26 Feb Amid the Erasure of Black History, Climate Justice Leader Tells Stories That Bridge Political Divide

Catherine Coleman Flowers, MacArthur fellow and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. (Courtesy of Amanda Pitt via Bay City News)

By Ruth Dusseault
Bay City News

Born in a car in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958, carrying DNA from France, Nigeria, Nova Scotia and Thailand, Catherine Coleman Flowers entered the world at the swell of the civil rights movement.

Five decades later, she would be selected as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and become a celebrated author and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, or CREEJ, a nonprofit that advocates for clean infrastructure in marginalized rural communities.

Flowers spoke Tuesday in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club’s ongoing series called Climate One, which shines a light on environmental advocates, policymakers and other experts in the field of climate issues.

Flowers has been involved in grassroots activism all her life. As a child, her family moved to Lowndes County, which is located between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama.

“Lowndes County is known for the original Black Panther party, although the Bay Area takes credit,” Flowers said at the Commonwealth Club event.

Her parents participated in civil rights activism and were interested in the Pan-African movement. She remembers her family calling themselves African American and wearing natural hair.

“Prayer was a large part of that because it was very traumatic,” she said. “There was a lot of violence, a lot of people died, but it was also about having faith. As I do this work now, going into communities where people may not vote the way I vote, or look the way I look, I have to go in and have some degree of faith. That way we’re going to find some commonality and out of that make change together.”

Finding common ground in politically divided America is Flower’s strength, as she illustrates through stories in her 2025 collection of essays, “Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope.” There is an essay about her participation in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris after learning she had French DNA. Another essay focuses on food and health in Alabama’s Black Belt, where a large population of freed slaves remained after the Civil War. The narratives throughout the book return to the core principle of the environmental justice movement — a basic civil right to a clean, safe and sustainable environment.

Flowers’ entry into the movement began when she returned as an adult to Lowndes County to research the root causes of poverty in Alabama. Over the years, she discovered a profound lack of wastewater infrastructure, undergirded by a punitive regulatory system. A survey revealed that more than half the county’s households were piping raw sewage onto the ground or had failing septic systems that often drew sewage backwards into bathtubs.

“The Alabama Public Health Department used the threat of incarceration as a tool to punish families with failing or no septic systems,” reads a statement on the CREEJ website. “This tactic forced people to hide instead of disclosing the issues that resulted in significant health impacts, including evidence of hookworm in Lowndes County.”

Hookworm is a ground parasite that damages people’s intestines and can slow growth in children. The national attention led to the revelation of wastewater issues in areas throughout the United States.

Flowers said at the Climate One discussion that what was going on in Lowndes County had an impact on then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. She said Sanders found out about the county after a United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, an independent expert who reports on human rights issues, visited Alabama and reported back to Washington. He talked about how the conditions in Lowndes County were uncommon in the developed world.

“Sen. Sanders called me and said, ‘Catherine, I want you to come to Washington and talk in a town hall meeting. I don’t want you to use highly intelligent terms. Tell it like it, is so people can understand and see it,'” she said.

Sanders showed up to that meeting and promised to send help to Alabama.

“One of the things about coming to a place like Lowndes County, and these rural communities exist here in California too, is that when you see it, you can’t unsee it,” Flowers said.

Sanders eventually placed Flowers on President Biden’s Task Force on Climate Change, where she worked with former Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy to frame climate change through the lens of environmental justice. But she gained notoriety for crossing the political divide and forming unlikely alliances.

One of the essays in her book tells the story of working with U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, the former Auburn University football coach, on a bill to increase funding for rural communities to get wastewater treatment.

“You know, this guy has been in the homes of many Black women, trying to recruit their sons to go and play football,” she said. “I know he didn’t go there not knowing how to talk to people and interact. For that reason, I wasn’t afraid to approach him.”

Since Flowers began working with Tuberville’s staff in Alabama, she has had to confront some Democrats who don’t want to support Tuberville for any reason, she said.

“We cannot cut off our noses to spite our faces,” said Flowers. “That’s where we are right now as a nation. We need to change that. I think it is a template for how we move forward and how we try to build bridges.”

The story of her unlikely collaboration with Tuberville was written before the election. Since the Trump administration took office, federal programs have been slashed, including mass layoffs at regulatory agencies.

Lee Zeldin, the new director of the EPA, has attempted to claw back billions in funds distributed from the Inflation Reduction Act that were targeted for underserved populations, low-income and disadvantaged communities.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to the far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” said Zeldin in a Feb. 12 post on the social media site X.

“When I wrote this essay, I didn’t know how it would resonate at this moment in time,” Flowers said. “When we’re eliminating all mentions from the federal government of Black history — when we don’t even want to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday, who was all about peace — I think that we have to reach back and see these stories that can give us hope and keep us pushing for what we know to be right.”

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