A Note on Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

In her book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, Catherine Coleman Flowers (2022) disagrees with Bob Woodson’s assessment that the extreme poverty and associated environmental issues plaguing descendants of racial oppression are “a failure of the civil rights movement” (p. 15). Instead, she assigns fault to the government’s lack of intervention. While ultimate accountability for these issues begins and ends with the ruling class of government authorities, it’s vital that environmental injustice be recognized as deriving from a lack of civil rights. As such, a narrower argument can and should be made encompassing both points of view: the lack of government action on these issues is evidence of the failure of the civil rights movement to extend meaningful political power and social equity to the most marginalized communities.

The issues addressed by Woodson stemmed from his visit to rural homes in Lowndes County in Alabama, where residents live “without sewers or septic tanks, with waste running off into an open ditch” (Flowers, 2022, p. 15). Flowers is right to point out that government action and inaction contributed to and, at times, codified these inequities; however, it’s inaccurate to argue that this separates the matter from shortcomings in the fight for civil rights. In fact, by claiming such, Flowers is ignoring her own observations made only a few pages earlier, where she notes that the lack of political clout held by the county’s 11,000 voters has played a contributing role (p. 8-9). Despite Flowers’ subsequent argument to the contrary, that lack of representation—lack of effective civil rights—is what keeps these communities vulnerable to this day. If civil rights were fully realized, communities such as these would have a clear pathway to resolving the environmental injustices to which Woodson was referring.

By failing to link environmental justice and civil rights, as Flowers does here, advocates risk focusing on stopgap resolutions that fix the specific environmental or health hazards at hand without resolving the underlying structural inequities that allowed those hazards to promulgate in the first place. Doing so leaves the door open to the formation of further injustices at the hands of public and private industry. As such, in addition to environmental justice sharing a link with civil rights, it can only be effectively resolved by acknowledging that link. In other words, for environmental justice to be achieved and retained, civil rights must be achieved and retained.

A more charitable reading of Flowers’ disagreement with Woodson could be that she doesn’t see the civil rights movement as the cause of the environmental inequities in Lowndes County—obviously, the causes are long-standing and structural and existed long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s began. But that seems an obvious assessment, and it further seems unreasonable to assert that this is what Woodson intended. At best, flowers could be read as wanting to avoid labeling levels of progress not yet achieved by the civil rights movement as failures of that movement, but she doesn’t argue that; instead, she offers a blanket disagreement, placing the blame squarely on government, implying that the two are mutually exclusive.

Ultimately, many historical actors are responsible for the environmental injustices we see in places like Lowndes County, and blame cannot be placed on any single entity alone. The government has played perhaps the most significant active role in forming those inequities, while a lack of civil rights has played the most significant passive role. As such, for environmental justice to be achieved and maintained, advocates must acknowledge the causal role of both.

Flowers, C. C. (2020). Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. The New Press.