Wednesday, July 6, 2022

4145. WASTE - BOOK. Listening and Writing for Social Justice - Catherine Coleman Flowers

 Listening and Writing for Social Justice - Catherine Coleman Flowers
Writer's Digest Jul/Aug 2021

C C Flowers is an internationally recognised environmental activist. 

Her book: WASTE. One woman's fight against America's dirty secret.

She is an activist, an enviornmentalist, a teacher, professor and a mentor, but first she is a listener.

Real activism starts with listening. Lisening can also help one write about social justice.

She is from Lowndes Country, Ala., -- her fight to ensure basic human dignity through a right most Amerians take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, esp the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, consequently live amid filth. It was once America's dirty secret until she wrote about it and amplify the voices of those who had not been heard before.

Her book WASTE. For the audience to remember what was written or shared long after they put the book down, it is important to capture voices, places and contexts that paint vivid pictures. With writing for social, one has not only inspire compassion, but action, and hopefully change. 

To get the audience to understand the relationshipof environmental justrice to climate change, racial justice, rural American and failing wastewaer treatment systems. It was a tall order.

Listening to others in your community or writing about the environmental and social issues in your state is a step toward justice. It could be about climate change, plastic pollution or lack of sanitation.

Writing amplies the voices of those who have been silenced but could also offer meaningful solutions. Writing for soical justice creates powerful human connections made by putting a name and face to the narrative, which can be both lasting and transformative. 

  



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