‘It’s a Hidden Problem, Associated With Shame’
2020 MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner Catherine Coleman Flowers on how millions in the U.S. lack access to water and wastewater treatment — and what we can do about it
Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice in Montgomery, Alabama and a senior fellow at the Equal Justice Initiative. Catherine is a pioneer in working to address the lack of wastewater in rural communities in the United States — work that has just been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation, which just announced as a recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Just after the announcement, I sat down with Catherine for a chat about how environmental justice, racism, climate change and water and wastewater access are related in the United States.
John Sabo: Congratulations on becoming a MacArthur fellow; that’s amazing and well-deserved.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, thank you. I was very surprised, but I think it only will add more credence and credibility to what we’re trying to do.
John Sabo: Catherine and I met at the White House Water Summit in 2016. We had the opportunity to sit next to each other. I learned a lot about environmental justice and access issues in the South just sitting next to you that day — there were other folks in the room who were working on similar issues — and since that time I have gotten more and more engaged in it and kept in touch with you. And that’s been a productive influence on my research career and also on my water-activism career. It was a great fortune to sit next to you.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Well, thank you. You know, some things are about divine order — we were supposed to work together.
John Sabo: At the global scale: 785 million people lack access to safe water; that’s one in every nine people on the planet. Two billion lack access to a toilet; that’s one in every three. And I think a lot of times as an American — even as Americans in the water community, we think, oh, that’s a problem that’s abroad that we have to deal with.
But it’s not: There are at least 2 million people without access to water in the U.S. And that’s exactly the issue you work on. The recent report by Dig Deep and U.S. Water Alliance brought this issue to the forefront, but you have been working on what we’re now calling the “U.S. water-access gap” for decades and bringing it to public light.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I think that we really don’t know how many people in the United States don’t have access not only to water but certainly to wastewater treatment. It’s a hidden problem. Most of the communities that are suffering are in rural communities or small towns. We have pretty much associated this problem with shame, where people instead of talking about will take it on as a personal responsibility instead of knowing that it’s caused by failed infrastructure, or no infrastructure at all, or policies that have excluded rural communities.
We have pretty much associated this problem with shame, where people instead of talking about will take it on as a personal responsibility instead of knowing that it’s caused by failed infrastructure, or no infrastructure at all, or policies that have excluded rural communities.
— Catherine Coleman Flowers
And one of the things that we have seen that even when people think that this problem’s been addressed in the U.S. and there’s monies available for it, a lot of the monies that have been put aside to deal with wastewater problems don’t go to the communities that need it. It doesn’t go to the marginalized communities. It generally goes to communities to upgrade what they already have, and those are people that have access. The people that don’t have access are generally left out. Some of the policies are written in such a way that they do not include unincorporated areas of the U.S. It’s a shame to think that the only way you can get access to wastewater treatment or even water is that you have to be in an incorporated area when in fact you’re still a taxpayer and an American.
From where I sit I see this problem not just in Alabama but throughout the United States. People in Alaska are dealing with it because of the melting permafrost. People in California’s Central Valley are dealing with this problem because they never got the infrastructure in the first place. The Central Valley of California, one of the most liberal states in the union. And then you have people in Navajo Nation who have a lack of access to wastewater and water infrastructure. Or if you’re turning off water in Detroit — people there can’t even flush their toilets, because you need water to flush the toilets. Sea-level rise is causing people in Miami to lose access to water because they live in communities with septic tanks that are failing now, and when the tanks fail the sewage comes back into the house.
If we can treat wastewater to drinking-water quality in outer space, on space shuttles, why we can’t do that here, and why we can’t have the type of device that someone can buy at a Lowe’s or a Home Depot and be able to put it in a home?
— Catherine Coleman Flowers
The big question that I have is: How many of these people have increased risk of COVID and potential death because of exposure to wastewater? Because we know now that you can test wastewater to find out the level of COVID infection in the community before people actually start experiencing symptoms. We have to address this. This is not just a problem abroad; it’s a U.S. problem as well. The U.S. must provide the leadership, the will and the time and effort necessary to address it. If we can treat wastewater to drinking-water quality in outer space, on space shuttles, why we can’t do that here, and why we can’t have the type of device that someone can buy at a Lowe’s or a Home Depot and be able to put it in a home?
John Sabo: I have a couple questions about solutions down the road. But before you answer those, could you just paint us a picture of what access issues look like in the rural South and Alabama? Because I remember you told me a few things at the White House Water Summit that just opened my eyes.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: There are three problems. One is straight-piping. Usually this is done by poor families living in mobile homes that they own but are in predatory lending situations. Straight-piping means that when you flush your toilet it goes out into the ground right behind your house. That is very prevalent. You see it in a lot of areas where people have raw sewage on the ground. It’s primarily because the septic systems that they need are so expensive.
The second problem: With all the rain we’re getting in the Gulf region from tropical storms because of climate change, even homes with septic systems are starting to get sewage backing up. It comes in through a bathtub, it can come in through a sink. If they happen to be away from home during the day and come back, it can be all over their homes. We’ve actually gone to homes where we can see the water marks around the walls where the sewage just actually come out — and this is raw sewage coming back into homes.
The third problem is that some people are paying wastewater treatment fees that are part of smaller-town systems that don’t work. The engineers design it, the state approves it, and then they leave — and when there’s a problem they blame the individual like they do with the onsite systems. There are too many of these happening for it to just be random. When we took the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty to visit an area where there was sewage on the ground, it was a cluster of mobile homes. You could see the water lines bringing drinking water to the home just above the ditches full of raw sewage. It begged the question: Was any of that sewage getting into the drinking water pipes. A reporter that accompanied the special rapporteur asked him: “Have you ever seen this before?” He said: “This is very uncommon in the developed world.”
John Sabo: Most of the communities you work with that are rural, they’re not peripheral like peri-urban; they’re in the woods or in the swamp. And there are clusters of mobile homes that have aquifers that are very close to the surface, so any sort of below-ground storage and treatment option is questionable. Do you think that the solution is sort of individual household or trailer treatment at the toilet?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: Ultimately we’re going to have to get to that, because what is being proposed has not worked. It’s not working. I’m hearing from people around the country that are having problems with failures. I’m hearing from people around the country that are working in corporate America that say, “Look, I put all this money into a septic tank and I know that it’s just sooner or later it’s going to fail.” We have to find some solutions. We have to get away from thinking that we could build something that’ll last for a few years that’s so important, and then have to start it all over again. We can’t keep doing that.
John Sabo: Globally there are 2 billion people who lack access to a toilet, 785 million who lack access to safe water. So almost twice or 2.5 times as many people without a toilet. Is that the same in the United States?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: I would think so. Water is not everywhere. But a lot of the people in Lowndes County, Alabama that I’ve worked with, or other places that I’ve gone, have water, they just don’t have access to adequate wastewater treatment.
John Sabo: I remember you told me at the White House Water Summit often the nearest toilet is at a Walmart.
Catherine Coleman Flowers: For some people that’s true. What I do when people come to visit in Lowndes County when they want to see it first-hand, I have to plan the bathroom stops.
John Sabo: Wow. Now let’s pivot to equity. Globally these issues affect women more than men. Is that true here in the U.S.?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: That’s my educated guess.
John Sabo: And what about racial disparities and socio-economic disparities in access to either sanitization or drinking water?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: A lot of it is because of structural racism, where communities were just denied access to infrastructure. For example, there’s a town in Lowndes County where there was sewage treatment that was available to people who were white — the so-called “white side of town” at that particular time in history. And then when they expanded that infrastructure to the black side of town, the infrastructure was very different that they used on the white side. That’s a common problem around the U.S. when I go and I talk to people. When I went to Centreville, Illinois, right outside of St. Louis, similar problem. I saw more rural sewage on the ground there than I saw in Lowndes County. It’s gotten to the point that I’m not shocked anymore.
There should not be unequal access to water or sanitation based on your economic needs. We should not put people in a caste system and think it’s okay for people in rural communities or people in marginalized communities to be excluded something that should be a basic human right.
— Catherine Coleman Flowers
If you go to West Virginia, or Kentucky, or Tennessee, a lot of times it’s poor white communities that are suffering from the same thing. There should not be unequal access to water or sanitation based on your economic needs. We should not put people in a caste system and think it’s okay for people in rural communities or people in marginalized communities to be excluded something that should be a basic human right.
Next month: Catherine tells John why she thinks rural water access problems have been overlooked, whether she sees any bright spots in increasing wastewater access for U.S. rural communities, and why composting toilets aren’t embraced by many rural U.S. residents.
Catherine’s forthcoming book is “Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.”
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