Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice

Transforming Environmentalism explores a moment central to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. In 1978, residents of predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina, were that the state planned to build a land fill to hold forty thousand cubic yards of soil contaminated with PCBs from illegal dumping. They responded with a four-year resistance, ending in a month of protests with over 500 arrests from civil disobedience and disruptive actions.

Eileen McGurty traces the evolving approaches residents took to contest environmental racism in their community and shows how activism in Warren County spurred greater political debate and became a model for communities across the nation.