I was born into two worlds: the corporate world of reality and the ideal aspirational world of classical violin music. These were the worlds my father knew, working in the quality control department at General Electric by day and pouring forth his musical aspirations through his violin at night.

I had no idea, nor could I have had, how deeply Dad’s music flooded my being and would help create a depth of emotional life in me, one that eclipsed for many years the intellectual gifts and ways of interpreting the world that seemed to come effortlessly to others. Dad was to me the very personification of an aspiration ever constrained by the realities of life, expressed so simply, poetically, and eloquently in Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto’s statement, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Throughout my early life, I had the sense of living in the two diametrically opposed worlds my father had known.

I left home at seventeen and joined the Air Force. Upon returning, I realized I had more questions than when I set out, and I intuited the best way for me to ascertain answers, if any, was to seek a humanities education and journey through the liberal arts. Life brought me to literature, and literature brought me right back to life.

And then I found philosophy and became fascinated with theories of knowledge and fundamental questions like what can we know, if anything, how can we know, and what are the limits of what and how we can know?

My academic journey helped me understand that the separation of emotion from intellect was the way to a deeper penetration into the quest for knowledge, but so too did I see that a synthesis was needed.

I began to understand the importance of quantitative and qualitative methodologies informing research-based perspectives and of multidimensional, interdisciplinary thinking.

I was introduced to this kind of synthetic thinking when in a humanities class, a university professor, briefcase in hand, walked into the room and lectured for at least two hours, spontaneously and effortlessly interconnecting related areas of knowledge to the subject at hand, and at the end of the class, summarized the content so clearly and seemingly so effortlessly without ever opening his briefcase.

I knew then I wanted to be able to do what he did. I wanted to think the way he did.

What I did not know then was that connecting through research various related areas of knowledge in the search for truth would be precisely what we of Warren County would need to be able to do starting in December of 1978, when I was elected spokesperson, then later president, of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs and when I spoke six words into reality that would change my life: “Due process first, then civil disobedience.”

We needed a multidimensional, cross-disciplinary methodology and criteria for understanding waste disposal and environmental justice/civil rights issues as well as the associated dangers of the chemicals that would be dumped in Afton. We studied forever chemicals and learned of their bioaccumulation, environmental mobility, and persistency.

We needed to know why, according to empirical science, EPA’s state of the art “dry-tomb” landfill design continues to fail, why the containment principle continues to fail.

When the EPA dropped the 50-foot minimum standard between the base of a landfill and groundwater to as little as five feet or less, we learned first-hand about the EPA’s history of approving “sacrifice zones” (communities targeted for hazardous waste landfills), approving disposal sites while predicting that such toxic, hazardous, and radioactive land disposal systems would fail.

We needed to know why the government of North Carolina was willing to use force to open the PCB landfill in a poor, predominantly Black community on September 15, 1982; by preempting the significance of public sentiment, and using nearly a million dollars of local and state police force to secure the site, the state demonstrated that neither democratic nor environmental sustainability is possible under the 1981 state Waste Management Act and EPA’s inconsistent and arbitrary site selection criteria.

And, what we came to know is that a focus on causes is as essential as a focus on effects, on disproportionate impacts. For, without understanding and addressing the causes, we cannot change the effects.

Throughout my forty-four+ years as a researcher, writer, educator, and environmental activist, I have used an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. This approach to environmental justice and environmental civil rights is more needed now than ever as many continue to narrowly focus on the effects of pollution, too often ignoring the causes, narrowly focusing on the present while avoiding past truths. But the past is always in the present and both past and present inform the future. There is no escape from truth and the consequences of avoiding it.

Poet Robert Frost wrote never so true when he said, “Earth is the best place for love. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

We hope you will collect your bows and join us in a symphony for the future. We must work together to play a new music of hope for our planet.

Time is of the essence.

So, let’s exceed our grasp and reach for a brighter future.

I am a retired English and art teacher by profession. I also home-schooled my two children, Uri and Kyra. I was greatly influenced by my parents, Harriet and O.D. Lehman, who were public school teachers and believed that education occurs in the home, at school, and in the world at large. On our annual family camping trips that we took across the U.S., I gained a love of nature and learned that we have a responsibility to protect the environment, and, as my mother always reminded us, to leave a place better than we found it.

I was also greatly influenced by English teachers and by the times. I learned how to think critically when I wrote essays for Mrs. Christina Bolin’s 11th and 12th grade English classes and as she used the Socratic method to ask us questions that led to discussions which helped us articulate what we thought we believed about the issues of the day — women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental rights, as well as the Vietnam War.

We studied Thoreau’s Walden in the spring of 1970 and soon after the first Earth Day, which Walter Cronkite described as “a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of [hu]mankind seeking its own survival.” The purpose of such a day “was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy,” Senator Gaylor Nelson asserted, “and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.”

Simultaneously, campuses across the nation exploded with protests following the escalation of the Vietnam War, and so we also studied Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” Mrs. Bolin planted seeds of environmental and civil rights awareness in me as the turbulent times likewise did in the nation.

My freshman year in college, I met Ken Ferruccio. Ken was my English instructor (a graduate fellow at the time). He spoke rapidly in a strong Massachusetts accent, and his writing, which had to keep up with his ideas, was like hieroglyphics. He was on fire, and I was captivated. Ken often ended his classes saying, “Life brings us to literature, and literature brings us back to life.”

So it was that life and literature intersected for Ken and me. We fell in love and soon married, later met folks from Warren County, North Carolina during a stint at Ocracoke Island, and somehow found ourselves at the end of a long, dirt road living in a cabin in the woods next to our own Walden Pond. We went to these woods to live “simply, wisely, and deliberately,” which we thought meant to make do and spend little, to waste not, and to seize the day.

Once again, life and literature intersected when Ken and I found our rural Afton community targeted for a PCB landfill after, in the summer of 1978, thousands of gallons of PCBs had been illegally dumped along the roadsides of 14 North Carolina counties and at Fort Bragg and when we learned that Warren County simultaneously was targeted for a 500-acre hazardous waste landfill.

Thus began our forty-four year journey down this road we’ve walked as environmental researchers and educators, community organizers, and civil rights activists. Since then, we have worked for environmental and social justice not only in Warren County but across the region as well. We have come together with citizens to help stop multi-state solid, hazardous, radioactive, bio-hazardous, and coal ash waste landfills and to get equal protection in Warren County through county-wide zoning and amendments to a local ordinance that currently exempts polluters from regulations.

In our website and podcast series, Our Road to Walk: Then and Now, we share this history, our personal and public journey, in order to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that points to the environmental pollution, in its myriad of forms, that threatens health and life and to discuss how as individuals and communities we can come together to help protect ourselves, our loved ones, future generations, and this beautiful Earth that we all share from toxic threats.

We invite you to join us on Our Road to Walk and hope you will see that together we can each help make the world better than we found it.

“The Executive Team and the membership of the Northampton County Citizens Against Coal Ash are most grateful to you both for assisting us in our fight against VistaGreen’s attempt to site a coal ash facility in our county . . . Deborah’s interviews of former coal ash workers from other communities provided a realistic picture to our residents and county officials of the devastating health risks to people from coal ash exposure and the long-term negative impact that would occur to our property and our county from the establishment of a coal ash facility. Ken, we are very appreciative for your extensive research to establish the true rationale for the EPA designating toxic coal ash as “non-hazardous.”