In Catherine Coleman Flowers’ new book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret she writes, “Too many Americans live without any affordable means of cleanly disposing of the waste from their toilets, and must live with the resulting filth. They lack what most Americans take for granted: the right to flush and forget.”
In 2000, she returned to Lowndes County, Alabama, where she was born and raised, after leaving for years for college and career, to serve as an economic development consultant for the county. But she found that she was unable to get that work off the ground because of...