Catherine Coleman Flowers

Catherine Coleman Flowers is an environmental activist, author, and MacArthur Fellow whose work focuses on ensuring access to clean water and functional sanitation for all Americans, regardless of race, geography, or income. As the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers promotes equal access to clean water, air, sanitation, and soil to address health and economic disparities in marginalized rural communities. In her role as founding director, Flowers collaborates with local residents, elected officials, nonprofits, federal lawmakers, and global organizations to address challenges related to water and sanitation infrastructure, public health, and economic development.

Flowers’s activism is rooted in her experiences in Lowndes County, Alabama, a region in the Black Belt facing persistent poverty and inadequate sanitation infrastructure. She established the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise to attract businesses to the area but shifted her focus to environmental justice after recognizing that infrastructure deficiencies hindered economic development. Flowers worked with public health researchers to document the prevalence of hookworm, a parasite linked to exposure to raw sewage, in the county. Her efforts with the United Nations Special Rapporteur and Columbia University Law School Human Rights Clinic led to the publication of "Flushed and Forgotten: Sanitation and Wastewater in Rural Communities in the United States," which examines disparities in access to sanitation and clean water through a human rights lens.

Flowers’s advocacy has influenced policy at the federal level. She served as vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, where her work contributed to the creation of a federal program providing assistance to millions of Americans lacking access to clean running water and indoor plumbing. Flowers’s testimony before Congress supported legislation addressing neglected diseases of poverty in the United States.

As an author, Flowers wrote "Holy Ground" and "Waste," which explore environmental justice, sanitation, and the intersection of class, race, and geographic disparities in the United States. Her work has been featured by CBS 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and PBS Newshour. Flowers has been recognized on TIME's 100 Most Influential People list, Forbes 50 Over 50 List, and received the TIME Earth Award.

Flowers serves on the board of directors for The Climate Reality Project, Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Constitutional Rights, and American Geophysical Union. She is a practitioner in residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, has been named Levenick Resident Scholar in Sustainable Leadership at the University of Illinois, and holds an honorary doctorate in science from Wesleyan University. Flowers’s work connects environmental justice and climate change with social inequities, bringing national attention to the need for equitable protection and dignity for all communities.