Catherine Coleman Flowers — Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope - with Diane McWhorter

Described by Bryan Stevenson as "the center of the quest for environmental justice in America," Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for the most vulnerable communities--rural, poor, of color--who have been deprived of the basic civil right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. Both deeply personal and urgently political, the essays in Holy Ground draw on history to illuminate and contextualize the most pressing issues of this moment: from climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, from the notorious history of Lowndes County, Alabama, to the broader crisis of racialized disinvestment in the South. Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. She reflects on trailblazers who have fought for social and environmental justice. She writes about her mother, a civil rights activist who lost her life to gun violence, and her own deeply personal experience with reproductive justice. And in a remarkably candid and moving piece, she writes about a traumatic attack that occurred at a moment of collective triumph, in which she weighs her fight for the common good against her own well-being. Flowers's faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home.Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action--for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781954118683?ic_referral=A3X5Tdhk4lE_8sgWXbeR4anzO057q5icNIrPGmIG-ucwM2xTd25UsOlIh5s6adZ4ywHriNF3Q0_JkqINkf7X6GKidj-bF4kz5biytk0aC8-EcyNSjhhuss-vN9itB0opBYyaIwCatherine Coleman Flowers is an internationally recognized environmental justice activist and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ). A MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient, Flowers sits on the board of directors of the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and RMI. She has served as the co-vice chair of the inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and is a practitioner-in-residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Flowers is the author of Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret and has written for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2023, she was recognized as one of the TIME 100 most influential people in the world and one of the Forbes 50 Over 50.Flowers is in conversation with Diane McWhorter. McWhorter, a journalist who lives in Washington, D.C., is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home, a civil rights history of her hometown of Birmingham. She is at work on a book about the top Nazi missile engineers who were brought to segregated Huntsville, Alabama, after World War II and built the rocket that achieved the great moral victory of the Cold War--the first man on the moon--at the time that their adopted state was the prime battleground for civil rights in this country. *recorded 1/30/2025