A Landmark Day for Environmental Justice

Yesterday was a landmark day for environmental justice in the United States. Advocates for the environment have long highlighted that communities of color experience a disproportionate amount of suffering from the climate crisis yet receive the least help from the government. In a rare but significant victory, the federal government announced an agreement that acknowledges it has neglected to provide Black residents of Lowndes County, Ala., acceptable sanitation systems, and that the residents have been discriminated against.

“Today starts a new chapter for Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama, who have endured health dangers, indignities and racial injustice for far too long,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Our agreement puts Lowndes County on a path to long overdue reform as the state now takes steps necessary to provide access to basic sanitation services, end exposure to raw sewage and improve health outcomes for marginalized communities.”

The settlement itself is groundbreaking: It is the first time the Civil Rights Act has been used successfully to mediate environmental justice issues. When I spoke a couple months ago to Troy Abel, a professor of urban and environmental planning and policy at Western Washington University, he told me that that the federal government regularly violates the act, but that it had never been utilized to find justice for the people suffering the brunt of climate change-induced disasters — like the flooding that has created the sewage problem in Lowndes.

Able said that the corporate law world calls the Civil Rights Act “the sleeping giant is reawakening.”

One Woman’s Fight

Eighteen months ago, the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services launched an investigation into Lowndes County’s lack of working sanitation systems — septic tanks were overflowing — and residents were paying fines even though they had no ability to remedy the situation. Raw sewage was flowing through their yards and even coming up into their sinks, bathtubs, and pools, creating health problems rarely seen in the developed world, such as hookworm.

But, behind the scenes, a singular Black woman has been fighting to remedy the situation. Catherine Coleman Flowers has been working with environmental engineers at Columbia University to create “a new kind of toilet that will act as a mini sewage treatment facility.” This system “will filter, clean and recycle waste on site,” rather than allowing it to seep into the county’s soil. The water will be treated for use in washing machines, fertilizer, and, hopefully, one day, energy for homes.

Flowers, who has won a MacArthur “genius grant” and has been called the “Erin Brockovich of Sewage,” calls Lowndes County, where she grew up, “one of the most neglected corners of the country.”

“The poverty rate in this majority-Black county is double the national average,” she said. “Cell phone service is a luxury and so, incredibly, is sewage treatment.”

Still, on Thursday after the federal announcement, Flowers said: “Overall, it’s a great day.”

The Need for Remediation

As the climate warms, it brings rising sea levels and increased storms and flooding, as well as higher temperatures, that the country’s septic systems are unable to handle. The systems were not created with such conditions in mind. And there are more than 21 million septic systems in the U.S.

When these systems fail, says the Brookings Institution, the results are “catastrophic — polluting drinking water and threatening human health.” And that’s not the only problem: with rising water “linked to higher sea levels, conventional septic systems near the coast will not be as effective at removing harmful bacteria and nutrients,” according to Circle of Blue, a site focused on water issues.

Brookings points out that the onus of maintaining septic tanks “falls mostly on homeowners and local governments — a particularly tough challenge for smaller, less affluent rural communities.”

The institution calls for state and federal support of small communities in order to stave off catastrophe — free-flowing, untreated sewage that spreads disease as the planet warms.

“Without major policy action,” Brookings writes, “the consequences and risks of septic tank failure will only increase as sea levels and water tables continue to rise. Human health will suffer as a result of sewage and resulting pollution, so policymakers must work to come up with big-picture solutions.”