BORN IN A CAR in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1958, carrying DNA from France, Nigeria, Nova Scotia and Thailand, Catherine Coleman Flowers entered the world at the swell of the civil rights movement.

Five decades later, she would be selected as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and become a celebrated author and founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice or CREEJ, a nonprofit that advocates for clean infrastructure in marginalized rural communities.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.