Holy Ground - On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope

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.

About the author

Catherine 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.

Summary

A stirring, galvanizing collection of essays, personal and political, by the environmental justice activist and MacArthur Fellow named one of the Forbes 50 Over 50 and TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023—that frames the inequities that define us as a society and, with grace and generosity, gives us reason to have hope.
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 communities deprived of their most basic civil right to waste and water sanitation infrastructure, an epidemic that disproportionately affects the poor. The original, first-person pieces that comprise Holy Ground depict the moments where the personal intersects with the political. As a result, these essays, drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, have the galvanizing force of sermons.
In Holy Ground, Flowers contends with an America that has neglected its poor, its people of color, its vulnerable and marginalized, and its rural communities. Nowhere is this more glaringly evident than in her birthplace, the notorious Lowndes County, Alabama, with its brutal history of enslavement, racial violence, and segregation, where most residents live below the poverty line and where diseases long thought to have been eradicated continue to threaten the population. Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. She reflects on trailblazing women and indigenous people 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 experience with reproductive justice. And in a remarkably candid and moving piece, she writes about a traumatic attack that occurred at a moment of professional triumph, in which she weighed her fight for the common good and her responsibility to her people against her own well-being. Flowers’s faith runs as an undercurrent through these essays, a north star that guides her activism and inspires her vision of our responsibility to one another.
In Holy Ground, the leading environmental activist of our time 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.

Foreword

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Product details

• Authors: Catherine Coleman Flowers
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 28.01.2025, delayed
• EAN: 9781954118683
• ISBN: 978-1-954118-68-3
• No. of pages: 240
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations