凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯 环境健康倡导者

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Catherine Coleman Flowers
Environmental Health Advocate | Class of 2020
Bringing attention to failing water and waste sanitation infrastructure in rural areas and its role in perpetuating health and socioeconomic disparities.


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Title
Environmental Health Advocate
Affiliation
Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice
Location
Montgomery, Alabama
Age
62 at time of award
Area of Focus
Housing and Community/Economic Development, Environment and Climate Change
Website
Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice
Center for Earth Ethics: Catherine Coleman Flowers
Social
Twitter
Published October 6, 2020
ABOUT CATHERINE'S WORK
Catherine Coleman Flowers is an environmental activist bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in rural communities in the United States. As founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), Flowers builds partnerships across social scales—from close neighbors, to local elected officials and regional nonprofits, to federal lawmakers and global organizations—to identify and implement solutions to the intersecting challenges of water and sanitation infrastructure, public health, and economic development.

Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, an area plagued by poverty and failing infrastructure, which often results in raw sewage in yards and waterways and contaminated drinking water for residents. With a deep understanding of the historical, political, economic, and physical contraints that impede the implementation of better infrastructure in the region, she has engaged collaborators across a broad range of disciplinary expertise to document how lack of access to sufficient and sustained waste treatment and clean water can trap rural, predominantly Black populations in a vicious cycle of poverty and disease. In 2011, Flowers worked with the UN Special Rapporteur to uncover the startling level of poverty in Lowndes County and the southern United States more broadly. With the Columbia University Law School Human Rights Clinic and Institute for the Study of Human Rights, she published “Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the United States” (2019), an examination of inequalities in access to sanitation and clean water within a framework of human rights. The report exposes the extent of water contamination and sanitation problems in poor, rural communities across the country, largely due to the marginalization of these communities. Flowers also spearheaded a collaboration with tropical disease researchers focused on intestinal parasitic infections spread by way of insufficient water treatment and waste sanitation. The researchers found that hookworm, long thought to have been eliminated from the South, is in fact prevalent among the residents of Lowndes County, prompting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to undertake a similar, larger study across the rural American South. Flowers’s testimony to the U.S. Congress led to the introduction of legislation in 2019 to address neglected diseases of poverty in the United States.

Flowers is broadening the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities and galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities in rural areas across the United States.



CatherineColemanFlowers
BIOGRAPHY
Catherine Coleman Flowers received a BA (1986) from Cameron University and an MA (2015) from the University of Nebraska. In addition to being a founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers is also the rural development manager for the Equal Justice Initiative, a senior fellow for the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and a member of the board of directors of the Climate Reality Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Previously, Flowers has worked as a high school teacher in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. She has published articles in Anglican Theological Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, among others, and her book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, is forthcoming in fall 2020.



凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯
环境健康倡导者 | 2020级
让人们关注农村地区失败的水和废物卫生基础设施及其在延续健康和社会经济差异方面的作用。


凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯的肖像

标题
环境健康倡导者
所属机构
农村企业和环境正义中心
工作地点
蒙哥马利，阿拉巴马州
年龄
获奖时为62岁
重点领域
住房和社区/经济发展, 环境和气候变化
网站
农村企业和环境正义中心
地球伦理中心。凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯
社会
推特
发表于2020年10月6日
关于凯瑟琳的工作
凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯是一位环境活动家，她让人们关注美国农村社区的废物和水卫生基础设施不足这一基本不可见的问题。作为农村企业和环境正义中心（CREEJ）的创始主任，弗劳尔斯建立了跨社会规模的伙伴关系--从近邻到地方民选官员和区域非营利组织，再到联邦立法者和全球组织，以确定和实施解决方案，应对水和卫生基础设施、公共健康和经济发展的交叉挑战。

Flowers在阿拉巴马州的Lowndes县长大，该地区受到贫困和失败的基础设施的困扰，这往往导致院子和水道中的原始污水和居民的饮用水受到污染。凭借对阻碍该地区实施更好的基础设施的历史、政治、经济和物理限制的深刻理解，她与广泛的学科专家合作，记录了缺乏足够和持续的废物处理和清洁水是如何使以黑人为主的农村人口陷入贫困和疾病的恶性循环中。2011年，弗劳尔斯与联合国特别报告员合作，揭示了伦德斯县和美国南部更广泛的惊人的贫困水平。她与哥伦比亚大学法学院人权诊所和人权研究所合作，出版了《被冲刷和遗忘。美国农村社区的卫生设施和废水》（2019年），在人权框架内对获得卫生设施和清洁水的不平等现象进行了研究。该报告揭露了全国各地贫穷的农村社区的水污染和卫生设施问题的程度，主要是由于这些社区的边缘化。弗劳尔斯还带头与热带疾病研究人员合作，重点研究通过水处理和废物卫生设施不足的方式传播的肠道寄生虫感染。研究人员发现，长期以来被认为已经从南方消除的钩虫病，实际上在Lowndes县的居民中普遍存在，这促使美国疾病控制中心在整个美国南方农村地区进行类似的、更大的研究。弗劳尔斯在美国国会的证词导致了在2019年提出立法，以解决美国被忽视的贫困疾病。

弗劳尔斯正在扩大环境正义的范围，以包括被剥夺权利的农村社区的具体问题，并激励政策和研究，以纠正失败的基础设施，使美国农村地区的社会经济差异长期存在。



凯瑟琳-科尔曼花
个人简历
凯瑟琳-科尔曼-弗劳尔斯在卡梅隆大学获得学士学位（1986年），在内布拉斯加大学获得硕士学位（2015年）。除了是农村企业和环境正义中心的创始董事外，弗劳尔斯还是平等正义倡议的农村发展经理，联合神学院地球伦理中心的高级研究员，以及气候现实项目和自然资源保护委员会的董事会成员。她曾在《圣公会神学评论》、《哥伦比亚人权法评论》和《美国热带医学和卫生学会》等杂志上发表文章，她的书《废物》。她的书《废物：一个女人与美国肮脏的秘密作斗争》即将在2020年秋季出版。