Catherine Coleman Flowers is a MacArthur Fellow (a.k.a. genius grant recipient), an author, and a vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. But she often introduces herself as “a country girl from Lowndes County, Alabama.”

Her activism is deeply rooted in the dark, fertile soil of Alabama’s Black Belt, which runs through Montgomery and Selma and was the center of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the ensuing decades, Lowndes County was neglected by elected leaders, leaving the area plagued by poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and broken waste-water systems that foul homes and yards with raw sewage. In 2023, a federal civil rights investigation sparked by decades of advocacy by Flowers and her allies resulted in an interim agreement between the Department of Justice and the Alabama Department of Public Health, which led to a plan to redress the unsanitary conditions.

Yet the fight is nowhere near done, she said, neither in Lowndes nor in the countless other American communities she’s visited where aging wastewater infrastructure is increasingly overwhelmed by flooding and other pressures from a changing climate.

“These systems are failing all over the country, septic and big-pipe systems too, for the same reasons,” she said. “We’ve ignored them for too long, just like we’ve ignored certain communities.”

“Catherine’s not a parasitologist, but she saw there was a really big problem.”

A passion for social justice runs in Flowers’s family. Both her dad, an army veteran who worked in sales, and her mom, a school bus driver and a teacher’s aide, were active in the civil rights movement. By the time Flowers was a teenager, she was protesting the substandard educational offerings of the local high school. In college, first at Alabama State University and then at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, she studied history and political science and devoted herself to several causes, ranging from wrongful convictions to affirmative action. After graduating, she taught history and social studies in Washington, DC, and Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 2000, she returned home to work as an economic development consultant for Lowndes County.

That’s when Flowers discovered the extent of the county’s wastewater problems. Most people were relying on septic systems that frequently failed in the region’s dense clay soil. Fixing or replacing them with more reliable systems was beyond the means of many residents in a county with a poverty rate above 25 percent. As a result, sewage often backed up in plumbing and pooled in yards, especially when people without recourse resorted to running their own pipes, called “straight piping,” into pits behind their homes. Rather than helping people fix their plumbing, Alabama state authorities often fined and criminally prosecuted them.

To confront the crisis, she helped create a community-development organization that would eventually become the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ). Flowers has welcomed plenty of partners to the cause, including Rojelio Mejia, a physician and associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine who specializes in parasitic infections. Working with Flowers and community volunteers, Mejia and colleagues tested dozens of people in Lowndes County and found that more than one-third had hookworm, a parasitic infection that spreads through feces-contaminated soil and causes wheezing, diarrhea, and skin rashes as well as longer-term harms to children’s physical and mental development. Before Mejia and his colleagues published their findings in 2017, hookworm was thought to have been eradicated in the United States. “I was surprised. Everybody was surprised,” Mejia said about his discovery. “Catherine’s not a parasitologist, but she saw there was a really big problem.”

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The hookworm findings bolstered the civil rights complaint against the Alabama Department of Public Health filed in 2018 by CREEJ and Earthjustice that resulted in the 2023 interim agreement with the Department of Justice. It was the first successful environmental-justice settlement pursued by the DOJ under federal civil rights laws.

In 2021, Flowers coauthored an essay with Mitchell Bernard, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s chief counsel, decrying America’s neglect of wastewater infrastructure, particularly in rural, low-income areas and communities of color. The following year, the Biden administration announced that $11.7 billion of new federal infrastructure money was earmarked for loans and grants to Lowndes County and 10 other rural communities in seven states for a range of water infrastructure projects. In February, the initiative was expanded to 150 other communities.

Environmental groups scored a small victory in May 2023, when the Alabama health agency agreed to halt the prosecutions for inadequate sanitation, to create a public awareness campaign about the health risks of sewage exposure, and, most important, to help fix the unsanitary conditions in Lowndes County.

Meanwhile, CREEJ partnered with the Natural Resources Defense Council to file a second civil rights complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, alleging discrimination against communities of color in allocating federal funding for water infrastructure projects. Bernard calls Flowers “a pioneer who has, more than anyone else, put sanitation equity on the map of public and political consciousness.”

Flowers is now focused on the larger, looming wastewater crisis exacerbated by climate change. She worries about the long-term viability of funneling more money into the same technologies and oversight authorities that let so many failures go unaddressed for so long. “We have to start listening to people on the ground,” she insisted. “The systems are broken.”