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Holy Ground

On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

*TIME 2025 EARTH AWARD WINNER*

An inspiring collection of essays, personal and political, from the leading environmental justice activist of our time, that frames the challenges we face as a society and—with grace, generosity, and hope—charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.

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.

Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground 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.

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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from December 15, 2024
      A tireless advocate for civil rights takes stock of the current moment. Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, writes with passion and gracefulness about her life and experiences as an advocate for the rural poor. While she is best known for her work to secure safe water and sanitation for people living near toxic conditions, Flowers recounts a varied and fascinating career of advocacy for marginalized communities, full of encounters with politicians and other notable figures. Flowers includes pointed analyses of reproductive liberty, the neglect of the rural poor, the cowardice of politicians, and the avarice of the wealthy, along with absorbing personal reflections on the power of religious faith, community, food, and the pain of personal loss. She is unapologetically progressive in her political commitments, heaping withering scorn on the Tennessee legislators who censured Black legislators for speaking out against gun violence after the Covenant School shootings and on the Republicans who rushed to restrict reproductive freedom after the Supreme Court overruledRoe v. Wade. Yet she includes surprising sympathetic assessments of staunch conservatives such as Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, suggesting that sensitivity to the plight of the rural poor--a group often forgotten by urban progressives--can cross ideological divides. The book is a collection of essays rather than a chronologically organized autobiography, but it coheres in both tone and substance. A passionate and thoughtful exploration of social injustice.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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