Catherine Coleman Flowers’ new book, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, was published a week into President Donald Trump’s second term.
Grounded in faith, the book weaves together stories about Flowers’ family, climate change and her work on sanitation rights and infrastructure in rural America. In the first essay, “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” she compares the infiltration of money into U.S. politics with Judas Iscariot’s biblical betrayal of Jesus Christ for 30 pieces of silver.
It’s not just a parable, however: Environmental injustice in the United States is deeply rooted in the ascension of profits over people in America.
Flowers founded and leads the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and was vice chair of the Biden administration’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, as well as a member of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Climate Change. She’s also a 2020 MacArthur Fellow for environmental health advocacy and, in 2011, worked with the United Nations special rapporteur to expose environmental injustices in Lowndes County, Alabama, where she grew up, and across the southern U.S.
Now, she says, is a good time to read her book and work toward transformation.
This week, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin publicly announced 31 changes as part of the agency’s “greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”
In more than 20 different press releases issued on March 12 alone, the agency touted efficiency, blasted burdensome regulations and slashed programs as part of the EPA’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative.
Zeldin proclaimed that the agency is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” and cutting or changing long-standing regulations on air and water quality and industry oversight. He also terminated all environmental justice divisions with the EPA’s 10 regional offices and its headquarters in Washington, D.C.
For decades, environmental justice arms have funded and focused on improving public health, protecting drinking water and clean air, and remediating pollution within communities where poor people and people of color are targeted by industries and routinely and systematically exposed to unhealthy and unsafe living and working conditions.
Flowers spoke to Capital & Main from the road on the day after Zeldin’s pronouncements.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: What are your top concerns about Zeldin’s announcement and the EPA’s trajectory?
Catherine Coleman Flowers: The people that are going to be impacted the most by this are people in rural communities, because it’s hidden. Most people don’t see that people in rural communities sometimes are dealing with dirty air, dirty water and no sanitation infrastructure. They’re dealing with contamination from human waste because the sanitation systems don’t work or sometimes [people are] simply straight piping because they don’t have the funds to do any better.
When you’re thinking about impacted rural communities, what jumps to your mind first and foremost?
Appalachia. I think about Appalachia. I think about the Midwest. I think about the colonias in south Texas. I think about Alabama. I think about all these areas in need of sustainable economic development and the infrastructure that’s needed to sustain a workforce.
A lot of these rural communities are unincorporated, and they’re unincorporated because it’s hard for them to get the federal funding they need for infrastructure, and for the infrastructure to support sustainable lifestyles, the American norm.
In colonias, from California to Texas along the Mexican border, people are living in unincorporated communities, rural areas, but they’re not rural in the traditional sense. In one little community, you could have 1,000 homes there. They’re all mobile homes, for the most part, and they don’t have adequate sanitation, they don’t have drainage for when it rains, they don’t have, in some places, quality drinking water or access to electricity.
Then, what I’ve seen in Appalachia: I still saw a mobile home sitting on the side of hills with raw sewage running down the side because they were straight piping. In our study, [“Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the United States” in 2019], we found people had tropical parasites in their system because of the exposure to raw sewage.
I’m from Lowndes County, Alabama, where people existing in poverty are living in mobile homes that cannot withstand a storm. Alabama is one of those states that has a high incident of people dying during tornadoes. That’s because they live in mobile homes, and they’re not resilient, they’re not sustainable, and they don’t help people develop wealth because they depreciate in value.
Even in some of the more affluent and progressive states, in rural communities, where the poorer people tend to live, they don’t have the type of infrastructure that they need in order to exist. Then in the poorer urban areas, they also will have failing systems, and we are starting to find that this is the case across the United States, that sanitation systems are failing.
Zeldin and Trump and others publicly say they don’t believe in climate change, that climate change isn’t real, but people in positions of power clearly know that climate change is happening and understand its effects. Why do you think that it’s so important for them to message that climate change isn’t real?
I think that most people on the ground do know that climate change is real, so I don’t understand their position. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that.
What does Zeldin’s phrase “Powering the Great American Comeback” mean to you, or signal to you?
To me, what would be a “Great American Comeback” would be when everybody is guaranteed a living wage. When there is no more raw sewage on the ground, and we have sanitation systems that work. When we don’t have people living on the street, when people have decent housing, and all children can have an opportunity for quality education. To me, that will be when we have the Great American Comeback.
How can Americans, especially those in rural communities, have clean air and clean water without the EPA, the federal laws, the leadership and the funding? Is there hope for state or local action?
I think there is hope for state and local action on these issues because the people on the ground can see the damage before the federal government even gets involved. We also still have to push for federal involvement and engagement. But maybe some states can become exemplary of what it really looks like to have the type of environmental regulations that protect everybody.
There is so much fear in the country right now. Do you feel or see that in the communities where you work?
I don’t really see a lot of fear because a lot of the communities that I work in have been through hard times before. I grew up poor, in a rural community without access to a lot of things that we take advantage of today, and that are being threatened. I was around before we had all these things. We survived. And I believe that we’re going to survive again. We know that this is only short term. Ultimately, all of us believed in what America is and what the American ideal is. We still support that, and we think we’re going to get back to that. To be fearful and do nothing is just to succumb.
Is there anything that people need to think about right now in terms of action, protecting communities that have systematically been deprived of access to resources?
People still need to stay engaged. They need to lift up stories of folks who are suffering and also examples of what success looks like. I think that’s very important. We also need to look to the midterms. We need to vote. And some of these people who are fearful need to run for office so they can change things.
