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Article and photo by Luci Weldon, Warren Record assistant editor and photographer.

Above WR Photo: Deborah Ferruccio asks zoning consultant Jake Petrosky if he’s ever seen outright regulatory exemptions (a green light) for high impact polluters. Ken Ferruccio watches on as Petrosky admits he has not. 

WR article and letter refer to Scott Murray, Roanoke River Basin Association Upper Reach Program Director whose leadership has been invaluable in educating the people and public officials on actual negative impacts of industrial-scale solar. _________________________________________________________________________________________________

In this episode, Deborah and Ken explain why they haven't podcasted for over seven months as they pivoted from their work as podcast historians back once again to researchers, educators and community activists.

The issues they and other Warren County citizens have been facing are age-old ones over land use, the rights of landowners, and in this case, the power of mega corporations to try to position themselves to profit  from what industries call “solar electric gold.”

Through coverage in the Warren Record, this episode follows the citizens’  “Close the Door to Horizon and Industrial-Scale Solar” campaign.

As the county government moves to consolidate all its land use ordinances into one Unified Ordinance, intensive lobbying efforts to lift solar regulations are unloosed by Horizon Solar, a subsidiary of a $15 trillion international conglomerate. 

The plan is to convince commissioners to lift current size and spacing solar restrictions so that Horizon can build two 450-acre mega solar facilities that will be equivalent to 1,080 football fields!

The prospect that commissioners might open the regulatory door to utility-scale power so that thousands of acres of football-field-sized solar installations could be built, end-to-end along the electric grid, does not sit well with the majority of Warren County citizens who favor protecting and furthering the county’s agricultural, timber, recreational, housing, and tourism economies, as well as supporting community-scale solar. 

Citizens also know the mega-scale solar land grab is possibly positioning the county for solar-powered hyper-scale AI data centers.

The public’s sentiment is informed and fierce, and Warren Record coverage shows the people are relentless. 

The way Ken puts it to zoning officials, “Here in a birthplace of environmental justice, the people lead.” 

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Photo: A stack of Deborah’s journals spanning from 1977 — 1982 taken from the Ferruccio’s Warren County PCB Dead Sea Scrolls.       

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In this Our Road to Walk: Then and Now podcast series, Deborah and Ken continue to examine the past in the context of the present. In their last episode, they focused on the current climate crisis and the petrochemical take-over. 

In this episode, they go back in their PCB Dead Sea Scrolls archives to a collection of 1982 documents that Deborah has found stuck in the last of a stack of seven of her journals spanning from 1977 to 1982. The dates on the documents coincide with her journal entries, and it’s clear from the journals that Deborah and Ken’s personal lives are inextricably woven into the documented PCB history.

They share several 1982 journal entries when the euphoria they have been feeling with new teaching jobs is shattered with news that county commissioners have just dropped the county’s PCB lawsuit against the state. 

To give context to the commissioners’ decision, Deborah and Ken analyze letters to the editor and news coverage leading up to it. 

The county is on a collision course with the state. It has been three-and-a-half years since Ken warned the Hunt Administration there would be “due process first; then civil disobedience.

But Ken and Deborah and Warren County Concerned Citizens are not done with due process, not yet, anyway.

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Screenshot photo: Vice-President Al Gore speaking at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Opening Reception of Climate Week, April 21, 2025 (ABC7 News Bay Area). 

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In this episode, Ken and Deborah explain why this podcast has been such a long time coming. As with many Americans, they've been busy keeping up with the current administration’s daily assault on democracy, with more than one-hundred-fifty executive orders so far, including day one’s declaration of a “state of energy emergency,” with plans to lift the “burden” of regulations on the fossil fuels and to open up all aspects of the oil and gas industry.

The real emergency, according to Deborah and Ken, is that in effect, President Trump is facilitating a petrochemical takeover of the country and reversing decades of efforts to reduce deadly greenhouse emissions that are responsible for global warming and climate disaster.

They read former Vice-President Gore’s sobering climate change speech delivered just before Earth Day and decide to share much of the speech with their listeners as Gore tells his audience that with this presidency we are in an existential, “all hands on deck” moment as never before, and that we have “to solve the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.” 

Adding to Gore’s sentiments, Ken and Deborah share excerpts from a recently published May 14, 2025 Union of Concerned Scientists damning report titled: “Decades of Deceit: The Case Against Major Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Fraud and Damages.”

They share Yale Climate Connection  findings, namely, “The 2024 presidential election saw over $4 billion in various fossil fuel contributions to the candidates’ campaign committees and to outside groups supporting them.”

Still, Ken and Deborah agree with former Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention, Christina Figueres, “The task of a mindset of stubborn optimism about the climate crisis is needed more than ever,” because, she said, “As Henry Ford phrased it, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re usually right.”

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Ken and Deborah were recently asked by Michael Lamphier, Executive Director of the Wake Forest University School of Business, if they will speak to a class he is taking called “Communication and Conflict.” The class is part of the Master of Arts Sustainability Program at Wake Forest University. 

Michael then asked them if they would share their Warren County PCB history with the class, especially focusing on how the history began, what part did communication play in the conflict, and what are the lasting impacts. He knows how sustainability programs such as at Wake Forest University are attempting to prepare students to become sustainability leaders who will help address the daunting challenges of climate change. 

Deborah and Ken decide it will be helpful to share a representative slice of this long history by following the immediate 15-day timeline for their grassroots opposition to the PCB landfill. By chronicling the fast-thinking and fast-acting of Warren County citizens in this extraordinary compressed fifteen-day period, Deborah and Ken share how ordinary citizens take extraordinary measures that will become a model for pollution prevention and sustainability. 

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Above Photo: “Making Music,” Left: Sylvia Davis Bumgardner, Robert Ferruccio, Ken Ferruccio, Robert Macon Davis (harmonica), Deborah Ferruccio (harmonica), Charlie Davis (guitar), Laura Bennie Davis, pregnant with daughter, Mariah, born the next day, July 4, 1977. (Photo by Stan Bumgardner)                               

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In this episode, Deborah and Ken share with their listeners the answer to questions folks often ask them: “What bought you to Warren County, and what has kept you?”

They share chance encounters that seem more than accidental . . . . a family camping tradition carried on at Ocracoke Island . . . .  a convergence of North Carolina teachers with the same tradition . . . . an introduction to Warren County friends, Laura Bennie and Charlie Davis . . . . an   unforgettable day riding horses in the surf . . . . a powerful Atlantic storm that demolishes their tents and directs the Ferruccio course inland to Warren County, a place they would have never, ever thought of on their own to call home.

There, in a log cabin at the end of a mile-long farm road, Deborah and Ken see the opportunity to live the simple, back-to-the-land, rural life they have been looking for. They get to know people from all walks of life who take them in with a neighborly welcome, homegrown garden meals, seasoned Southern story-telling, and back porch music.

Ocracoke is not only a mystical starting point for Deborah and Ken. The island is where they return because it’s the place that helps them assess and reassess the direction of their lives. As Ken puts it in a 1980 preface, "Ocracoke is a navigational center from which to guide our course through the dangerous shoals ahead.” 

Ken is, of course, obliquely referring to the dangers posed by the PCB landfill that threatens Warren County. 

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In this episode, Ken echoes Dr. King’s notable “How, Long? Not Long" question and refrain in a memorandum to Jonathan Howes, Secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources that outlines Ken's 5-point framework for detoxifying the Warren County PCB landfill based on conditions necessary to environmental justice.

Three days earlier, the Secretary has announced that up to a million gallons of water is in the PCB landfill and is threatening to breach the bottom liner. 

However, after ten years of silence, the question is, why are state officials now bringing up the water issue?

Perhaps the Hunt Administration has been listening to the conversation Ken and Deborah have just had in Wilson County, the Governor’s own home county, about the failures and dangers of allegedly secure, lined landfills as they spoke to a poor, black community being targeted for a mega commercial solid waste landfill. Perhaps state officials have heard how the Ferruccios told Wilson citizens that with funding from the Episcopal Church, they are going to prove the PCB landfill is leaking. 

Perhaps state officials want to divert Ken and Deborah’s focus from continuing to build a coalition of ecumenical and environmental leaders to help prevent North Carolina from becoming an East Coast dumping grounds for solid, hazardous and radioactive waste.

Perhaps a PCB landfill water crisis and a stop-gap, drawn-out pumping solution will keep the Ferruccios busy at home. 

The year is 1993, and Governor Hunt is now in his third term in office. His record speaks for itself. He is well-known as a waste expansionist who will use police force against his own citizens. Ken knows this better than anyone. In his memorandum to Secretary Howes, Ken writes: “We are deeply disturbed about the PCB crisis here and about the trends this crisis represents throughout our state, our nation, and our world. The Afton crisis symbolizes the prevailing model for economic/industrial development: the model for waste expansion and inequity,  a model that transforms communities into sacrifice zones and preempts their civil rights.”

Taking his gloves off, Ken reminds the Secretary that “members of three races, blacks, whites, and Native Americans carried a cross here and were sacrificed in defense of principles universal to all people, places, and times — to all races, colors, classes and creed’ and that “everything concerning landfill siting since 1982 will be a footnote to Warren C   ounty.”

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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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Above Photo:  Bill Kearney and Dollie Burwell unveil the PCB historic marker at the September 15, 2012 30th anniversary PCB celebration held at Coley Springs Baptist Church, (Henderson Daily Dispatch, Earl King)

In this episode, it comes as no real surprise to Ken and Deborah that soon after the North Carolina Public Radio interview they did with “The State of Things,” the local Warren County government is facilitating efforts to plan the 2012, 30th anniversary celebration of the 1982 PCB protest movement. Leading the efforts is Bill Kearney and his newly formed Warren County Environmental Action Team which includes local, state, and federal government affiliates and state university academics and others. 

As part of the celebration, Kearney proposes plans to build a park and recreation center on the landfill site, and government affiliates claim the site is safe. Deborah vehemently counters the claim.

Deborah negotiates for months with North Carolina state archivists to convince them to erect a historical PCB marker and to approve the wording for the sign, but the historic marker and the program are  “essentially hijacked.”

More than the historic marker is hijacked as part of the 30th anniversary campaign though. The Action Team and its government and academic affiliates feature Kearney as the prevailing spokesperson for the re-narration industry that puts a basket over the light of truth, the basket that Deborah and Ken continue to remove again and again in this podcast series. 

Deborah and Ken end the episode as they explain why they could not attend the 30th PCB anniversary Coley Springs Baptist Church celebration in letters to the editor published in the Warren Record  soon after the celebration event, letters they know will become part of the public record, part of the history they are living and documenting as they go.
                                                       
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Click below to see a photo of the PCB historic marker being erected in Afton by state workers while non other than health minister and Warren County Environmental Action Team Director Bill Kearney looks on.

https://www.wcaahc.com/uploads/1/3/8/3/138395702/naacp-memorial-2020-photo_orig.jpg

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Ken and Deborah begin this episode with an update on the status of the Warren County Environmental Action Team's proposal for a partnership with county officials to seek EPA Justice40 community grant funds for an environmental justice center in the county based on the PCB legacy. 

With EPA grant funding deadlines nearing and with no public engagement in the grant decision-making process, it seems that the Action Team may have decided to dismiss attempts to partner with the county.

Deborah shares excerpts from an October 16, 2024 letter to the Warren Record that address current environmental protection and justice issues in the county.

Ken and Deborah then do something different as they continue to address the people’s PCB legacy by sharing a 2011 interview they had with Frank Stasio, who was host of a WUNC NPR radio program titled: “The State of Things.” 

They ask their listeners to go to the top or bottom of this Episode 39 summary page, and click the following link:

https://www.wunc.org/the-state-of-things/2011-10-24/meet-deborah-and-ken-ferruccio

The link can also be found on their website OurRoadtoWalk.com home page about half-way down.

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In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to address the re-narration of the PCB 
history as they contradistinguish fact from fiction.  

They explain how the PCB landfill legacy is relevant to everyone because it is part of a crucial turning point for the nation, a watershed that has set precedents which continue to affect economic development, environmental protection standards, and environmental civil rights policies.

They fact-check statements in the recent PCB film titled: “Our Movement Starts Here” and give detailed context to back their positions. 

Ken and Deborah recognize that from the beginning of this long PCB saga, the battle to protect Warren County has been a battle for the truth played out through the media. 

This battle for the truth is no different today, but the stakes are higher than ever now that the legacy of the PCB environmental justice history is tied not only to disproportionate impacts from pollution, but also to climate justice, and to how we all face increasing environmental stressors and disasters caused by man-made pollution.