Our Road to Walk: Then and Now
Our Road to Walk: Then and Now is a podcast series hosted by Deborah and Ken Ferruccio broadcast from Warren County, North Carolina, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. The purpose of the series is to share the inside, untold, documented, forty-four-year PCB landfill history which serves as a roadmap and guidebook for communities everywhere who want to actively help protect the environment, especially marginalized communities, through education and activism based on science for the people. Our goal is to raise the consciousness of our listeners by informing and inspiring them and by winning their hearts and minds so that they want to join Our Road to Walk on a mutual pilgrimage for the planet, person by person, community by community, region by region, and nation by nation.
Episodes
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 pe...
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 ...
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 t...
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 an...
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...
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 citize...
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 fa...
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 Act...
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 poli...
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 episod...
Episode Photo: For this hard-hitting episode, we chose to feature this quote by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Montgomery, Alabama, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, because we agree with him that "an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future."
In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to respond to EPA’s Senior Environmental Justic...
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. Cha...
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Than Viet “argues that the way nations remember and re-narrate their pasts isn’t random or coincidental. It’s intentionally curated in memories, monuments, museums, even in key-chains and mugs in gift shops.” He calls this the
“re-narration memory industry.” In other words, they change history.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah examine how the EPA’s environmental ju...
In this episode, Ken and Deborah take off their gloves as the chemical war of words rages and is playing out in Warren County as a winner-takes-all battle for the PCB environmental justice narrative.
Currently, the Warren County Environmental Action Team — which includes local, state, federal, EPA and academic-affiliated members, seeks to partner with county commissioners to secure EPA Justice40 community gra...
The above photo of T. Mitchell Langdon, a Johnston County, North Carolina farmer, was published in Newsweek magazine on September 6, 1982, with an article titled "Toxic Time Bomb." The photo was taken in 1979 by Fayetteville Observer reporter
James L. Pate, Jr.
In this episode, Deborah and Ken are focusing more closely on what could have been behind the 1978 North Carolina PCB roadside crime, ...
Photo: At his parent’s home in New Hampshire, Ken works on his manuscript titled: Toxic Aggression, Fighting on the Front Lines: The North Carolina PCB Story
(October, 1980).
In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to share with their listeners the events of 1980 as they relate to their PCB situation in particular and as the events relate to the larger hazardous waste issue in North Carolina and ...
In this late December, 2023, Podcast Episode 30, Deborah and Ken break from their chronological narrative in order to recognize and celebrate the 45th anniversary of the actual birth of the Warren County environmental justice movement. They follow the extraordinary events that take place in Warren County in late December, 1978, and early 1979, after citizens learn the Hunt Administration plans to bury the roadsides PC...
In this episode, the Warrenton Rotary Club invites Ken to speak about the PCB problem. Citizens are really concerned about Warren County becoming a PCB and toxic waste dumping grounds. Ken presents his analysis titled: “PCBs: Issues Without Answers,” and Attorney Frank Banzet suggests that Ken shares his PCB analysis with the candidates running for governor.
Ken then sends his analysis to the three 1980 gube...
Photo: William Sanjour, Former Branch Chief of EPA's Division of Hazardous Waste Disposal, warned in the late 1970s that reducing the scope of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) industrial hazardous waste disposal regulations would be devastating. He became an EPA whistleblower, speaking out about the dangers of weak and non-existent regulations of chemicals and predicting the horrific chemical age in...
This episode continues to follow the first year of the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill opposition and the making of the environmental justice movement that is taking place in 1979. The local narrative is very much a national EPA narrative. PCBs in North Carolina, and EPA regulations in Washington, D.C. are the battle grounds.
EPA is turning hazardous waste regulations into a license to pollute, an...
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