BioMed
Activist Catherine Coleman Flowers documents how costly septic systems and clay soil leave rural families exposed to sewage, illness, and fines.
When a working septic system costs more than a household earns in a year, families run their toilet waste through improvised pipes into open pits in the yard. The sewage then sits where children and pets play, breeding parasites and disease.
Returning home, the author saw peers who looked older than their years and were sick for reasons no one could name. She came to link such illness to the conditions the poor are trapped in, such as polluted air, tainted water and untreated sewage.
Septic systems depend on the ground soaking up wastewater, and dense clay soil barely absorbs it. In such ground, even families who pay for a system often see it fail, and wetter, warmer weather makes the failures worse.
Officials who would not extend sewer lines to marginalized areas instead threatened residents with fines and arrest for lacking proper on-site sanitation. The cost of a public failure is shifted onto the individuals least able to fix it, turning a missing service into a personal offense.
Environmental harm falls hardest on places shaped by a history of racial exploitation and lasting poverty, where mostly Black residents are left without basic services. The neglect of sewage in such a place is as clear an injustice as poisoned city drinking water.
Moving a neglected problem onto policymakers' agendas takes coalitions, media attention, political leverage and the persistence to keep going despite resistance and threats. Not everyone has to march, because people who support the marchers in other ways also have a large effect.
No one measured how many households had failing wastewater systems until a local group went door to door, and estimated it at about 90 percent. A crisis that is never counted can be ignored, so a basic survey can turn private hardship into public evidence.
A country that boasts of its wealth can still leave rural poor people living amid untreated sewage, because those left behind are not talked about. The author calls this a 'dirty secret': the problem survives mainly because it stays out of public view.
Rainier, warmer weather makes waterlogged soils even worse at absorbing wastewater, so failing sanitation is spreading. As sewage reaches more backyards, a problem once confined to poor minorities becomes too big for anyone to ignore.