Do you take having a working sanitation system for granted?
What if you didn’t have access to a public wastewater treatment plant? What if you lived with sewage running back into your home? And what if your failing septic system made YOU a criminal?
MacArthur Fellow Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of The Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ) and author of Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Catherine joins Ross to discuss the neglect of water and wastewater infrastructure in rural America, explaining why septic systems are failing and how that impacts public health.
Catherine offers insight on the disparities in access to sanitation for poor rural communities and people of color, describing how corrupt government officials and bad policy can contribute to the inequity. Listen in for Catherine’s advice on collaborating with people who don’t necessarily share your values and find out what CREEJ is doing to design a solution that will allow people to treat wastewater affordably—wherever they are.
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Resources
The Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice
Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret by Catherine Coleman Flowers
CREEJ & The Guardian’s Sanitation Self-Report Form
American Society of Civil Engineering Report Card for America’s Infrastructure
President Biden’s Climate Task Force
White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Catherine Coleman Flowers, a MacArthur genius, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and author of Waste, One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. Thanks for being here, Catherine.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Thank you for having me.
Ross Kenyon: It is my pleasure. Of all the things in the world to work on, I have to imagine that rural sanitation was a bit of a surprise that you could not have foreseen your life going in this direction. Is that a correct assumption?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: That’s a very correct assumption. You know, when I was younger, I thought I was going to go west and become a soul trained dancer. That didn’t happen. And then even later, as I studied, went to college, I thought I would just be a teacher. But I found out that being an activist is still being a teacher, but teaching a different way. But I never thought that the focus would be something so basic to all of us and basic to life forms in general, but certainly something all humans have to deal with.
And I never thought that it would be an issue that would get the attention of folk because I was told it was not sexy and nobody would be interested. But we found that was not the case.
Ross Kenyon: No, it... Well, I think it’s safe to say it’s not sexy per se, but it is definitely important and shocking to learn the details of it. I love stories like this too, because we take for granted having working septic systems or waste disposal. Things work as they’re broadly intended to. And at least in the cities that I’ve lived in, and that is not the case for many Americans or people around the world. Can you just frame the issue for people who maybe are not located rurally? What exactly is the state of affairs in rural America as it comes to sanitation?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, I think the biggest problem in a lot of rural communities, especially unincorporated communities, is that they are left to figure out their own wastewater problems. And they are forced by regulations, usually one that has been put in place by the state or the county or some kind of authority in the area. And what happens is that When they treat their wastewater, it has to be treated on the property. In a lot of communities, people are straight piping, meaning that they have no wastewater treatment at all. Or they have septic systems, and the septic systems are failing.
A lot of that is because of sea level rise. A lot of that is because of climate conditions that are changing. And a lot of it is just because the technology is just not working. And then, of course, we see people on these small treatment plants that are also not working. And they have lagoon systems, which are basically big ponds of raw sewage, but they don’t care where they’re sited. In some cases, they’re close to communities, housing developments, and schools. And out of that, it’s pretty much exposing people to the possibility of getting sick.
So in rural America, there has been neglect of this type of infrastructure, water and wastewater infrastructure that people take for granted.
Ross Kenyon: When I’ve stayed with friends in rural areas and they have septic systems, I think household waste goes into a sort of tank. And then there’s a field that I think it like leaches out into and sort of filters through. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Although I’ve also heard of work having to be done on septic systems is not a cheap thing to do. But for people who cannot afford such an elaborate system or have the amount of space necessary to have this field, It just goes into a pond or goes into some sort of open air kind of pond or a lagoon, as you say.
Is that what’s happening?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: It’s a lot more complicated than that. I know people that have paid for elaborate systems and they’ve still failed. Wow. It’s not that simple. It’s not a simple fix. Septic systems are one of the few things you can buy in the U. S. and pay that much money for, and it doesn’t come with a service warranty. So it varies from place to place, and we’ve been in conversations with the association that represents that industry and they don’t want warranties. Actually, part of our conversations, they say, well, maybe we should just have warranties in Alabama.
Well, they’re not just failing in Alabama, they’re failing everywhere. And it’s not just a rural problem because I just talked with a group of people that talk about places like in Raleigh, North Carolina, for an example, around that area, they built sewer around the Around the black community, they are now on fielding septic systems. So I’m finding them in Montgomery, Alabama, where we thought that it was only out in rural communities, but in black communities, Where because of racialized covenants at one point, that was the only place people could live.
They’re on septic systems, but they’re failing. A lot of this is failing because of climate change. And a lot of it is failing because of infrastructure that was not designed to work the way it was sold to people. It’s not working properly. And we’re seeing more and more failures exposing people to potential health risks.
Ross Kenyon: To what degree is it a problem of density where you have to be somewhat living near enough to one another that you could have sewers that go to some sort of facility? I imagine, I know race and class clearly figure into this prominently, but to what degree is it a problem of just living far away from one another in rural environments? But it sounds like what you just said, it sounds like that was an urban environment or suburban?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: In urban and suburban environments, we find to be the same, but we’ve seen where they build factories in rural environments and they ran the city sewers there to treat. To provide it for the factory. So why can’t we do it for residents? So it’s not just a problem of density. And what we tend to see is tend to be people of color. They tend to be poor people. If you go to Appalachia, they’re white people, but they’re poor people. And they’re dealing with the same thing. And then the other problem is the biggest problem that we’ve discovered is that the infrastructure is just failing.
It’s not working properly. I mean, it may have worked 20 years ago, but even I grew up on a septic tank and it was coming back into our homes. We didn’t know it was a regular problem because we didn’t sit around the kitchen table or when we went to church, we didn’t say to folks, oh, did your septic tank fail today? Is sewage coming back into your bathtub? We didn’t know that. It was only when we did a house-to-house survey in Lowndes County that we realized how big this problem was.
And we started talking about it. People from around the U. S. start reaching out to us. And what we’re finding out is that it’s not just a rural problem. It’s an urban problem, too. And we’re doing a study with The Guardian where we just found we’re asking people to self-report this problem because there’s no real data on this in the U. S. , which is so unfair. That’s why we still have this problem, I believe. And we’re hearing from urban areas, even where there’s density, like Mount Vernon, New York. Where sewage is running back into people’s homes or Centerville, Illinois, where sewage is running back into people’s homes.
So a lot of it is a bigger problem than that. It’s also a problem of infrastructure and we have to change our infrastructure.
Ross Kenyon: Who’s currently responsible for this now? Is it typically done at the municipal level?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: It depends on where it is. In a municipal area, when you’re talking about municipal, then that’s urban lingo because a lot of the rural communities are unincorporated. So in Alabama, it’s the state that’s responsible. And then they have county health departments. It’s the state health department. When you’re talking about larger facilities, it’s the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. So there’s no uniform way of doing it across the U. S. It depends on where you’re located. For an example, in California, I’m not sure what the entity is, but I know that there are problems in the state of California.
I know there’s problems in Alaska. There’s problems in Hawaii. There are problems in Texas. There are problems across the country. But in terms of the data being collected, it’s not happening in a uniform way. If you were to call me and say, Catherine, are there wastewater problems in this particular area? Which data set can I go to and find that? We wouldn’t really know because it hasn’t been compiled and collected like that. I think the closest thing we can look to is the American Society of Civil Engineers who have a report card on infrastructure who’s given the U.
S. a D+.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. This is a deceptively simple question, but... But why? Why can’t we do this? Is it as simple as something like prejudice or racism? Is there more operating to this story? Why can’t we make sure people aren’t getting sick from merely existing?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, what I’ve found that in some places is race, in some places is economics, and a lot of it is just simply inequality. Who deserves access to sewage and who doesn’t? It should be something that everybody has because one the things COVID has taught us is that it was an equal opportunity killer. And it affected people, no matter, you know, people that were more Likely to die, of course, with those with healthcare disparities and so forth. But it killed a lot of people that we didn’t know they had issues were dying.
And we’re seeing around the world now, younger people are dying since they had the vaccines because they weren’t available to them until recently. So it was the same thing with sanitation. I think that it’s not a simple issue. I think there are many factors that influence who has sanitation and who doesn’t. It depends on where you’re located. And that may help determine what the factor is. But one of the things that is overwhelming in all of that is that the people that tend to not have it are marginalized. And I would include rural communities as being marginalized, too.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, like the template of the environmental justice story or one of them that gets used is Erin Brockovich, right?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I love her, but go on.
Ross Kenyon: Right. Yeah. Just invest your own utility, doing not so nice things, suing them, getting them to fix it, getting a nice big judgment. But a lot of the people you’re dealing with are oftentimes people who are at public health agencies, they’re sort of government or public employees, then they’re not as cooperative as one might think or one might expect from the government. Is the story more complicated than just government good and corporations bad in this context?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Oh yeah, it’s more complicated than that. I think that a lot of it is people changing the narrative to suit what they want and also people changing it to make sure that the people that they’ve sponsored and support are always the ones to get the money, even if they created the problem. So that’s a large part of it. I attribute this to be like what happened on January 6th. Some people saw What I saw, and I guess I’m looking at it because I’m a former member of the military, what I saw, because I believe in the Constitution, were people that went and invaded my house.
They didn’t follow the rules. I used to work in the Capitol, and I knew you just couldn’t walk through there and push through a door. I would have been shot. And I just saw how the rules were applied there. The same thing happens when it comes to septic and sewage treatment in terms of who gets it and who doesn’t. If you have the right kind of support and the right people trying to say, you know, shape the story to make it look a different way, then, of course, you’re going to have people to support that option.
That’s what happens here. And we’ve got to keep in mind that in some of these communities, they’re operating based on philosophies that were built up years and years and years of having free labor, And minimizing certain groups of people so that they can continue to export their labor. And now we’re at a point where we’re looking at all of these inequalities and note that to continue to sustain this in terms of environmental justice issues impacts all of us. Because out of this are coming health problems that don’t stay in my community.
It can impact everybody’s community, whether it’s even the more affluent people. I know some people that were affluent that got COVID. And I think that all of us are seeing things differently now because it helped us to drop those scales from our eyes to realize we are all one. We’re all human and we’re all impacted by this. So that’s why we have to find a solution that will help all of us. And that’s why I tend to reach across the aisle when I can. It wasn’t called reaching across the aisle when I started doing this work.
It’s just that for me coming from the country is being neighborly. And reaching out to my neighbor and seeing that we can find some common ground to solve this problem because we all realize it’s an issue that we have to address.
Ross Kenyon: I really respect that. And it’s not as common as one might hope, but there’s even work in here or there’s a section about your work with Jeff Sessions and being able to collaborate. I don’t think people would have expected to find that in a book like this. How did that happen?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, I actually met Senator Sessions at a town hall meeting. I was working as the economic development coordinator for Lowndes County. And what often happens is that the senators, U. S. senators, would actually come into the community. He did this a lot, would go to the community and meet with constituents to explain what was going on in Washington. And I went to one of those meetings and I asked him a question because he was talking about the grant programs that were available for rural communities. And my question was, well, how do poor rural communities get access to these grants?
If they have to have to have a match and they don’t have a tax base to do that. And he couldn’t answer the question, but to his credit, he came to me afterwards and he said, I’ve always been concerned about that. Then he went on to tell me about the fact that he himself grew up poor and ruled Wilcox County, Alabama, which is also part of the black building. He said, Captain, I didn’t have, my family didn’t have a television in our home until I was 10 years of age. So, you know, from that point on, we just bonded and During that time, when I got involved in the wastewater issue, I was getting death threats.
And he would actually send someone down from Washington to go to meetings with me. So there was never a meeting that I went to at the state level or a meeting I went to in the evening where I didn’t have someone from Senator Sessions’ office, either from the D. C. office or the Alabama office that would accompany me. And I think that gave me some measure of protection during that time. And he knew, we often talk about, because he would ask me sometimes, Catherine, why don’t you run for office? And you know, we would love to have you.
He was talking about the Republican Party, but he knew I wasn’t a Republican. But he said, I would support you. And I was, even in another story, there was a woman who was over the Daughters of Confederacy in Selma. And when they opened the Interpretive Center, the Lowndes County Interpretive Center, which tells the history of the Selma to Montgomery Marsh along the Selma to Montgomery Marsh Trail. She was there and she wrote an editorial saying, calling it a temple orgy of hate and wrote Senator Sessions and said they needed to close it down.
So Senator Sessions decided that he wanted to visit the Interpreter Center and he, his office reached out to me and asked me would I accompany him. And I did. And at that time it was under state control. And I had talked to some leaders, some black leaders across the state and was told that To ask him, could they move it from the state controlling it to the Department of the Interior, which he said on that committee that oversaw the Department of the Interior. So as we walked through there, at the end, he talked about voting rights and all the impediments that were put up to voting, which is really ironic right now.
Some states are trying to do the same thing again. But he said, we need to keep this open because people need to know this history. And it was moved from the state. Under state control to federal control is now run by the National Park Service.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Do you have any guidance or tips for someone listening how they can better work together or maybe not all the values are shared or maybe not even in the same political party as someone? But I got the sense from reading your book that your Christian faith has a lot to do with it. But I’m curious, how might you frame this?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: There are two things. Well, three, actually. One is, in fact, my Christian faith and then my And one of the things that I’ve learned that my father used to always say, and he was paraphrasing what he saw in the Bible, which was, Catherine, if you make one step, God would make two. So I think we have to make the step. And then the second part of it is being from a rural community. When you grow up in a rural community, you’ve got to be dependent upon each other. So you can’t be at each other’s throats.
So we have to find ways in which to communicate. And even though we may not have attended church together, but we were still neighborly toward each other. And then of course, coming from a family that did not meet strangers. So we have to seek common ground. And one of the things I learned about being in the military is that I was put in this situation, you know, with all these folks from around the country that I didn’t know. But at the end of the day, we, at the end of the experience of six weeks in basic training, we had formed lifelong friendships.
So we have to find, and we had come from different backgrounds. I was with people who had never been around a black person before. But at the end of the day, we became friends. And I think we have to find common ground and find the humanity in each and every person. So I’m not going to get into an argument with people over things I don’t agree with. Let’s first let’s find some common ground first. When you can find the common ground, then it’s easy to talk about the hard things.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve heard people say that the military is the most integrated place in America. It sounds like maybe that was your experience, too.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: It was. It was. It was a different experience for me at that time. Now, I didn’t mean I didn’t deal with racism. I dealt with racism. I remember I had braids at the time. And one of the persons walked into the day room and wanted to write me up because I was wearing my hair in braids. But there was nothing in the uniform code of military justice, the UCMJ, that said I couldn’t wear braids. And he wanted to write. He ended up having to give me an apology because my supervisor at the time Reached out to him and sent him the rags and said that you’re wrong.
And he had to back up. But I knew that he was he was you know, he saw that he did that because, you know, I was black and he was white and he had power over me and he felt like he could do that. But he was wrong. And I’ve seen that throughout not just my experience, but I tell the story of my my ex-husband’s experience in the military as well. But it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the military. I have three brothers that served in the military. My father is a vet and I believe in the Constitution and will defend it.
Ross Kenyon: Why would someone make death threats against you? Would they just not want their taxes raised to pay for sewage? Where is the problem?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I really don’t know. I suspect that there are people that benefit from the problem. And of course, you know, if you’re in a situation where you get business based on people being reported to the health department and the health department can criminalize the individual and force them to pay for your business, maybe that was it. I really don’t know. I’m still trying to understand that one of the things that happened during that period of time is someone put a ball python in my apartment. And that’s why I would not live in an apartment anymore.
I want to live in a place where I feel like I can secure it myself because an apartment, anybody can have access to it. But those are the kinds of things that I encountered during that time. Who it was, I really don’t know. People that do stuff like that are cowardly. They never reveal who they are.
Ross Kenyon: If it were someone who made money off of people being cited, having to make extremely expensive repairs, in some cases worth more than the home itself, it seems unmanageable entirely, but they would have made money off of putting in good quality septic systems too, right?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: It doesn’t seem like there’s a... Well, if they fail within two years and you have to go back and do it again, Oh, I see.
Ross Kenyon: Just like a repeat kind of deal.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Yeah, it’s a repeat kind of thing. And then we saw situations, for an example, where there was a person who, he was a minister at a church in another county, and they bought this church property because it was located close to the highway. And after they bought the church property, the adjacent landowner, who I suspect probably sold the property, ended up Found the complaint against the church because the field lines had been separated from the septic tank. When they flushed the toilet, it was coming out onto his property. However, where was he when his property was for sale?
And the health department put all of his might against his minister. The minister was arrested. And the health department put all the might against the minister. And I remember asking somebody from the health department, who I didn’t know at the time, actually wrote one of the laws that criminalized people for this. And I asked him, why aren’t you all trying to help him connect to brownish water and sewer? Since they have a public sewer there, instead of making him pay thousands of dollars, For an on-site system, that doesn’t make any sense.
And the person said to me, it’s a bad law, but we’re going to enforce it. That’s the part that’s so unfair about it. We went to court and it was eventually thrown out because the minister was really, he was just a minister that worked for a corporation and he was the wrong person that they sued. But there was a, this is a case of people reaching across the aisle The attorney that represented him actually ran, we had to get an attorney to represent him to sue to get access to Brunish water and sewer because the person who bought the complaint against him, he had the sewer main on his property within 25 feet of the church.
So it would have made more sense for the health department to facilitate them connecting to the sewer system Instead of trying to convict him and put him in jail because he wouldn’t get the expensive on-site system that they wanted him to get in an area that had access to public sewer. That’s the kind of craziness that we’re dealing with. And that’s the kind of unfairness that happens in these situations that should not have occurred.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any good faith explanation for that? It does seem like a little bit like petty tyranny or people just exercising power indiscriminately.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I think they were exercising power because even when the sheriff at that particular time did not want the health department to execute that warrant, tried to talk them out of it. In terms of the example of people walking across the aisle, a person who’s a local river keeper reached out to me and said, I know an attorney that would sue on his behalf. This attorney had ran for a seat in the State House of Representatives as a Republican. And he was white. The minister was black. He ended up and he was local.
He sued because he knew it was wrong. But he because of who he was as a person, you know, wanting to do the right thing and wanting to be principled. He sued on behalf of the of the church so they can connect to the sewer system, which would would have been that was the easiest fix. But instead, it was almost the same thing that happened when we did the parasite study and the health department said that it wasn’t even accurate. I mean, because we use PCR technology, which is commonly used today, they were not visionaries, but it is commonly used today in diagnosing and treating COVID, for example.
That’s the kind of thinking we’re going to have to get rid of some of these bureaucrats that have been in these offices for a long time. They take their own prejudices with them and they use them and they it gets supercharged through policy to impact people in a negative way instead of the way it was intended, which was for the public good.
Ross Kenyon: How should we be thinking about policy and how might this be addressed in a in a larger way?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, I think one way in which we need to think about policy is How do we dismantle and take power away from people that have used this the wrong way? Because oftentimes they are not replaced. They are still there. They’re there until they retire because as long as they have the support of the politicians who have enabled them or empowered them to practice tyranny, they stay there, especially on the state and local level. So we need to get rid of them. I just heard from people in a town where an engineering firm built a failed system They are really upset because the engineering firm just got money to extend the system that they built that was failing in the first place.
And they said that the town did not want to deal with them. But they said it was agents from USDA that actually showed up with the engineering, a representative of the engineering firm that pretty much forced the town to sign the agreement or they weren’t going to get anything to repair it. Those are the kinds of things that we need to change. It’s that type, that level of corruption that’s occurring where folks that are in these positions are no longer public servants. They’re not serving the public good. They’re serving themselves and they’re serving, I’m assuming, corporations that they represent or the people that can afford to pay their lobbyists and make sure that they always are in line to get the money.
Even if the technology or the infrastructure they put in place doesn’t work, that’s where we’re going to break the back of having, even if you have all the money to go and solve these problems, you have the wrong people in place receiving it and designing systems that don’t work. Our children and grandchildren will be talking about this problem 30 and 40 years from now.
Ross Kenyon: That is a fascinating answer and not the direction I expected you to go. I’ve always loved the expression that personnel is policy. Administrative rules are oftentimes much more important than legislation or how things are interpreted by the offices that are charged with carrying out the law. So that’s such an interesting angle. No one ever focuses on that. Everyone always talks about you need to support H. R. 273, support this bill. It’ll solve everything from the top down. You’re like, it doesn’t matter what you do up there. In some cases, if the people carrying it out are not good.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I mean, if you look at just look at the South and how the South put in place impediments to voting rights back in the 1960s, it didn’t matter that the federal government, the rest of the country was on another trajectory. But the South was going to be the South and try to do everything it could to still enable Jim Crow and discrimination. And we’re starting to see some of that pop back up again. But that happens across the board. But these kinds of issues are issues that impact the public good.
And I think in order for us to change that, we got to reveal it. And that’s why, at least with the environmental justice approach, there has to be community engagement. And I think a lot of the anger that we see bubbling up in this country, even from people that I don’t necessarily agree with their political views, but a lot of the anger is coming because nobody’s listening to them. They’re being told what to do from the top down and nobody’s listening to them and nobody’s going to these communities and seeing what the real problems are.
And even sometimes the best People that may be well-intentioned or are actually killing these communities because they haven’t spent any time there, it’s not their focus, and they can’t go there and have a big crowd. But these areas are very vital to our survival as a country. That’s where a lot of our food is grown. That’s where a lot of us are gonna have to move to because of sea level rise when we can’t live along the coastal areas anymore. We saw people moving to these areas even doing COVID. Because they didn’t want to be in crowded confines.
They want to be someplace where they felt like they can roam around and be okay and not have to come in contact with a whole lot of people and potentially this pandemic as well. So that’s why I think it’s very, very important that rural communities where people are also taxpayers also benefit from what comes from the government. It shouldn’t just go to corporations. It should also go to those people that are living in these small towns because to me, small towns is what, that’s what America is all about. That’s true America.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to ask you about that too. In some of these cases where people are living with open raw sewage pits and things of that nature, would they prefer to be connected to some sort of sewer system or would they, if they could afford it, would they prefer to move? I imagine it’s a mix, but what do you think about that?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, how do you move from a community where your church is, where you went to school, your relatives are buried there? I mean, I think there are cultures in small communities that are there for a reason. And a lot of us can even, those that are living in urban areas, can connect their family heritage to these small towns. I mean, I’m big on genealogy now. And a lot of people are going back to these communities to find out who they are. And I think the only way we’re going to really find out who we are and really correct a lot of the wrongs is when we start getting more in touch with all of America and not just part of America.
And that includes rural communities, too. And I think that we should have a choice. I mean, we’ve got a big country, you know, from sea to shining sea. When did we get to a point where we had to say that everybody had to live in a city? In order to have access to services that all of us should have access to. That’s not the case in Europe. I just talked to people from the PBS equivalent in Italy where they don’t have this problem. I’ve been told by one journalist who interviewed me that they’ve outlawed septic systems in Germany.
I mean, we need to look and see what they’re doing in other parts of the world to treat wastewater. Because of the Gates Foundation and its noble fight to deal with the toilet, we just forgot about what happens once you flush the toilet. And that’s our focus through our organization, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, is make sure that we realize that once you flush the toilet, it has to be treated. And it has to be treated in such a way there are nutrients that are in there that we can actually reuse.
And part of our goal is to create the technologies using not only the best minds from the engineering and even aeronautic engineering, because they treat wastewater out of space. I mean, out of space to drinking water quality. Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we create something that you can go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy and it’ll treat your wastewater? It would change the whole trajectory around where you settle, where you live, and whether or not you need to be connected to A sewer system that eventually is going to dump it into the ocean or into a river or some other place where it shouldn’t go.
Ross Kenyon: People would have their own composting or reactor for biosolids. They would have a night soil making machine in their home, something like that.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, we’re not going to expose what our concept is yet, but we do have a concept that we want to develop and we’re going to work on it. And the difference in our engineering paradigm is that we’re going to have impacted people at the table At the beginning, helping with the design. Because most of the people that are trying to design a solution have no idea what the problem is because they haven’t had to live with it.
Ross Kenyon: That seems very wise to me. I’m sure you’ll come up with an entirely different product than if you did not include them until you were testing it or really far down the line.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Yeah, and that’s part of the failures. I was a consultant recently. This group reached out to me and asked me would I have a call with them about a project. They were contacted by EPA because... This wastewater system was failing in this area and the local people would not cooperate with them. I said, why not? And they said, well, they brought us on board to develop a system to educate them about how to manage the system that they have because that’s why it’s failed. So how do you know that? Have you talked to them?
They said no. I said, that’s what’s wrong with your design. That’s why they’re not cooperating with you. How do you go into a community where you have never made any contact with them To tell them that the reason their system is failing is because they don’t know how to maintain it and they need to be educated. But you never ask them, why is it failing? They know because they deal with it every day. That’s what’s wrong with that paradigm. That’s why people are upset. That’s why we have a divide. Because there are folk coming in that won’t listen.
And that’s one of the most important things that we have to do is start listening to each other by doing that and asking the people themselves, what is the problem? Explain that to me. What do you think the solution is? And we probably would come up with better solutions than we have coming up from the top down.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s very wise. I think there’s plenty of great reasons to do that from ideological ones to more practical concerns. Catherine, I have to ask you because I’ve been so enamored by the EJ concerns of your book that we didn’t really get to climate, which is okay. That happens sometimes.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Oh, we get to climate because it’s all part of it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s all part of it. Yeah. And you’ve been involved with the Joe Biden Task Force on Climate Change. You’re involved with the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. So I know there’s a lot of intersections here with climate change. Maybe you can paint that for our listeners.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, I can give you an example. You know, I’m a storyteller because I’m from the country. So we always, you know, we sit on the porch and tell stories, right? So one of the places that we can look at and see what climate change is having an impact is Miami. In the Miami area, they built all these communities using septic systems. Miami has over a billion dollar septic system problem. They’re failing because of sea level rise. With sea level rise, that means the water is coming from the bottom and the water is also coming from the top and they have poorer soils.
And as a result of that, they’re getting a lot of allergy booms and fish kills and that’s going to Continue to increase, but it’s not just Miami, it’s throughout the state of Florida. We found that true here in Alabama too, where we’re having more and more flooding. And Noah just issued a report that talked about how the West is going to get drier and it’s going to get wetter in the East. What does that mean for us? It means our water tables are rising. One of the persons I wrote about in the book was Pamela Rush.
And Pamela Rush lived in a single wide mobile home and a donor came forward and wanted to give her another home Because that one was dilapidated and she was not really protected that much from the elements. Because of climate change and being so hot and humid, the house was full of mold and mildew and her daughter was sleeping on a CPAP machine. What stopped us from moving forward was that when we, the half acre property that she owned, when we wanted to put the septic tank there, we brought out the engineers, we had all the engineering work done, we paid for it and was told that the system that she needed on this property Because the water table was so high, it was going to cost $28,000.
They dug down 25 inches and struck water. What does that mean? That means that the water table, we’re talking about sea level rise, but what we’re not talking about are these groundwater tables that are also rising. And what that means, that means that flooding is probably going to be more prevalent, but it also means that the infrastructure that we put in the ground is not going to work the same because it was not designed for that. And that’s why we’re talking about working on new designs, dealing with the realities of what’s going on on the ground now, because people are still selling us stuff that if it had an expiration date would have expired 15 or 20 years ago.
And we can’t do this with infrastructure because it’s too critical to our public health. And that’s where climate change intersects. And that’s why we have found hookworm and other tropical parasites in places like Lowndes County, And after my book came out, I actually heard from a veterinarian who told me that they’re starting to find hookworm in dogs in Alaska. What? That should be a warning to us all.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a tropical parasite and it’s in Alaska.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. If someone wanted to keep up with your work, Catherine, what’s the best way for them to do so?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, there are a couple of ways. One, they can go to our website, which is www. crej.org. That’s the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. You can also follow me on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. You can read the book. We are also engaged in a year-long project with The Guardian newspaper where we’re looking at wastewater issues around the country, and we’re asking people to self-report. So if you’re interested in doing that, You can go to the website, find that link and self-report wastewater problems because out of that are coming stories, but we’re also pulling together documentation on wastewater issues around the country.
So if you are aware of a wastewater issue, you can contact me directly. I will respond and we can try to make sure that we include that in the database that we’re developing. Because we feel that policymakers are not going to make good policy until we have the data to show them that this is a problem. And it’s very widespread and why it is the way it is. And we need people, not the people that benefit from the problem. We need the people that are suffering from the problem to speak to us because out of that will come the solutions.
Ross Kenyon: A great place to leave it. Thanks for being here, Catherine.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Thank you so much.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my pleasure. Links to all of those things are in the show notes. And if you like what we do, please send this show to a friend. Give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And thank you so much for being a listener. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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