Environmental activism and leadership became a way of life for Ken and Deborah Ferruccio when in 1978 the governor of North Carolina announced a plan to bury thousands of truckloads of soil contaminated with high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their rural community of Afton, Warren County, “regardless of public sentiment.”

Ken’s response, “due process first, then civil disobedience,” and the work Ken and Deborah did alongside community members (Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs) to educate the public and later protest against the unsafe site selection and forced placement of the PCB landfill changed the course of environmental history. Warren County is now hailed as the “birthplace of the environmental justice movement.”

Here and in their podcast series, Our Road to Walk: Then and Now, the Ferruccios offer a documented look into Warren County’s opposition to the burial of chemicals from the largest PCB spill in U.S. history. Along the way, they explain how Warren County citizens married civil rights and environmental rights activism, and they expose regulatory frameworks that legalize such “sacrifice zones,” which disproportionately affect vulnerable and minority populations but inevitably harm us all.

Click here to listen to an NPR Throughline segment featuring the Ferruccios, entitled, “How Everyday People Started a Movement That’s Shaping Climate Action To This Day.”

Ken and Deborah Ferruccio are the accidental instigators of the Environmental Justice Movement. It all started in 1978, when the North Carolina government decided to build a landfill for toxic PCBs in Warren County. The Ferruccios were recent transplants to the area and were outraged at the proposal. They vowed to fight it. Along the way, they organized the community and tied environmental issues to race discrimination. Host Frank Stasio talks to Ken and Deborah Ferruccio about the Warren County Landfill and helping launch the Environmental Justice Movement.