Photo Collage: EPA Public Hearing, Warren County Armory, January 4, 1979. Archives. Eight-hundred Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs listen intently to their independent scientist, University of Maryland soil scientist Dr. Charles Mulchi.
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In the Room Where it Happened

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to tie past PCB history to the present as they take their listeners to “to the room where it happened,” to the Warren County National Guard Armory where the PCB landfill environmental justice movement began on a frigid January 4, 1979 night when some 800 citizens voiced their sentiment against a toxic PCB landfill they believed would endanger their lives, their environment, and future generations.

Two weeks earlier the Hunt Administration had announced that “public sentiment would not deter the state from burying PCBs in Warren County,” an announcement that had ignited the people and has come to epitomize the dictatorial politics of poison.

Ken and Deborah take their listeners back to this 1979 Armory space and time, and compare it to the August 22, 2024 public forum they recently attended held in the Armory that was sponsored by the Governor’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

They explain how these two Armory occasions were a stunning display of contrasts concerning what the Warren County environmental justice movement was in its natural, unadulterated grassroots form in 1979 and what it has become in its current institutionalized, manufactured, manipulated, and monetized, and greenwashed form.

For Deborah and Ken, and for Warren County citizens who were there that January night, the Armory is sacred space because the will of the people was displayed for all to see, including local, state, and national media.

But the Advisory Council public forum desecrated the space — killed the hot-button topic of environmental justice with death-by-PowerPoint greenwashing. Public comments were initially limited to three minutes, even though only five people attended because of poor advertising.

Warren County Environmental Justice Executive Director Bill Kearney was an Advisory Council panelist. Currently, Kearney is Action Team have pressing county officials to partner with his Action Team for as much as $20 million for a Warren County-based EPA-sponsored environmental justice grassroots center of excellence.

In this episode, as Deborah and Ken move backward and forward on the historical timeline, as they make the case that there is no documented historical justification for such a center in Warren County.

Contrasts abound between the two events, but one thing is the same all these forty-five years later — Ken Ferruccio, the spokesperson still for Warren County citizens who are concerned about a future based on truth and justice.

Concerning the proposed EPA-sponsored environmental justice center, Ken warns Advisory Council members, Bill Kearney, and county, state, and federal EPA officials: “Not the federal government, not the state government, not the local government, none of these, but the people of Warren County, the stakeholders, the taxpayers, will stand on the public sentiment that they’ve always always done. They will decide their future, and they will decide the future of Warren County.

Episode Photo: For this hard-hitting episode, we chose to feature this quote by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Montgomery, Alabama, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, because we agree with him that "an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future."

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to respond to EPA’s Senior Environmental Justice Policy Advisor Dr. Charles Lee’s invitation to Ken to share his ideas — past, present, and future — as part of a “We Birthed the Movement” panel discussion.

They follow where the last episode left off, explaining more about the reversal of the Warren County environmental justice movement, especially as it plays out in the detoxification cleanup process of the PCB landfill.

It’s important to know how and why this reversal in the birthplace occurred because the PCB cleanup process has informed the perceptions of the environmental justice movement at large.

Ken and Deborah share excerpts from a revealing, December, 1998 inside letter from PCB Working Group member Jim Warren, who was and still is Director of NC WARN, the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, to Co-chair Dollie Burwell. The letter follows how the original citizen/state agreed-upon goal of the PCB Working Group — to detoxify the landfill with qualified independent scientific oversight — is reversed, using subterfuge to create a rift in the PCB Working Group.

They remind Dr. Lee of the 1994 statement he wrote on behalf of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in support of detoxification of the PCB landfill with stakeholder decision-making and independent science. They then ask Dr. Lee if he was aware of Jim Warren’s letter concerning the rift in the PCB Working Group.

As they speak to present concerns, Ken and Deborah, address potential allocation of EPA Justice40 community grant funding, especially as it relates to the Warren County Environmental Action Team that has proposed a partnership with the Warren County Board of Commissioners in order to build an EPA-sponsored Warren County-based environmental justice grassroots leadership center of excellence in the county.

Ken and Deborah point out that members of the Action Team have clear governmental and institutional-affiliated conflicts of interest that are antithetical to grassroots citizen interests and that members of the Action Team are not experientially qualified to “develop and implement a grassroots leadership training model based on the PCB landfill struggle,” as Action Team Director Bill Kearney has stated is the objective.

Concerning the vision for the future of Warren County, Ken adamantly makes his point clear:

“An EPA institutional nexus of entangling alliances with the Warren County Environmental Action Team, in partnership with Warren County Commissioners, or any other entity, will not determine the future of Warren County, but the public sentiment of Warren County Citizens — landowners, tax payers, stake-holders —will determine the future of Warren County.”

Ken and Deborah end the episode with this question to EPA’s Charles Lee:

“Would you, Charles, consider coming to Warren County, joining Warren County Environmental Action Team Director Bill Kearney, and sitting down with the citizens of the county as we discuss our visions for Warren County and beyond going forward, as well as, if and how, proposed EPA Justice40 grant monies might best be allocated?”

This photo of Reverend Leon White and Ken Ferruccio, President and Spokesperson for Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, was taken in December 1982, soon after the PCB protest movement as they spoke to audiences on an East Coat Tour organized by Charles Lee and sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.


In this episode, Ken responds to a recent invitation from Dr. Charles Lee to serve as a panelist and to share his PCB experiences and insights at a “We Birthed the Movement” discussion hosted by the EPA-Research Triangle Park Management Council in partnership with the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Special Collections Library and its traveling Warren County PCB archival exhibit. Dr. Lee is Senior Policy Advisor for EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights

However, Ken turned down the invitation because his knowledge of the documented history has little in common with the prevailing “We Birthed the Movement” narrative and because of the inherent constraints of a panel discussion format, so Ken told Dr. Lee he would be responding at length in this upcoming podcast episode.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah share two key historical experiences that they believe describe the trajectory of the Warren County PCB landfill environmental justice movement history, how the direction of the movement was reversed from a grassroots focus to an institutional focus, the reversal also following the arc of Dr. Lee’s environmental justice career.

In order to give context to the analysis that follows, Deborah refers to a leaked EPA memo and to the EPA’s Environmental Equity report that author Robert Bullard describes as part of the EPA’s “outreach strategy” to prevent “minority fairness flashpoints” from happening by “mounting a public relations campaign to drive a wedge between grassroots environmental justice activists and mainstream civil rights and environmental groups.”

Section 1, “The Reversal,” begins soon after the fall 1982 PCB protest movement when Dr. Lee asks Ken and Reverend Leon White to speak about the PCB history on an East Coast Tour sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.

Ken refers Dr. Lee to the 1983 grant proposal he submitted to the Commission for Racial Justice at Dr. Lee’s request that Ken titled,
“An Institute for Environmental Justice,” the purpose which was for grassroots communities facing environmental pollution to work with institutions to integrate coordinate, and focus environmental justice efforts and resources.

Section 2; “The Rift,” focuses on the PCB landfill detoxification process and the wedge that was driven within the PCB Working Group and which created a major environmental justice rift which divided citizens from their right to decision-making power and independent scientific oversight during the PCB cleanup process.

They refer to Dr. Eileen McGurty’s use of the word “rift” in her book Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice, and to her erroneous conclusion that this rift “allowed the state to avoid the sticky problem of the risks from the landfill.”

Ken and Deborah argue that Dr. McGurty’s explanation of the rift was not only erroneous, but it was personally harmful to them, and has the most serious and far-reaching implications for the environmental justice movement to this day.