Built From the Ground Up: Why Environmental Justice Belongs to Communities

In the autumn of 1982, residents organized inside Coley Springs Baptist Church in Warren County, North Carolina to stop the state from burying PCB-contaminated soil in their community. For six weeks, men, women, and children marched and lay down in the road in front of trucks hauling toxic waste. More than 500 people were arrested. It was from a jail cell in Warren County that the term…