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.
