Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), an organization that works to address environmental issues such as climate change and environmental-related disparities through the viewpoint of environmental justice. According to its website, CREEJ’s mission is to “reduce health, economic, and environmental disparities and improve access to clean air, water, and soil in marginalized rural communities.” Her professional work and activism centers around how failing waste and water infrastructure perpetuates socioeconomic and health disparities in rural America.

Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, an area with a racist history with lasting consequences for today. Lowndes continues to suffer from poverty and failing infrastructure, resulting in the presence of sewage in backyards and drinking water. Flowers' exposure to the consequences of environmental racism from a young age prompted her to pursue history and political science at Cameron University, where she received her BA in 1986. Flowers then earned her MA in history from the University of Nebraska in 2015.

Flowers’ 2020 memoir, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, investigates how systemic racial, geographical, and class prejudice results in developing world conditions for people across America. Flowers tells the story of her activism, starting in Lowndes County, fighting to ensure that all Americans have access to a right most people take for granted: sanitation. As climate change worsens, Flowers draws attention to its consequences for marginalized groups and their access to sanitation. Her other publications include “Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the United States,” which also sheds light on the rural communities suffering from a lack of basic sanitation and wastewater nationwide, and “How the Trump Administration’s Efforts to Redefine Human Rights Threaten Economic, Social, and Racial Justice,” a paper that analyzes the link for marginalized people between eroding economic and social rights (ESRs) and limitations on their civil and political rights.

In addition to founding CREEJ, Flowers is also the rural development manager for the Equal Justice Initiative, a member of the board of directors of the Climate Reality Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a senior fellow for the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. In 2011, Flowers worked with the United Nations Special Rapporteur poverty to expose the suffering of the rural South. In 2020, Flowers also received the MacArthur Fellowship, which is often referred to as the “Genius Grant.” Finally, Flowers will be doing the speaker series from the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, advocating for environmental justice and basic human rights for the rural South.

Written by Claire Goldberg and Bennett Neuwirth, Class of 2022