This year's common reading text focuses on issues of sanitation and waste management in poor areas around the United States. Author Catherine Coleman Flowers delves into why our sanitation and wastewater infrastructure has been systematically neglected over decades and explores how this situation has harmed the safety, health and livelihood of millions of low income and rural Americans. What happens to garbage and human waste is not something we often think about but it is an essential function of society that needs to be addressed in order to improve the lives of some of our most vulnerable citizens. 

Author Catherine Coleman Flowers was born in Birmingham and grew up in rural Lowndes County Alabama. An activist from an early age, she became interested in the issue of sanitation and wastewater infrastructure while serving as an advocate for rural business development in her small, relatively poor, Southern county. Over the years she has teamed up with lawyers, universities, public health organizations, environmental causes and government agencies to bring to light the massive harm that neglected rural water and sanitation infrastructure causes in poor and marginalized communities. 

Spotlight: Interview with Catherine Coleman Flowers via The New Press website. 

Environmental Racism

Watch: Environmental Racism, a two part documentary from Academic Video Online delving into how marginalized and disadvantaged populations can organize to fight waste and sanitation issues that negatively impact their safety and quality of life. 

Clean and White: A history of environmental racism in the United States (ebook)

Environmental racism and climate change (article from the New England Journal of Medicine)

Environmental Justice

Environmental Justice: the key issues (ebook) 

Environmental Justice: the economics of race, place and pollution (article)

Environmental Activism