{"id":102005,"date":"2022-09-17T18:26:15","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T18:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=102005"},"modified":"2022-09-17T18:26:18","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T18:26:18","slug":"this-weeks-marks-40th-anniversary-of-warren-county-nc-environmental-protest-that-began-american-environmental-justice-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=102005","title":{"rendered":"This Weeks Marks 40th Anniversary of Warren County, NC Environmental Protest That Began American  Environmental Justice Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.northcarolinahealthnews.org\/2022\/08\/26\/nc-recognized-as-the-birthplace-of-the-environmental-justice-movement\/\" target=\"_blank\">NC Health News<\/a>: &#8220;In the summer of 1982, Warren County became ground zero for the environmental justice movement. The community, at the time a relatively sparsely populated county on the Virginia border north of Raleigh, was rocked by six weeks of protests over PCB-laced oil being sprayed on rural county roads.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The incident that sparked the movement that\u2019s now a worldwide phenomenon occurred back in 1978, when the Ward Transformer Company was looking for a low-cost way to dispose of toxic oil that came from electrical insulators. They began spraying the stuff along roadsides under the cover of darkness. In total, a 240-mile area, which stretched across several North Carolina counties, was contaminated.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People in the community, once they learned about it in 1982, weren\u2019t having it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.energy.gov\/lm\/services\/environmental-justice\/environmental-justice-history\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">During a six-week period in 1982, more than 500 protesters were arrested<\/a>, and their actions drew national attention. It was during the protest that civil rights activist, Ben Chavis, reportedly described what was happening to the community as environmental racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The PCB protests, which ignited over placement of a hazardous waste dump in Afton, and the subsequent delivery of nearly\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/exchangeproject.unc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18406\/2018\/08\/Real-People-Afton-long-story-07-0426.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">40,000 cubic yards of soil<\/a>\u00a0contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), resulted from illegal disposal of the chemical along North Carolina roadsides in 1978.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NC Health News: &#8220;In the summer of 1982, Warren County became ground zero for the environmental justice movement. The community, at the time a relatively sparsely populated county on the Virginia border north of Raleigh, was rocked by six weeks of protests over PCB-laced oil being sprayed on rural county roads.\u00a0 The incident that sparked&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsstory"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102006,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102005\/revisions\/102006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}