On December 20, 1978 the Hunt Administration announced that public sentiment would not deter the state from burying 240 miles of PCB-tainted soil that had been spewed along the roadsides in fourteen counties, as well as at Ft. Bragg Army Base, in a landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. On that same day, we learned also that the state would present its PCB landfill plans to the EPA for approval at a January 4, 1979 public hearing that would bring 800 citizens but that would have no bearing on the Governor’s decision. Rather than move, we chose to remain and work to protect the people and the place we had come to know and love so dearly. In response to the announcement, Ken volleyed back through the Associated Press six words that would change history and the course of our lives: “due process first, then civil disobedience.”

We found we were not alone when Carol Limer put an ad in the Warren Record that read, “If you don’t want poison in our county, come to a citizen’s meeting at the courthouse.” At Carol and her husband Larry’s home, we created a phone chain, tore up the Warren County phone book, and each took a page. We created PCB fact sheets and went door-to-door. We met in Earl Limer’s shed, a handful of white Afton residents and Reverend Willie T. Ramey, an African-American preacher and teacher who left his headlights on and pointing out in case he had to exit in a hurry.

We became an unprecedented multi-racial coalition of citizens, a grassroots fighting force that would bring 800 citizens to that January 4th public hearing the Governor had planned to be cosmetic.

Indeed, over the following years, our community and surrounding region have continued to be targeted, and yet we did not move. From 1991 to 1992, our own county and regional officials offered our community as a site for a 1,600-acre trash dumping grounds. After an exhaustive campaign, during which we warned that this would “be like putting Rosa Parks on the back of the bus again,” officials withdrew as “host” to the regional landfill.

In 1993, new federal solid waste regulations were shutting down county and municipal landfills across the country to be replaced with regional, state-of-the-art, “dry-tomb” lined landfills, just like the PCB landfill that had failed immediately in Warren County.

North Carolina, and especially the Piedmont, was being targeted for numerous commercial, multi-state waste dumping grounds, so we spoke out at state hearings in order to expose EPA’s failed “dry-tomb” landfills and formed the Ecumenical Environmental Leadership Coalition with support from the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. After Warren County, we supported efforts in Wilson, Franklin, and Bertie Counties.

In 1993, Debbie Crane, of the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, informed us the PCB landfill contained approximately a million and a half gallons of water threatening to breach the bottom liner. Ken wrote a 5-point framework centering on detoxification, the state agreed in principle with all five points of the framework, and the Joint Warren County State PCB Landfill Working Group was formed, Ken acting as one of the co-chairs.

From 2007 to 2009, when Homeland Security and a consortium of North Carolina businesses, universities, and politicians attempted to secure a Level 4 deadly disease lab and landfill in Granville County, we helped our neighbors protect the region and beyond by sharing our knowledge of the inevitable failures of waste containment.

Between 2012 and 2014, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and Virginia officials attempted to lift a thirty-year ban on uranium mining that would have opened up the largest uranium deposit in North America. The radioactive mine tailings would have been disposed of in “entombment” landfills they claimed would never leak. However, buried in the Nuclear Regulatory Agency’s Final Report, we found that to keep the radioactive tailings impoundments from overflowing, they would necessarily have to “de-water” uranium tailings into the Bannister River on a regular basis, a river that flows into nearby Kerr Lake Reservoir and Lake Gaston, the source of drinking water for Warren County and some two million people downstream, including Virginia Beach.

The following is part of a letter written by the North Carolina Environmental Review Commission to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell on December 13, 2012:

The NC Environmental Review Commission of the North Carolina General Assembly learned that the modeled impacts of a catastrophic breach of an aboveground uranium tailings impoundment on downstream water quality in Kerr Lake and Lake Gaston could result in radiation above the United States Environmental Protection Agency Maximum Contaminant Levels . . . . The North Carolina Department of Public Health and Natural Resources stated that a release of radioactive tailings could have devastating adverse socioeconomic impacts on the communities of northeastern North Carolina, including impacts to the public water supply of more than 118,000 North Carolinians; Impacts to numerous industrial facilities; Impacts on over 60 agricultural operations in Bertie, Granville, Halifax, Vance, and Warren Counties; Impacts on recreation and tourism at Kerr Lake and Lake Gaston with possible economic losses of more than 15 million per year.

Ken wrote an analysis titled “The Mining of Uranium in Virginia: The Search for Science, Technology, Liability, Logic, and The Core Values of America’s Founding Documents,” and on March 14, 2014 sent the analysis to Virginia Governor Terry McCauliffe, N.C. Governor Pat McCrory; to then Attorney General Roy Cooper, as well as to Virginia and N.C. legislators.

A North Carolina contingency of environmental activists joined hundreds of Virginians and inundated the Richmond Capitol. In the end, the Virginia Legislature did not lift the thirty-year ban on uranium mining.

In 2014, Duke Energy’s Eden, N.C. coal ash impoundment breached, sending coal ash sludge and contaminated water into the Dan River, a river that flows directly into Kerr Lake and Lake Gaston, the water sources for some million people, including Warren County. We worked alongside other citizens to hold Duke Energy responsible for its pollution and called on downstream counties and towns to join forces to press for a comprehensive cleanup. However, Duke Energy claimed they couldn’t vacuum dredge the Dan River because it would disturb “legacy PCBs” that lay in bottom sediment.

From 2016 to 2017, our neighboring county to the east, Northampton County, was targeted for an 800-acre coal ash landfill and pond facility that would have been open for domestic and international coal ash waste disposal. We joined their grassroots education campaign and shared PowerPoint presentations focused on the failure of landfills, the deadly constituents of coal ash, and the dangers to workers we interviewed from the Kinston, Tennessee coal ash clean-up.

Later in 2017, Ken exposed the inherent dangers of coal ash in an analysis titled, “EPA’s Nonhazardous Coal Ash Classification Decision: A Breach of Federal Law,” that he shared with Northampton County Citizens Against Coal Ash. They based their opposition to the coal ash facility on the most important principle of environmental justice — honest science — and successfully stopped the proposed Vista Green coal ash facility. We later learned that Warren County had been targeted also by the same company.

Much has been written about the environmental justice movement that began in Warren County, North Carolina, in the Afton community where we live, but mostly the narratives have been rewritten and mythologized, the hard edges smoothed into unsubstantiated folklore — tales told by people who were not here at all, or by people who came and left in a day or a week, or by those who remained yet were not truly invested in protecting the health and safety of our people.

The narratives fail to focus on the reality that the EPA-approved, “Cadillac,” “state-of-the-art” PCB landfill was built just a few feet above the water table, that it filled up with a million and a half gallons of water before it was capped, and that for years, water entered and exited the plastic liner that was said to last in perpetuity. The narratives fail to address that significant PCB air emissions were found by the EPA a half mile away within months of the burial of the PCBs and that modern landfills are still built on false promises and without a true regard for honest science.

We are not scientists. We are English instructors who found that with our education we could learn to think like scientists: we had to gather the facts, critically analyze them, and put them into coherent order so that anyone could understand what lies beneath discrimination and environmental and social injustice.

We would not be moved because we believed, and continue to believe, that it is better to fight against the odds for ourselves and for one another than assume somehow that we are personally safe as part of an elite few who could be saved by the color of our skin or the protection of a zip code. What we do can make a difference—one meeting, one forum, one public hearing, one protest, one household, one county, one state, one nation at a time.

We share one Earth, and we ultimately share this road to walk toward environmental protection and justice.

Join us.