Catherine Coleman Flowers

Catherine Coleman Flowers (born 1958) is an American environmental health researcher, writer and the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2020. Her first book, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret, explores the environmental justice movement in rural America. She is known for bringing attention to failing sewage treatment infrastructure in rural U.S. communities, particularly in Lowndes County, Alabama. Flowers and her family would relocate to Lowndes County in 1968. Flowers was inspired to pursue environmental activism by her parents, who were influential community activists during the American Civil Rights Movement. Her upbringing was contextualized by a deep understanding of the political and cultural history of Lowndes County, particularly its history of racial violence. On her father's side, Flowers is descended from slaves living in Lowndes County during the 1800s. Flowers started her professional life as a geography teacher in Detroit and an advocate for civil rights, being appointed as the executive director of the National Voting Rights Museum. As Flowers became more involved with activism, she took on different roles, including leading the NAACP Voter Empowerment Program. She eventually returned to academia and joined the University of Nebraska at Kearney for a master's degree in history.

Career In 2001, Flowers moved back to Alabama, where she concentrated on economic development as part of the Lowndes County Commission. By 2002, she had identified several failings of the local sanitation; including people being arrested for not paying for on-site septic systems and people who were paying for on-site sanitation not being provided adequate provisions. She received federal approval from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to produce a plan to address raw sewage in Lowndes County.

In 2011, Flowers worked with a UN Special Rapporteur to better understand poverty and its impacts on infrastructure in Lowndes County, Alabama. She founded the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice in 2019.

Flowers and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute investigated how structural inequalities impact access to sanitation and clean water. She identified that marginalised, poverty-stricken rural communities were more likely to suffer from contaminated water and poor sanitation. Together, these permit the spread of intestinal parasitic infections, including hookworm. In 2019, academic JoAnn Kamuf Ward and Flowers published, Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the United States, in which Flowers wrote, "In Lowndes County, Alabama, and many of the surrounding areas, lack of basic amenities that many Americans take for granted is a way of life,". She was appointed to the Joe Biden Task Force on Climate Change, which is co-chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Flowers is the only Black member of the task force.

Personal life Flowers is married to Thurgood Bunche Flowers and has one daughter with him.

Awards and honors

2004 Interreligious and International Peace Council's Crown of Peace Award for Exemplary Leadership in Reconciliation and Peacemaking 2017 Women Who Shape the State 2020 River Rally River Hero 2020 Studs and Ida Terkel Prize 2020 Greenmatters Black Climate Scientists and Scholars Changing the World 2020 MacArthur Fellow

Selected publications