Speaker 1: Bushkin. This is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. The first thing
Speaker 1: he has to do is recognized you have a problem,
Speaker 1: yet to admit to it. We haven't done that as
Speaker 1: a nation. The problem is inadequate wastewater removal and sanitation infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Do you think this is a problem that exists in
Speaker 1: all fifty states? I know it exists in all states.
Speaker 1: Talking about human waste and the ills it causes, it's
Speaker 1: not so pleasant. A sense of humor helps. It is
Speaker 1: grows sometimes, but I've gotten used to it. That's why
Speaker 1: I have my outfit. I have my black outfit with
Speaker 1: my boots so I won't be big by mosquito's on
Speaker 1: rous sewage. Again, not talking about the problems caused by
Speaker 1: untreated sewage has led us to ignore the prevalence of
Speaker 1: diseases that people thought were largely gone from the United States,
Speaker 1: and we found evidence of hookworm and other tropical parasites.
Speaker 1: Hookworm can penetrate the skin and usually end up typically
Speaker 1: in the good and it can create anemia because it
Speaker 1: feeds on the person's blood. COVID nineteen has underscored the
Speaker 1: health vulnerability that are linked with poverty and racial inequality.
Speaker 1: Some of those health discorities are closely tied to inadequate
Speaker 1: wastewater treatment. Catherine Coleman Flowers was recently awarded a MacArthur
Speaker 1: Genius Grant for her work studying the problem of bad
Speaker 1: sewage on how to improve it. That's the good news.
Speaker 1: The bad news is she sees the problem getting worse
Speaker 1: the climate change. Whether you're in Alaska whereas because of
Speaker 1: no infrastructure in some cases, or failing infrastructure because of
Speaker 1: militing for perma frost, or if you're in a coastal
Speaker 1: state because of rise in sea level, or you're like
Speaker 1: where we are in Alabama with groundwater increasing because of
Speaker 1: sea level rise. All of these issues are issues that
Speaker 1: we're going to have to deal with, and it's best
Speaker 1: to deal with it now instead of waiting until there's
Speaker 1: a crisis like what we saw just happened in Texas.
Speaker 1: Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder and director of the
Speaker 1: Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. The lack of
Speaker 1: basic sanitation and rural communities in the United States is
Speaker 1: a problem that is solvable. Katherine, you grew up in
Speaker 1: Lownes County, Alabama. Can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about it and what it was like growing up there. Yes,
Speaker 1: Lowndes County is seven hundred and fourteen square miles, very rural.
Speaker 1: When I grew up, we could actually pick plants and
Speaker 1: apples off trees, and I would walk through corn fields
Speaker 1: and actually pick up an ear corn off of stock
Speaker 1: and could you know, sink my teeth in it, and actually,
Speaker 1: you know, like the way it tasts. It was supported
Speaker 1: by the Alabama I'm a river. There are lots of
Speaker 1: creeks and streams there. It was a kind of community
Speaker 1: where people were self reliant and everybody had a garden
Speaker 1: and when you went to visit someone, it was not
Speaker 1: unusual for them to talk about what they had grown
Speaker 1: in their garden, even give you something to take home.
Speaker 1: And that is the Black Belt is where cotton was
Speaker 1: historically grown in the country. It's got this very rich soil.
Speaker 1: We got to keep in mind that Lounge County was
Speaker 1: very agriculture. We had a lot of plantations there. Loungese
Speaker 1: County also has a history of activism that goes back
Speaker 1: really to after the Civil War, where African Americans, which
Speaker 1: make a majority of the county, we're fighting not only
Speaker 1: for the right to vote, but the right to control
Speaker 1: their own labor. And because of the type of racial
Speaker 1: trauma and violence that was in Lownes County, it gained
Speaker 1: the name Blood and so I grew up at a
Speaker 1: time when it was great change and a lot of
Speaker 1: people were coming to visit, primarily students that were part
Speaker 1: of the Student and Violent Coordinating Committee that were organizing
Speaker 1: people for the right to vote, because Lounge County is
Speaker 1: between the Settler to Montgomery area and most of the
Speaker 1: march for the right to vote actually goes through Lounge County. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've highlighted the statistic that eighty percent I think of
Speaker 1: people live in Lone County are not on a municipal
Speaker 1: sewer system, which means when you flush the toilet, it
Speaker 1: doesn't go in the sewer system, it goes somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Is that the situation, Yes, that's the situation. And but
Speaker 1: of those eighty percent, well of the twenty percent that
Speaker 1: are all in a municipal system, some of them are
Speaker 1: paying a waste with a treatment fee, and when they
Speaker 1: flushed their system, instead of the just going into the lagoon,
Speaker 1: it's coming back into their homes and into their yards.
Speaker 1: So we not only see failing on site septic systems
Speaker 1: or the lack of septic systems, But we also see
Speaker 1: failures that are occurring with the wastewater treatment plants as well. Kevin,
Speaker 1: can you explain to me how septic system works in
Speaker 1: just the simplest terms, Well, quite simply, what a septic
Speaker 1: system does. When the toilet is flush, it goes into
Speaker 1: it generally looks like a concrete container, and it goes
Speaker 1: into that container. They're supposed to be natural processes that
Speaker 1: take place to break down the affluent that goes there,
Speaker 1: and then it goes through field lines, and once it
Speaker 1: goes to those field lines, it's supposed to come out
Speaker 1: to almost like drinking water quality. But when it fails,
Speaker 1: that's not what happens. It'll get clocked up. And once
Speaker 1: it gets clocked up or it gets water log it
Speaker 1: comes back into the home. And when it comes back
Speaker 1: into the home, you know, the affluent that we thought
Speaker 1: would get treated would not get treated. It actually end
Speaker 1: up inside of the house. So even if you're on
Speaker 1: a system, you don't necessarily have effective sewage. But the worst,
Speaker 1: presumably is if you have no septic system or an
Speaker 1: inadequate septic system. It depends on what you de find
Speaker 1: is worse, and an inadequate septic system is probably worse
Speaker 1: than not having a septic system, because if they're straight
Speaker 1: piping that they're taken away from the house, that's just
Speaker 1: a pipe that dumps the sewage outside the house. Right.
Speaker 1: They often just connect PVC pipe to a connection there
Speaker 1: at the mobile home, so when they fluster the toilet,
Speaker 1: it'll go through that PVC pipe and wherever it extends it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I've seen it go into a pit outside of
Speaker 1: the home. I've seen it go into a pasture. I've
Speaker 1: seen it go into the woods. When you have a
Speaker 1: septic system and it fails, or you're part of a
Speaker 1: treatment system that fails, it comes back into the home
Speaker 1: quite easily, and it usually comes back. Sometimes they can
Speaker 1: flood the homes. I've been in the homes where you
Speaker 1: can see the lines along the walls where it was
Speaker 1: flooded with raw switch you can still smell it, or
Speaker 1: to come back into a person's bath, to whatever the
Speaker 1: lowest point of entry is going to come back into
Speaker 1: the home. These failures can create serious health consequences. What
Speaker 1: are some of the health consequences that you see in
Speaker 1: Lowne County, But in other places where there is inadequate
Speaker 1: sewage or a total lack of a sewage system. In
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, and we found evidence of hookworm and other
Speaker 1: tropical parasites that are generally related to being exposed to
Speaker 1: raw sewage. We found that in Lowne County. We haven't
Speaker 1: done those type of studies in other places. However, we
Speaker 1: have collected soil samples and there's a study that's currently
Speaker 1: being peer reviewed where samples were collected in five states,
Speaker 1: and in those five states we also found parasites associated
Speaker 1: with raw sewage. I mean hookworm. That's one of those
Speaker 1: diseases you read in novels describing, you know, the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century, along with things like malaria and yellow fever
Speaker 1: that we don't have I think in the United States anymore.
Speaker 1: What is hookworm? And well, how do we never aradicated?
Speaker 1: So hookworm can penetrate the skin and usually end up
Speaker 1: typically in the gut, and it can create all kinds
Speaker 1: of malats in terms of a person's health, but in children,
Speaker 1: it can create anemia because it feeds on the person's blood.
Speaker 1: For children, it can cause them to be sluggish. It
Speaker 1: can cause even adults who are to be sluggish, and
Speaker 1: it can also cause them not to develop and learn
Speaker 1: as well because of anemia. And now with climate change
Speaker 1: is making it even worse because places that that have
Speaker 1: been mandated to have septic systems, and there have been
Speaker 1: massive developments around the country housing developments that were built
Speaker 1: using septic systems and their failing. We just embarked upon
Speaker 1: a study but The Guardian where The Guardian it's going
Speaker 1: to be doing a year long study in partnership with
Speaker 1: the Center for Rule, Enterprise and Environmental Justice, because we
Speaker 1: want to figure out how many people in the US
Speaker 1: have wastewater problems, and we also want to amplify what
Speaker 1: those problems are so we can find some meaningful solutions,
Speaker 1: because right now for us to talk about what a
Speaker 1: real solution is is only you know, we're just guessing
Speaker 1: because we don't have the information to back it up.
Speaker 1: So this way we'll get a chance to see where
Speaker 1: the problems are across the US and be able to
Speaker 1: quantify that and help come up with some reasonable policies.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the examples of what happens when
Speaker 1: we have failed infrastructure, we saw that in Texas when
Speaker 1: they got cold weather. The infrastructure couldn't deal with it.
Speaker 1: The same thing is happening with wastewater treatment around the country,
Speaker 1: so a lot of people are seeing what we with
Speaker 1: people in the Black Belt and other parts of the
Speaker 1: country have been talking about and seeing for quite some time.
Speaker 1: Hopefully everybody see that it's imperative now. That's including any
Speaker 1: kind of infrastructure package that we talk about, not just
Speaker 1: rows and bridges and now power grids. We also need
Speaker 1: to be talking about wastewater treatment too. I know there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of talk. I know Bill Gates was
Speaker 1: interested in these toilets that treat the waste and produce
Speaker 1: I don't know, drinkable water, which is maybe an idea
Speaker 1: people haven't fully wrapped their ad around just yet. But
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think that is the kind of
Speaker 1: a solution we need to be talking about waste that
Speaker 1: gets treated in the toilet? I think that we should
Speaker 1: talk about developing something akin to maybe a something that
Speaker 1: may look like an HVAC system that can be in
Speaker 1: a home or a building that can treat the waste
Speaker 1: and once it is treated and whatever goes out it's clean.
Speaker 1: How do we create the kind of innovation that would
Speaker 1: allow me to hold a cell phone and talk to
Speaker 1: you wherever you are in the world and we can
Speaker 1: see each other. Can we do the same thing with
Speaker 1: wastewater treatment. We have to move away from the wave
Speaker 1: we've been treating it to ways in which we can
Speaker 1: treat it to when the water leaves whatever it goes
Speaker 1: in there, it comes out clean and doesn't contaminate, or
Speaker 1: in the case of a storm or climate event, and
Speaker 1: they're going to be a lot of them, that it
Speaker 1: ends up contaminating our drinking water according to a river
Speaker 1: or a stream. You know. One of the things that
Speaker 1: people are always presenting to me is why don't they
Speaker 1: use composting toilets. Well, we had people to come down
Speaker 1: and talk to a focus group several years ago about
Speaker 1: composting toilets, and basically what people said to us was,
Speaker 1: this is like having an our house in our house.
Speaker 1: We just got away from our houses. We don't want
Speaker 1: that in our home. You know, oftentimes when people make
Speaker 1: these proposals, they're making proposals they've never even been to
Speaker 1: these areas to see what the problem looks like. And
Speaker 1: we can't assume because we studied it in a classroom
Speaker 1: or in a book or in another country that we
Speaker 1: know what's going on in Lowndes County or any other
Speaker 1: part of this country, and we got to find a
Speaker 1: way to Actually that's what an environmental justice perspective comes in,
Speaker 1: is to go to the community, talk to the people
Speaker 1: that are experience a problem because they could be part
Speaker 1: of the solution. That's what's gonna make it solvable. Can
Speaker 1: you tell me about Pamela Rush. She was a friend
Speaker 1: of yours, someone you advocated for, who I am sorry
Speaker 1: to say, passed away from COVID last year, but she
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways just exemplifies this problem with
Speaker 1: her and her family went through. Yes, Pamela Ust lived
Speaker 1: in a single white mobile home. She had two children.
Speaker 1: One was eleven when I met her, and then she
Speaker 1: had a son who's about sixteen, who's now eighteen. Her
Speaker 1: sister had reached out to me through Facebook, one of
Speaker 1: her sisters and asked me what I help her, And
Speaker 1: I went to see her and she just lived in
Speaker 1: stark poverty. She was in a home that her her
Speaker 1: mother and brother had purchased, a single white mobile home.
Speaker 1: It was literally falling apart. She had stuffed rags and
Speaker 1: holes to keep animals from coming in She had traps
Speaker 1: for opossums to keep them from coming into her house
Speaker 1: because she was afraid that one of them had scratched her.
Speaker 1: She would have to get raby shots, and she was
Speaker 1: a diabetic. Her daughter slept with a sea pap machine,
Speaker 1: something that you generally only see older adults having those
Speaker 1: kind of respiratory issues. One of her rooms in her
Speaker 1: house was just full of mold, and she was straight pipe.
Speaker 1: Her income was less than a thousand dollars a month,
Speaker 1: so we were in some cases her sometimes her power
Speaker 1: bills again climate change and poor housing that's not properly insulated,
Speaker 1: and in this community, you cannot live here without air
Speaker 1: condition in the summertime it gets too hot, and her
Speaker 1: power bills would be three and four hundred dollars a month.
Speaker 1: That was a great chunk of what she was She
Speaker 1: was getting once a month because she was on disability
Speaker 1: and her daughter was on disability. I would take people
Speaker 1: there and she would tell her story about being poor.
Speaker 1: And one of the persons, one of the first persons
Speaker 1: who went there was Reverend doctor William Barber, who leased
Speaker 1: a new poor People's campaign, and he actually invited her
Speaker 1: to go to Washington to speak and she testified before Congress,
Speaker 1: and I understand there wasn't a dry eye in the
Speaker 1: house when she told her story because she was so humble.
Speaker 1: But Jane Finder came to visit along with Kat Taylor,
Speaker 1: and we thought we had found a solution to Pama's
Speaker 1: housing issue. But COVID had other plans, and she ended
Speaker 1: up getting COVID and died. Pamela USh died at forty
Speaker 1: nine of COVID nineteen. That's not just bad luck, right,
Speaker 1: That reflects a lot of what we're talking about. It
Speaker 1: reflects a lot of the inequalities that we have to
Speaker 1: deal with in this country. The people that sacrifice the
Speaker 1: most get the least amount in terms of access to
Speaker 1: opportunities and at least the things that should be a
Speaker 1: basic human right, which is the human right towarding sanitation.
Speaker 1: Looking at lone counted place you know so well, you
Speaker 1: see this as a manimistation of environmental racism? Or is
Speaker 1: it simply an economic injustice to do African Americans suffer
Speaker 1: disproportionately from lack of access to effective sewage system? Or
Speaker 1: is it just being poor in a place like that.
Speaker 1: I think it's all of the above. It's all of
Speaker 1: the above. It has to do with the land that
Speaker 1: was sold to black people versus the land that white
Speaker 1: people could acquire in Lowne County. It has to do
Speaker 1: with the type of infrastructure investment that's come from the
Speaker 1: federal and state level. There's some people in Lownge kind
Speaker 1: They have told me that they feel that Lowne County
Speaker 1: is still being punished for its activism. Places like Lownes
Speaker 1: County have been neglected for years. And the only reason
Speaker 1: when they only reason they're get attention if they want
Speaker 1: to put a dirty cold plant there or they want
Speaker 1: to put a landfill there, we can get attention to
Speaker 1: get funding and support for that. People that are in
Speaker 1: the county that have gotten help in terms of wastewater treatment.
Speaker 1: The bulk of the money has gone to the white
Speaker 1: businesses that are a long Interstate sixty five. But if
Speaker 1: you go from the town hall and go past the
Speaker 1: town hall to the area where some of those people
Speaker 1: test a positive for hookworm, they're left to their own devices.
Speaker 1: The federal government won't put money there, nor the state,
Speaker 1: but of course they can be cited and prosecuted. But
Speaker 1: when the sewage runs back into the business, then those
Speaker 1: people are not cited, they get federal help. There's something
Speaker 1: wrong with that equation going back to the New Deal,
Speaker 1: but the Clean Water Act. I mean, there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of federal resources devoted to improvement in those areas,
Speaker 1: but they've been handed out by local officials who've been
Speaker 1: white and black people had no political power and didn't
Speaker 1: benefit from most of it. Are certainly not to the
Speaker 1: extent that white residents in a place like that dead.
Speaker 1: That's very true, and I think it also goes back
Speaker 1: further than that, because they had a lot of plantations there,
Speaker 1: a lot of cotton plantations, and Lownes County's history has
Speaker 1: been a history of violence where the white minority has
Speaker 1: tried to control the black labor through violence and trauma,
Speaker 1: going back to the Sharecroppers Union when they put down
Speaker 1: the sharecroppers Union with violence by killing people there, Lots
Speaker 1: of lynchings took place in Lownes County, some documented, some undocumented.
Speaker 1: I've met people when Taylor Branches writing his book at
Speaker 1: Cannon's Edge, I've met a lot of people who had
Speaker 1: left Lownes County because they had either witnesses to lynchings
Speaker 1: or their own family members were killed and they end
Speaker 1: up leaving going to other places. So all of those
Speaker 1: factors I think have to be looked at. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you've been working with the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization
Speaker 1: Brian Stevenson founded, which is best known, first of all
Speaker 1: for its work documenting the history of lynching and segregation,
Speaker 1: but also for challenging wrongful convictions. I was a little
Speaker 1: surprised to see they were involved in sanitation issues. I
Speaker 1: just didn't know they were doing that. Well. First of all,
Speaker 1: if you read my book, in the foreword, Brian Stevenson
Speaker 1: talked about himself growing up in a home that had
Speaker 1: a failing septic system, and it wasn't in Lownes County,
Speaker 1: was in Delaware, and he said that whenever his sister
Speaker 1: took a shower, he and his brother had the puppet
Speaker 1: to keep it from coming back into the house. That
Speaker 1: sounds like the same thing that happens in Lounge County.
Speaker 1: But what they were doing in Lounges Canna was criminalizing people.
Speaker 1: The state was criminalizing people who had failing septic systems,
Speaker 1: meaning that they were booking them. Some people have the
Speaker 1: only criminal record they have is because they were booked
Speaker 1: for failing to have a working septic system, And sadly,
Speaker 1: one of the first persons who I knew that was
Speaker 1: criminalized for a septic system was one of Pamela's sisters.
Speaker 1: I never really told that part of his story that
Speaker 1: sister just died about two weeks ago from COVID. Well, Catherine,
Speaker 1: you recently wanted MacArthur Fronda Genious Award. Congratulations. Is that
Speaker 1: a sign? Is that a sign? Do you think that
Speaker 1: more people are coming to understand environmental justice and especially
Speaker 1: the issues in the South around environmental injustice. Yes, I
Speaker 1: think that there is a sign that people are starting
Speaker 1: to understand environmental injustice, but I think it's bigger than
Speaker 1: just the South. I think that people are starting to
Speaker 1: understand that this is a problem around the United States
Speaker 1: and that it is time for us to solve it
Speaker 1: once and for all. I think for those that don't
Speaker 1: know that it's a problem, just fortunate and privilege to
Speaker 1: not have to encounter some of what I've seen. One
Speaker 1: of the places that I went to that I wrote
Speaker 1: about in my book is Centerville in Illinois, which is
Speaker 1: Illinois is definitely not a Southern state, but there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people I'm told that in that area,
Speaker 1: especially southern Illinois that have wastewater problems. And I saw
Speaker 1: just as much raw sewage, if not more, on the
Speaker 1: ground in Centerville than I have seen in Lownes County.
Speaker 1: We're optimists on this show. So if in ten years
Speaker 1: you're writing another book about how this problem got solved
Speaker 1: or dealt with, what do you think it's going to
Speaker 1: be that solves it. Do you think it's going to
Speaker 1: be technology around toilets. Do you think it's going to
Speaker 1: be extension of septic systems? How we're going to fix it?
Speaker 1: Ten years you're going to write the story that Catherine
Speaker 1: Flowers went up to Huntsville and found some of the
Speaker 1: best minds that the Department of Defense and NASA had
Speaker 1: to offer, and together came up with a designed to
Speaker 1: treat wastewater that you can find that any loads of
Speaker 1: home depot and just basically find a technician to come
Speaker 1: and install it, and that it changed the way we
Speaker 1: treat it wastewater. Instead of it going through pipes to
Speaker 1: a large treatment center, when it came out of the house,
Speaker 1: it was clean water. Have you seen a prototype of this?
Speaker 1: I mean, where in my head this is how things start.
Speaker 1: It's like with Einstein the theory of relativity. You know,
Speaker 1: everything is not concrete. We have to make it concrete.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of listeners who are interested now
Speaker 1: and want to know what they can do to help
Speaker 1: solve the problem. Do you have a few few suggestions? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think that they should look for
Speaker 1: the article that we've written with the Guardian and that
Speaker 1: project and help us because we have a survey that's
Speaker 1: attached to that where we're asking people to self report
Speaker 1: where they are experiencing or have seen waste water problems
Speaker 1: around the US. We can't solve a problem. It's just
Speaker 1: like you know, the twelve step program if you're trying
Speaker 1: to get you know, if you're a substance abuse and
Speaker 1: you're trying to get help, the first thing you have
Speaker 1: to do is recognize you have a problem. You got
Speaker 1: to admit to it. We haven't done that as a nation,
Speaker 1: and this is an opportunity for us to do something
Speaker 1: that the government can't do fast because the government would
Speaker 1: have to put that put a number of series of
Speaker 1: questions on the census to do that, and the census
Speaker 1: is every ten years, and we know that's not going
Speaker 1: to happen. Anytime soon. So what we're doing is partnering
Speaker 1: with different organizations and collaborate is around the country for
Speaker 1: the purpose of trying to identify the extent of the
Speaker 1: wastewater problem throughout the US, so we can map that
Speaker 1: and then we can go to our policymakers and say, look,
Speaker 1: these are the problems that we're having. This may suggest
Speaker 1: why we are having these problems, and let's work on
Speaker 1: the type of innovation that's necessary to change it. So
Speaker 1: I think the first step is looking in your own
Speaker 1: backyard and letting us know that this exists. And then
Speaker 1: the second step after that would be for us to
Speaker 1: ask our policymakers, especially this new administration, as we talk
Speaker 1: about green infrastructure, that we include wastewater treatment and we
Speaker 1: also look at new and innovative ways to treat wastewater
Speaker 1: and turn universities into centers of even if there's a
Speaker 1: regional thing, centers of innovation throughout the US where young
Speaker 1: minds and the brightest minds are together trying to come
Speaker 1: up with ways in wish to solve this. You've been
Speaker 1: involved in some of the early policy formation around the
Speaker 1: Biden administration, right, I serve on the Biden say Distunity
Speaker 1: Task Force, and I have to write a lot of
Speaker 1: the policy on environmental justice and when exists. When he
Speaker 1: issued his executive order, he also included wastewater infrastructure. You know.
Speaker 1: I went back and I read it last line. I
Speaker 1: was like, wow, you know. And now I have great
Speaker 1: friends that are now in the White House, like Jenna
Speaker 1: McCarthy and John Carey, and they understand that this is
Speaker 1: a problem throughout the US. And the person from the
Speaker 1: Office of Wastewater specifically called my name is say Catherine,
Speaker 1: We're going to work on the wastewater problem. I'm very
Speaker 1: optimistic and hopeful having looked at this. Do you think
Speaker 1: this is a problem that exists to some degree in
Speaker 1: all fifty states. I know it exists in all fifty states.
Speaker 1: I think it's solvable. We just have to start talking
Speaker 1: about it and not see it as just a plumbing problem.
Speaker 1: With climate change is going to get worse. And there
Speaker 1: are different aspects of it depending on where you are.
Speaker 1: Whether you're in Alaska, where it's because of no infrastructure
Speaker 1: in some cases or failing infrastructure because of melting perma
Speaker 1: frous or if you're in a coastal state because of
Speaker 1: rise and sea level or you're like where we are
Speaker 1: in Alabama with groundwater increasing because of sea level rise.
Speaker 1: All of these issues are issues that we're going to
Speaker 1: have to deal with, and it's best to deal with
Speaker 1: it now instead of waiting until there's a crisis like
Speaker 1: what we see. What we saw just happened in Texas.
Speaker 1: We can't patch our way out of it. We're going
Speaker 1: to have to do something new and different. Well, Catherine,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for joining us today. It's
Speaker 1: a great conversation and we wish you every success with
Speaker 1: your work. It's amazing the way you have brought attention
Speaker 1: to this problem. Well, thank you, thank you, and hopefully
Speaker 1: I'll be back in less than teen years to tell
Speaker 1: you what the solution is. You're in even more of
Speaker 1: an optimist than i am. I'm giving it five years.
Speaker 1: Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder and director of the
Speaker 1: Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. She was awarded
Speaker 1: a Arthur Genius Grant in twenty twenty. Solvable Senior producer
Speaker 1: is Jocelyn Frank, Research and booking by Lisa Dunn, Our
Speaker 1: Managing producer is Katherine Girardo, and our executive producer is
Speaker 1: Mia Lobell Special thanks to Heather Fay, John Schnars, Carley Mgliori,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Emily Rostek, Maya Konig,
Speaker 1: and Kadija Holly. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
Speaker 1: and review it. It really helps us get the word out.
Speaker 1: You can find Pushkin podcasts wherever you listen, including on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app and Apple podcast. I'm Jacob Weisberg.