Our Road: Then - - 35: Environmental Justice: The Reversal and the Rift

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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.