The Lack of Basic Sanitation in the United States is Solvable

I have my outfit. I have my black outfit with my boots so I won't be big by mosquito's on rous sewage. Again, not talking about the problems caused by untreated sewage has led us to ignore the prevalence of diseases that people thought were largely gone from the United States, and we found evidence of hookworm and other tropical parasites. Hookworm can penetrate the skin and usually end up typically in the good and it can create anemia because it

feeds on the person's blood. COVID nineteen has underscored the health vulnerability that are linked with poverty and racial inequality. Some of those health discorities are closely tied to inadequate wastewater treatment. Catherine Coleman Flowers was recently awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work studying the problem of bad sewage on how to improve it. That's the good news. The bad news is she sees the problem getting worse

the climate change. Whether you're in Alaska whereas because of no infrastructure in some cases, or failing infrastructure because of militing for perma frost, or if you're in a coastal state because of rise in sea level, or you're like where we are in Alabama with groundwater increasing because of

sea level rise. All of these issues are issues that we're going to have to deal with, and it's best to deal with it now instead of waiting until there's a crisis like what we saw just happened in Texas. Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder and director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. The lack of basic sanitation and rural communities in the United States is a problem that is solvable. Katherine, you grew up in Lownes County, Alabama. Can you tell me a little bit

about it and what it was like growing up there. Yes, Lowndes County is seven hundred and fourteen square miles, very rural. When I grew up, we could actually pick plants and apples off trees, and I would walk through corn fields and actually pick up an ear corn off of stock and could you know, sink my teeth in it, and actually, you know, like the way it tasts. It was supported by the Alabama I'm a river. There are lots of

creeks and streams there. It was a kind of community where people were self reliant and everybody had a garden and when you went to visit someone, it was not unusual for them to talk about what they had grown in their garden, even give you something to take home. And that is the Black Belt is where cotton was historically grown in the country. It's got this very rich soil. We got to keep in mind that Lounge County was

very agriculture. We had a lot of plantations there. Loungese County also has a history of activism that goes back really to after the Civil War, where African Americans, which make a majority of the county, we're fighting not only for the right to vote, but the right to control

their own labor. And because of the type of racial trauma and violence that was in Lownes County, it gained the name Blood and so I grew up at a time when it was great change and a lot of people were coming to visit, primarily students that were part of the Student and Violent Coordinating Committee that were organizing people for the right to vote, because Lounge County is between the Settler to Montgomery area and most of the

march for the right to vote actually goes through Lounge County. Yeah, you've highlighted the statistic that eighty percent I think of people live in Lone County are not on a municipal sewer system, which means when you flush the toilet, it doesn't go in the sewer system, it goes somewhere else.

Is that the situation, Yes, that's the situation. And but of those eighty percent, well of the twenty percent that are all in a municipal system, some of them are paying a waste with a treatment fee, and when they flushed their system, instead of the just going into the lagoon, it's coming back into their homes and into their yards. So we not only see failing on site septic systems or the lack of septic systems, But we also see

failures that are occurring with the wastewater treatment plants as well. Kevin, can you explain to me how septic system works in just the simplest terms, Well, quite simply, what a septic system does. When the toilet is flush, it goes into it generally looks like a concrete container, and it goes

into that container. They're supposed to be natural processes that take place to break down the affluent that goes there, and then it goes through field lines, and once it goes to those field lines, it's supposed to come out to almost like drinking water quality. But when it fails, that's not what happens. It'll get clocked up. And once it gets clocked up or it gets water log it comes back into the home. And when it comes back into the home, you know, the affluent that we thought

would get treated would not get treated. It actually end up inside of the house. So even if you're on a system, you don't necessarily have effective sewage. But the worst, presumably is if you have no septic system or an inadequate septic system. It depends on what you de find is worse, and an inadequate septic system is probably worse than not having a septic system, because if they're straight piping that they're taken away from the house, that's just

a pipe that dumps the sewage outside the house. Right. They often just connect PVC pipe to a connection there at the mobile home, so when they fluster the toilet, it'll go through that PVC pipe and wherever it extends it. Sometimes I've seen it go into a pit outside of the home. I've seen it go into a pasture. I've seen it go into the woods. When you have a septic system and it fails, or you're part of a treatment system that fails, it comes back into the home

quite easily, and it usually comes back. Sometimes they can flood the homes. I've been in the homes where you can see the lines along the walls where it was flooded with raw switch you can still smell it, or to come back into a person's bath, to whatever the lowest point of entry is going to come back into the home. These failures can create serious health consequences. What are some of the health consequences that you see in Lowne County, But in other places where there is inadequate

sewage or a total lack of a sewage system. In twenty seventeen, and we found evidence of hookworm and other tropical parasites that are generally related to being exposed to raw sewage. We found that in Lowne County. We haven't done those type of studies in other places. However, we have collected soil samples and there's a study that's currently being peer reviewed where samples were collected in five states, and in those five states we also found parasites associated

with raw sewage. I mean hookworm. That's one of those diseases you read in novels describing, you know, the early twentieth century, along with things like malaria and yellow fever that we don't have I think in the United States anymore. What is hookworm? And well, how do we never aradicated?

So hookworm can penetrate the skin and usually end up typically in the gut, and it can create all kinds of malats in terms of a person's health, but in children, it can create anemia because it feeds on the person's blood. For children, it can cause them to be sluggish. It can cause even adults who are to be sluggish, and it can also cause them not to develop and learn

as well because of anemia. And now with climate change is making it even worse because places that that have been mandated to have septic systems, and there have been massive developments around the country housing developments that were built

using septic systems and their failing. We just embarked upon a study but The Guardian where The Guardian it's going to be doing a year long study in partnership with the Center for Rule, Enterprise and Environmental Justice, because we want to figure out how many people in the US have wastewater problems, and we also want to amplify what those problems are so we can find some meaningful solutions, because right now for us to talk about what a

real solution is is only you know, we're just guessing because we don't have the information to back it up. So this way we'll get a chance to see where the problems are across the US and be able to quantify that and help come up with some reasonable policies. You know. One of the examples of what happens when we have failed infrastructure, we saw that in Texas when they got cold weather. The infrastructure couldn't deal with it.

The same thing is happening with wastewater treatment around the country, so a lot of people are seeing what we with people in the Black Belt and other parts of the country have been talking about and seeing for quite some time. Hopefully everybody see that it's imperative now. That's including any kind of infrastructure package that we talk about, not just rows and bridges and now power grids. We also need to be talking about wastewater treatment too. I know there's

been a lot of talk. I know Bill Gates was interested in these toilets that treat the waste and produce I don't know, drinkable water, which is maybe an idea people haven't fully wrapped their ad around just yet. But I mean, do you think that is the kind of a solution we need to be talking about waste that

gets treated in the toilet? I think that we should talk about developing something akin to maybe a something that may look like an HVAC system that can be in a home or a building that can treat the waste and once it is treated and whatever goes out it's clean. How do we create the kind of innovation that would allow me to hold a cell phone and talk to you wherever you are in the world and we can see each other. Can we do the same thing with

wastewater treatment. We have to move away from the wave we've been treating it to ways in which we can treat it to when the water leaves whatever it goes in there, it comes out clean and doesn't contaminate, or in the case of a storm or climate event, and they're going to be a lot of them, that it ends up contaminating our drinking water according to a river or a stream. You know. One of the things that people are always presenting to me is why don't they

use composting toilets. Well, we had people to come down and talk to a focus group several years ago about composting toilets, and basically what people said to us was, this is like having an our house in our house. We just got away from our houses. We don't want that in our home. You know, oftentimes when people make these proposals, they're making proposals they've never even been to

these areas to see what the problem looks like. And we can't assume because we studied it in a classroom or in a book or in another country that we know what's going on in Lowndes County or any other part of this country, and we got to find a way to Actually that's what an environmental justice perspective comes in, is to go to the community, talk to the people that are experience a problem because they could be part of the solution. That's what's gonna make it solvable. Can

you tell me about Pamela Rush. She was a friend of yours, someone you advocated for, who I am sorry to say, passed away from COVID last year, but she in a lot of ways just exemplifies this problem with her and her family went through. Yes, Pamela Ust lived in a single white mobile home. She had two children. One was eleven when I met her, and then she

had a son who's about sixteen, who's now eighteen. Her sister had reached out to me through Facebook, one of her sisters and asked me what I help her, And I went to see her and she just lived in stark poverty. She was in a home that her her mother and brother had purchased, a single white mobile home.

It was literally falling apart. She had stuffed rags and holes to keep animals from coming in She had traps for opossums to keep them from coming into her house because she was afraid that one of them had scratched her. She would have to get raby shots, and she was a diabetic. Her daughter slept with a sea pap machine, something that you generally only see older adults having those kind of respiratory issues. One of her rooms in her house was just full of mold, and she was straight pipe.

Her income was less than a thousand dollars a month, so we were in some cases her sometimes her power bills again climate change and poor housing that's not properly insulated, and in this community, you cannot live here without air condition in the summertime it gets too hot, and her power bills would be three and four hundred dollars a month. That was a great chunk of what she was She was getting once a month because she was on disability

and her daughter was on disability. I would take people there and she would tell her story about being poor. And one of the persons, one of the first persons who went there was Reverend doctor William Barber, who leased a new poor People's campaign, and he actually invited her to go to Washington to speak and she testified before Congress, and I understand there wasn't a dry eye in the house when she told her story because she was so humble.

But Jane Finder came to visit along with Kat Taylor, and we thought we had found a solution to Pama's housing issue. But COVID had other plans, and she ended up getting COVID and died. Pamela USh died at forty nine of COVID nineteen. That's not just bad luck, right, That reflects a lot of what we're talking about. It reflects a lot of the inequalities that we have to

deal with in this country. The people that sacrifice the most get the least amount in terms of access to opportunities and at least the things that should be a basic human right, which is the human right towarding sanitation. Looking at lone counted place you know so well, you see this as a manimistation of environmental racism? Or is it simply an economic injustice to do African Americans suffer

disproportionately from lack of access to effective sewage system? Or is it just being poor in a place like that. I think it's all of the above. It's all of the above. It has to do with the land that was sold to black people versus the land that white people could acquire in Lowne County. It has to do with the type of infrastructure investment that's come from the federal and state level. There's some people in Lownge kind They have told me that they feel that Lowne County

is still being punished for its activism. Places like Lownes County have been neglected for years. And the only reason when they only reason they're get attention if they want to put a dirty cold plant there or they want to put a landfill there, we can get attention to get funding and support for that. People that are in the county that have gotten help in terms of wastewater treatment. The bulk of the money has gone to the white

businesses that are a long Interstate sixty five. But if you go from the town hall and go past the town hall to the area where some of those people test a positive for hookworm, they're left to their own devices. The federal government won't put money there, nor the state, but of course they can be cited and prosecuted. But when the sewage runs back into the business, then those people are not cited, they get federal help. There's something wrong with that equation going back to the New Deal,

but the Clean Water Act. I mean, there's been a lot of federal resources devoted to improvement in those areas, but they've been handed out by local officials who've been white and black people had no political power and didn't benefit from most of it. Are certainly not to the extent that white residents in a place like that dead.

That's very true, and I think it also goes back further than that, because they had a lot of plantations there, a lot of cotton plantations, and Lownes County's history has been a history of violence where the white minority has tried to control the black labor through violence and trauma, going back to the Sharecroppers Union when they put down the sharecroppers Union with violence by killing people there, Lots of lynchings took place in Lownes County, some documented, some undocumented.

I've met people when Taylor Branches writing his book at Cannon's Edge, I've met a lot of people who had left Lownes County because they had either witnesses to lynchings or their own family members were killed and they end up leaving going to other places. So all of those

factors I think have to be looked at. Yeah, I mean, you've been working with the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization Brian Stevenson founded, which is best known, first of all for its work documenting the history of lynching and segregation, but also for challenging wrongful convictions. I was a little surprised to see they were involved in sanitation issues. I

just didn't know they were doing that. Well. First of all, if you read my book, in the foreword, Brian Stevenson talked about himself growing up in a home that had a failing septic system, and it wasn't in Lownes County, was in Delaware, and he said that whenever his sister took a shower, he and his brother had the puppet to keep it from coming back into the house. That sounds like the same thing that happens in Lounge County. But what they were doing in Lounges Canna was criminalizing people.

The state was criminalizing people who had failing septic systems, meaning that they were booking them. Some people have the only criminal record they have is because they were booked for failing to have a working septic system, And sadly, one of the first persons who I knew that was criminalized for a septic system was one of Pamela's sisters. I never really told that part of his story that sister just died about two weeks ago from COVID. Well, Catherine,

you recently wanted MacArthur Fronda Genious Award. Congratulations. Is that a sign? Is that a sign? Do you think that more people are coming to understand environmental justice and especially the issues in the South around environmental injustice. Yes, I think that there is a sign that people are starting to understand environmental injustice, but I think it's bigger than

just the South. I think that people are starting to understand that this is a problem around the United States and that it is time for us to solve it once and for all. I think for those that don't know that it's a problem, just fortunate and privilege to

not have to encounter some of what I've seen. One of the places that I went to that I wrote about in my book is Centerville in Illinois, which is Illinois is definitely not a Southern state, but there are a lot of people I'm told that in that area, especially southern Illinois that have wastewater problems. And I saw just as much raw sewage, if not more, on the ground in Centerville than I have seen in Lownes County.

We're optimists on this show. So if in ten years you're writing another book about how this problem got solved or dealt with, what do you think it's going to be that solves it. Do you think it's going to be technology around toilets. Do you think it's going to be extension of septic systems? How we're going to fix it?

Ten years you're going to write the story that Catherine Flowers went up to Huntsville and found some of the best minds that the Department of Defense and NASA had to offer, and together came up with a designed to treat wastewater that you can find that any loads of home depot and just basically find a technician to come and install it, and that it changed the way we treat it wastewater. Instead of it going through pipes to a large treatment center, when it came out of the house,

it was clean water. Have you seen a prototype of this? I mean, where in my head this is how things start. It's like with Einstein the theory of relativity. You know, everything is not concrete. We have to make it concrete. There are a lot of listeners who are interested now and want to know what they can do to help

solve the problem. Do you have a few few suggestions? Well, first of all, I think that they should look for the article that we've written with the Guardian and that project and help us because we have a survey that's attached to that where we're asking people to self report where they are experiencing or have seen waste water problems

around the US. We can't solve a problem. It's just like you know, the twelve step program if you're trying to get you know, if you're a substance abuse and you're trying to get help, the first thing you have to do is recognize you have a problem. You got

to admit to it. We haven't done that as a nation, and this is an opportunity for us to do something that the government can't do fast because the government would have to put that put a number of series of questions on the census to do that, and the census is every ten years, and we know that's not going

to happen. Anytime soon. So what we're doing is partnering with different organizations and collaborate is around the country for the purpose of trying to identify the extent of the wastewater problem throughout the US, so we can map that and then we can go to our policymakers and say, look, these are the problems that we're having. This may suggest why we are having these problems, and let's work on

the type of innovation that's necessary to change it. So I think the first step is looking in your own

backyard and letting us know that this exists. And then the second step after that would be for us to ask our policymakers, especially this new administration, as we talk about green infrastructure, that we include wastewater treatment and we also look at new and innovative ways to treat wastewater and turn universities into centers of even if there's a regional thing, centers of innovation throughout the US where young minds and the brightest minds are together trying to come

up with ways in wish to solve this. You've been involved in some of the early policy formation around the Biden administration, right, I serve on the Biden say Distunity Task Force, and I have to write a lot of the policy on environmental justice and when exists. When he issued his executive order, he also included wastewater infrastructure. You know. I went back and I read it last line. I

was like, wow, you know. And now I have great friends that are now in the White House, like Jenna McCarthy and John Carey, and they understand that this is a problem throughout the US. And the person from the Office of Wastewater specifically called my name is say Catherine, We're going to work on the wastewater problem. I'm very optimistic and hopeful having looked at this. Do you think this is a problem that exists to some degree in all fifty states. I know it exists in all fifty states.

I think it's solvable. We just have to start talking about it and not see it as just a plumbing problem. With climate change is going to get worse. And there are different aspects of it depending on where you are.

Whether you're in Alaska, where it's because of no infrastructure in some cases or failing infrastructure because of melting perma frous or if you're in a coastal state because of rise and sea level or you're like where we are in Alabama with groundwater increasing because of sea level rise. All of these issues are issues that we're going to have to deal with, and it's best to deal with it now instead of waiting until there's a crisis like what we see. What we saw just happened in Texas.

We can't patch our way out of it. We're going to have to do something new and different. Well, Catherine, I want to thank you for joining us today. It's a great conversation and we wish you every success with your work. It's amazing the way you have brought attention to this problem. Well, thank you, thank you, and hopefully I'll be back in less than teen years to tell you what the solution is. You're in even more of an optimist than i am. I'm giving it five years.

Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder and director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She was awarded a Arthur Genius Grant in twenty twenty. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research and booking by Lisa Dunn, Our Managing producer is Katherine Girardo, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell Special thanks to Heather Fay, John Schnars, Carley Mgliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Emily Rostek, Maya Konig,

and Kadija Holly. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review it. It really helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple podcast. I'm Jacob Weisberg.