I never grew up where I saw an injustice and I just sat on my hands and did nothing. Because I didn’t grow up in that type of household. So, I got involved [in the environmental justice movement] myself as a very young person. As time went on, I saw that Lowndes County [Alabama, my home county] was not developing. People still had sanitation on the ground. That sanitation issue was near and dear to me because I grew up in Lowndes County. And that was how I got engaged there.

I saw [the movie] An Inconvenient Truth – and I saw the intersectionality between climate change and what was happening around the sanitation issue. We did a parasite study, and we saw tropical illnesses emerging in Lowndes County. (As the climate changes, it’s not just going to be in the South, it’s going to be all over the US.) And so those are the kinds of things that drove me to getting involved in this movement.

I’m a grandparent. I don’t think that any grandparent or parent out there can sit idly by and not let our children have a future. And if we do not address climate change and environmental justice, there will be no future for them. And that drives me every day to do all I can do to make sure that my six-year-old grandson has a future. – Catherine Coleman Flowers #HumansofDukeSanford #Faculty This week, Catherine was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, saying she is at the center of the quest for environmental justice in America.” Flowers is currently Practitioner-in-Residence at Duke, and was featured in Sanford’s Fall 2022 Wilson Lecture. Links in bio.