Above Photo: “Warren Residents Oppose Regional Landfill," front-page, Henderson Daily Dispatch,” by Scott Ragland, March 19, 1992. Inset reads: “It takes Rosa Parks and puts her on the back of the bus once again.” Ken Ferruccio
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If we’re looking for social change leaders to stem the tide of climate change, ordinary citizens must, as Princeton University professor and author Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., puts it, “be the leaders we have been looking for.”
In this episode, Deborah and Ken feature the legacy of such homegrown leaders in the early 1990s, as local and regional officials attempt to turn Warren County, especially the Lickskillet community situated just a few miles downstream from the PCB landfill, into a 1,000-acre toxic trash dumping ground.
This episode relates how ordinary people in Warren County, during a critical time in the county’s history and the history of North Carolina, become the leaders they are looking for, leaders who never claim the legacy they leave.
Some of the many who come to mind are: Cliff Jackson. Susan and Steven Bender. Jean Strickland. Earl Limer. James “Sonny” Davis, and his wife Geneva, neighbors of the Ferruccios, and they are county leaders such as Commissioners George Shearin and Butch Meek.
Warren County isn’t the only place being targeted for commercial dumps open for interstate waste. Sixteen North Carolina counties are being targeted, and Ken and Deborah are speaking out against them, trying to help keep the state from becoming a regional, East Coast, and possibly national waste dumping grounds.
Ken and Deborah go to Wilson County, Governor Hunt’s own home county, where they support local citizens’ efforts to stop an 800-acre commercial landfill, describing the failures of lined landfills and telling the people that with the support from the Episcopal Church, they’re going to prove the PCB landfill is leaking.
Two days later after their Wilson County presentation, Debbie Crane, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources calls Ken and tells him the call is a courtesy call, that it’s only right that he learns the news directly from the department and not from the news media. She discloses to Ken that the PCB landfill has half a million to a million gallons of water in it that are threatening to breach the bottom liner, and something has to be done.
Why after a decade of silence and inaction is the state now describing the water in the landfill as a crisis, and why call Ken? Could it be that the real crisis is that Ken and Deborah have created an Ecumenical Environmental Leadership Coalition and are speaking out about leaking landfills and about waste expansion based on for-profit, commercial regional landfills? Could it be that the real crisis is that the Ferruccios are supporting grassroots leaders even in the Governor’s own back yard?
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