On a wastewater crisis in the rural south--and a MacArthur genius grant to a woman trying to solve it

Two stories today reported on the rural South's wastewater crisis today.  The first is from NPR, and it prominently features one of this year's MacArthur genius grant recipients, Catherine Coleman Flowers.  An excerpt from the story follows: 

Hookworm is an intestinal parasite often associated with poor sewage treatment and the developing world. It was long thought to have been eradicated from the United States — until a 2017 study revealed otherwise.

According to the study, more than one in three people in Alabama's Lowndes County tested positive for hookworm infection.

Hookworm spreads when people walk or play in soil contaminated with feces and the larvae of the worms penetrate their skin.

"This is not something that we test for in the U.S. because people don't anticipate that we have it," says activist and author Catherine Coleman Flowers.

It was Flowers' activism that spurred scientists to conduct the hookworm study. For 20 years, she's worked with advocacy organizations, philanthropists, business leaders and elected officials to shed light on the gaps in access to basic sanitation in rural America.

The other story is in the New Yorker, and it features Flowers far less prominently.  Here, the sanitation issue takes center stage.  Alexis Okeowo reports, with this quote from relatively deep in the story:

In Alabama, not having a functioning septic system is a criminal misdemeanor. Residents can be fined as much as five hundred dollars per citation, evicted, and even arrested. Rush’s sister Viola was once arrested for a sewage violation. But installing a new system can cost as much as twenty thousand dollars, which is more than the average person in Lowndes County makes in a year. Instead, Rush, like her neighbors, used a pipe to empty waste into the grass outside—a practice, called straight-piping, that is not uncommon in much of rural America. (At least one in five homes in the U.S. is not on a municipal sewer line.) Floods carry sewage across people’s lawns and into their living areas, bringing with it the risk of viruses, bacteria, and parasites that thrive in feces. Studies have found E. coli and fecal coliform throughout the Black Belt, in wells and in public waters. A United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty, visiting in 2017, said that the sewage problem was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world. “This is not a sight that one normally sees,” he said.

Rush’s situation got so bad that, in 2017, her sister Barbara sent a Facebook message to an environmental activist named Catherine Coleman Flowers. For two decades, Flowers has helped people struggling with sewage problems in Alabama. (She was recently named a MacArthur Fellow.) A petite woman of sixty-two, with a gentle drawl and a no-nonsense demeanor, Flowers is a reassuring presence; she grew up in Lowndes County and is distantly related to Rush, as she is to many people in the area. Still, she was shocked when she saw the trailer. “She showed me how they were living, and I cried,” Flowers told me.

I think (hope!) we'll be hearing more about these events and the attention that needs to brought to bear on this developing world problem in the (U.S.) American south.

Finally, here is the New York Times review of Coleman Flowers book,  Waste:  One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret. Anna Smith writes under the headline, "How the Problem of 'Waste' Affects the Rural Poor."  Here's an excerpt: 

In Lowndes County, a swath of rural land between Selma and Montgomery, as many as 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate systems for managing wastewater. This is structural poverty, Flowers writes, and it’s hardly a localized problem. From rural Appalachia to the suburbs of St. Louis to Allensworth, the California town that was the state’s first to be founded by African-Americans, “Waste” follows Flowers as she discovers that the failure to invest in infrastructure is pervasive nationwide. The consequences are life-threatening, but often invisible to those who live and work in communities with more political clout. 

* * * 

On top of all that, it’s not uncommon for people to face eviction and even arrest because of this scarcity of resources. Not having a septic system puts [poor rural folks] at risk.

It can also cause them to face criminal charges.  

The title “Waste,” then, has a double meaning. It signifies both the literal fact of waste and the loss of so much time, energy, money and even lives. What potential might be unleashed in a world where people have their needs met?

And that seems to be the $6 million question everywhere I look these days.  In any event, Waste sounds like a powerful read.