Center,
and former Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, both of whom grew up poor.
Flowers also makes a connection with the local environmentalist for the
state health department, who is burdened by incomplete data on septic
systems and compelled by law to act on health complaints. There are a
number of other high-profile partners who make appearances, including
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bryan Stevenson, founder of the
Equal Justice Initiative. (Flowers moonlights as the rural development
manager at E.J.I., and Stevenson wrote the foreword to “Waste.”) At one
point, Flowers finds herself on a road trip in California with the
actress Jane Fonda and the banker Kat Taylor, the wife of the
billionaire Tom Steyer, a former presidential candidate. At another
point, she’s in Geneva testifying before a panel of the United Nations.
It’s a long journey for “a poor Black girl from Lowndes County,
Alabama,” Flowers writes.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
The last quarter of the book is less interesting, as the rural
sanitation campaign moves into high-powered realms full of schmoozing
and important speeches. But then, this, too, is the story of how Flowers
generated momentum for the environmental justice movement.
Pamela Rush never got the home she deserved. She came close. Kat Taylor
provided funding to the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental
Justice to buy a safe, clean house for her. Rush even visited the lot.
But the team hit one obstacle after another trying to install a septic
system. Then the coronavirus struck. Then Rush got sick. She died of
Covid-19 at age 49.
Her children may yet make the house a home. But for now, it’s time to go
beyond individual problem-solving. “My wish,” Flowers writes, “is that
Pamela’s life, activism and death will move us to work for a just system
that provides affordable wastewater treatment and decent housing for the
rural poor.” No more, no less.
Anna Clark is the author of “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the
American Urban Tragedy.”
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