The advice came Saturday from someone who learned that lesson the hard way in the late 1970s.

Lois Gibbs, the housewife-turned-activist who led the fight against the polluted environment in her Love Canal neighborhood of upstate New York — a campaign that ended with the evacuation of the entire neighborhood and the federal government’s creation of the Superfund to clean up toxic waste sites — was the featured speaker in Roxboro for a Saturday afternoon rally hosted by Person County PRIDE (People Rising in Defense of Ecology).

The PRIDE rally was one stop on a 10-county “Don’t Dump on Us Keep North Carolina Healthy” tour by environmental groups urging state leaders to oppose “mega-dumps” and to adopt sound policies for dealing with solid waste in North Carolina. That tour, featuring Gibbs and other speakers, ended with a final stop in Raleigh on Monday.

Gibbs is now the executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ), which she founded in Falls Church, Va. in the wake of the Love Canal saga nearly 30 years ago. She assisted in setting up her own props at Saturday’s rally in Roxboro, including the 20-foot-tall inflatable yellow duck, bearing banners that cautioned, “Don’t be a sitting duck for mega-dumps.”

By times, upwards of 75 to 100 people were on hand for parts of the scheduled five-hour rally, which unfolded in the shade of the pavilion at Merritt Commons. Tables along the inside perimeter offered a variety of informational brochures ranging from recycling tips to a “Person County Pollution Scorecard” listing chemicals being released into the environment by county industries. Giveaways included table savers and portable trash receptacles made from recycled products. PC PRIDE T-shirts were available as were free bottles of water and free sandwiches furnished by pimento cheese spread maker Our Pride Foods of Roxboro.

About five minutes before the slated 2 p.m. start of the program, the pavilion lost electric power, rendering the public address system useless and idling the compressor for the inflatable duck, which slackened as it lost air. Some PRIDE members viewed the coincidence with more than a little suspicion. When power was restored about an hour later, in time for Gibbs’ main address, Gibbs advised the crowd that the restoration was the result of a volunteer bringing in solar panels, which generated power to run the public address system as well as to restore the yellow duck to its rightful stature.

(Roxboro City Manager Jon Barlow advised The Courier-Times this week that the pavilion lost power apparently because too many items were plugged into electrical receptacles, which triggered a ground fault. That, he explained, necessitated pushing the reset button on the ground fault receptacle in order to restore power to the facility.)

PC PRIDE is steadfastly opposed to the proposal by Republic Services of N.C. to expand the landfill it operates in southeastern Person County. It is urging the county to opt for running its own landfill limited to collection of Person County’s waste when the county’s existing contract with Republic expires in 2017. PRIDE also is encouraging the county to adopt a zero waste goal.

Last week County Commissioners Larry Bowes and Kyle Puryear, both of whom have publicly indicated they are leaning in support of landfill expansion, confirmed being subjects of apparent acts of intimidation. Bowes said he received a phone call in which the anonymous caller expressed support for PRIDE’s stance and vowed that if Bowes continued to support the Republic proposal he “would not live to vote” on expansion.

Puryear reported finding three bags of garbage spread on his front lawn when he was leaving home for work one morning last week.

Responsibility for the incidents has not been determined, but last Friday, PRIDE’s board of directors released a statement voicing “disapproval of the attacks” against the commissioners and vowing it does not condone such acts.

Gibbs commented on the threat and garbage-dumping incidents in her remarks Saturday, saying she was certain PRIDE was not responsible for them. But she also suggested that the incidents actually might have been perpetrated to discredit PC PRIDE.

“I know that PC PRIDE had nothing to do with dumping trash on somebody’s front yard,” Gibbs said. “And I know that PC PRIDE didn’t call somebody up and threaten them. What happened here is that you guys [PRIDE] got attacked.”

Gibbs posited that the acts might have been intended to distract PRIDE from its main focus and to create apprehension.

“Who got hurt in that? Not the guy who was threatened. Not the guy with the trash in the front yard,” Gibbs said. But, she added, “Now people are saying, ‘Well, did PC PRIDE really do that or not?’

“That’s the silliest stuff I’ve ever seen. I’ve traveled for 26 years and this is pretty silly,” she said. “And is it coincidental that it all happened when we were coming to town with our 20-foot duck? Maybe. Maybe not.”

Gibbs drew on her experiences in the Love Canal disaster to instruct her Person County audience on how to block expansion of the landfill.

“At Love Canal,” she said, “we learned that the science is important and the technical information is important, and we realized that there were some legal handles we could use, and all of that is important in the bigger picture. But the way to win this fight, ladies and gentlemen, is political. I know nobody likes that …. But you need to make it politically advantageous for your representatives to vote the right way.”

Gibbs said that back in the 1970s she thought she was living the American dream in her Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N. Y. But after her young children kept getting sick for reasons doctors couldn’t readily explain, Gibbs read a newspaper article through which she learned for the first time that a chemical dumpsite existed in her neighborhood.

“There were 20,000 tons of chemicals buried three blocks from my home,” she related. From the article, she said she also learned that “the elementary school that my son, Michael, was attending kindergarten in was on the perimeter of the dump, and that the playground that I took him to twice a day was on top of the dump. Chemicals would come up from the dirt and children would get chemicals on their fingers,” Gibbs said.

A study of the neighborhood commissioned by the City of Niagara Falls and the State of New York, concluded, Gibbs said, that “Love Canal posed an imminent health risk to the people living around it,” and that chemicals were evaporating from the soil into homes.

“Some homes had levels of chemicals above workplace standards” related Gibbs, explaining, “What that means is that a 160-pound man could not, would not legally be allowed in that home for 40 hours a week because it was too dangerous for a worker. In these homes were pregnant women, innocent children, living 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

And the governments were aware of that, she said.

For the most part, she said, adults in Love Canal were healthy, but the children and pregnant women proved far more susceptible to the environmental toxins from the dumpsite.

She said the neighborhood conducted its own door-to-door health survey to try to determine the scope of illness.

“What we found was, 56 percent of our children were born with birth defects. Fifty-six percent of our children had three ears, double rows of teeth, extra fingers, extra toes or were mentally retarded.

“…There were 22 women in Love Canal who were pregnant, and of those 22 pregnancies, only four normal babies were born. The rest of those pregnancies ended in miscarriages, stillborn babies or birth-defective children.”

Gibbs said a subsequent study by the New York Health Department essentially confirmed the results of the neighborhood survey. But instead of fixing cause of the health problems to the chemical dumpsite, the health officials said, Gibbs recounted, “We don’t believe those birth defects were related to Love Canal. What we believe those birth defects are related to is a random clustering of genetically defective people.”

By that point, Gibbs said she and neighbors were ready to sue but that first a lawyer disabused them of the notion that businesses cannot legally poison people. Indeed they can, the lawyer went on to explain, by virtue of permits and licenses that actually allow for certain amounts of chemicals to be leaked into the environment.

Thus, Gibbs said, permits and licenses allow corporations, in effect, to “take a certain amount of quality of life away and poison a certain amount of people,” much as hunting and fishing licenses allow hunters and fishermen to take a certain amount of game and fish.

The analogy works, Gibbs related, “except for one thing. If you have a hunting and fishing license, you’re never ever, ever allowed to take the babies.”

She continued, “When we’re talking about toxic poison, when we’re talking about solid waste, when we’re talking about leachate — which sounds very complicated but it’s just wet garbage and chemicals mixed together — you are talking about something that children, unborn children and young children, are most susceptible to. That’s why at Love Canal we were healthy as adults; we didn’t have that many problems. But our children were born with 56 percent birth defect rates. It is the children that are harmed by these sorts of things.”

At Love Canal, Gibbs said, “What we learned is that lawsuits work … but they’re not going to right the wrong. What you need to do is fight politically.”

That’s what Love Canal activists did, Gibbs said, by dogging then-New York Gov. Hugh Carey throughout his reelection campaign. In time, that won recognition of the Love Canal situation, evacuation of 900 families from the neighborhood, creation, in 1980, by the Carter Administration of the federal Superfund for toxic waste site cleanup and gained for Gibbs the moniker, “Mother of the Superfund.”

For Personians who would stand against landfill expansion, Gibbs exhorted, “This is a political fight. You’ve got to fight it politically. You’ve got to politely, but seriously, get in the face of those who are making this decision. … You need to ask your faith leaders to come forward and to help you. … And you need to ask other people to get in the face of these folks and say, ‘Look we’re really concerned.’ Not disrespectfully. Not nasty. But clear. That this cannot go forward. This is not what you want for your community. You need to be clear. … Don’t let the things they put in your way stop you.”

Gibbs suggested it would be better economically to build a recycling center that would create jobs for people and keep money in the community.

“That’s the type of economic development you want,” she said. “ Not taking somebody else’s trash.”

Gibbs concluded her remarks to Personians, “You guys have sacrificed hugely. Hugely. You already have a landfill that’s still got a 10-year life on it. You’ve already sacrificed. You’ve done your fair share. … You can stop now. You’ve paid your dues. Make them see that it’s only going to hurt you.”