E37 - Our Road: Then and Now — In the Room Where It Happened

Photo Collage:  EPA Public Hearing, Warren County Armory, January 4, 1979. Archives. Eight-hundred Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs listen intently to their independent scientist, University of Maryland soil scientist  Dr. Charles Mulchi. 
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                                 In the Room Where it Happened 

In this episode,  Ken and Deborah continue to tie past PCB history to the present as they take their listeners to “to the room where it happened,” to the Warren County National Guard Armory where the PCB landfill environmental justice movement began on a frigid January 4, 1979 night when some 800 citizens  voiced their sentiment against a toxic PCB landfill they believed would endanger their lives, their environment, and future generations.

Two weeks earlier the Hunt Administration had announced that “public sentiment would not deter the state from burying PCBs in Warren County,” an announcement that had ignited the people and has come to epitomize the dictatorial politics of poison.

Ken and Deborah take their listeners back to this 1979 Armory space and time, and compare it to the August 22, 2024 public forum they recently attended held in the Armory that was sponsored by the Governor’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council. 

They explain how these two Armory occasions were a stunning display of contrasts concerning what the Warren County environmental justice movement was in its natural, unadulterated grassroots form in 1979 and what it has become in its current institutionalized, manufactured, manipulated, and monetized, and greenwashed form.

For Deborah and Ken, and for Warren County citizens who were there that January night, the Armory is sacred space because the will of the people was displayed for all to see, including local, state, and national media.

But the Advisory Council public forum desecrated the space — killed the hot-button topic of environmental justice with death-by-PowerPoint greenwashing. Public comments were initially limited to three minutes, even though only five people attended because of poor advertising.

Warren County Environmental Justice Executive Director Bill Kearney was an Advisory Council panelist. Currently, Kearney is Action Team have pressing county officials to partner with his Action Team for as much as $20 million for a Warren County-based EPA-sponsored environmental justice grassroots center of excellence. 

In this episode, as Deborah and Ken move backward and forward on the historical timeline, as they make the case that there is no documented historical justification for such a center in Warren County.  

Contrasts abound between the two events, but one thing is the same all these forty-five years later — Ken Ferruccio, the spokesperson still for Warren County citizens who are concerned about a future based on truth and justice.

Concerning the proposed EPA-sponsored environmental justice center, Ken warns Advisory Council members, Bill Kearney, and county, state, and federal EPA officials: “Not the federal government, not the state government, not the local government, none of these, but the people of Warren County, the stakeholders, the taxpayers, will stand on the public sentiment that they’ve always always done.  They will decide their future, and they will decide the future of Warren County.