Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’ s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerableA Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” 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 also Flowers’ s life’ s work— a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation.