The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

California and other wildfire-prone western states have experienced a substantial increase in the number and intensity of wildfires in recent years. Wildlands and climate experts expect these trends to continue and quite likely to worsen in coming years. Wildfires and other disasters can be particularly devastating for vulnerable communities. Members of these communities tend to experience worse health outcomes from disasters, have fewer resources for responding and rebuilding, and receive less assistance from state, local, and federal agencies. Because burning wood releases particulate matter and other toxicants, the health effects of wildfires extend well beyond burns. In addition, deposition of toxicants in soil and water can result in chronic as well as acute exposures. On June 4-5, 2019, four different entities within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop titled Implications of the California Wildfires for Health, Communities, and Preparedness at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis. The workshop explored the population health, environmental health, emergency preparedness, and health equity consequences of increasingly strong and numerous wildfires, particularly in California. This publication is a summary of the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

During late 1978, a symposium entitled "Science Underlying Radioactive Waste Management" was one component of the Annual Meet ing of the Materials Research Society held in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of this Symposium was to bring together for the first time the entire range of sciences that form the basis for the treatment, solidification and isolation of radioactive wastes. Some 79 papers were presented to an international audience of over 300. The Symposium was such an impressive success that another will be held at the 1979 Annual Meeting of the Materials Research Society. The proceedings of the forthcoming symposium will also be published and it is for this reason that the present volume has been desig nated Volume 1. The scope of the Symposium was defined by the following steer ing committee: Rustum Roy, The Pennsylvania State University (Chairman) Richard S. Claassen, Sandia Laboratories Don Ferguson, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Victor I. Spitsyn, U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Moscow David B. Stewart, United States Geological Survey Torbjorn Westermark, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The program was organized by the following committee: Gregory J. McCarthy, The Pennsylvania State University (Cha- man) Harry C. Burkholder, Battelle Memorial Institute Arnold M. Friedman~ Argonne National Laboratory Werner Lutze, Hahn-Meitner Institut, Berlin John G. Moore, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Robert W. Potter, II, United States Geological Survey Richard L. Schwoebe1, Sandia Laboratories Roger W. Staehle, Ohio State University.