Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, cool people who did cool stuff as
Speaker 1: their new jingle. I hope it's not. I hope I
Speaker 1: never do it again. I'm your rest, Margaret Kiljoy. This
Speaker 1: is part two of a two parter about the fight
Speaker 1: against the Mountain Valley pipeline. And as you've probably noticed,
Speaker 1: this is a different format than usual. Usually I talked
Speaker 1: to a guest, and this time I talked just to
Speaker 1: you into the microphone. Do you know what I did
Speaker 1: during the break between part one and part two? You
Speaker 1: had to wait two days, but I just recorded part
Speaker 1: one and then stopped and went and refilled my water
Speaker 1: bottle and looked out the window at my dog that's
Speaker 1: sleeping in the yard in the sun. His little chest
Speaker 1: moves up and down. It's very nice, it's very relaxing.
Speaker 1: Highly recommend pets good for anxiety. I think there might
Speaker 1: be anxiety sponges, though, because I think that our pets
Speaker 1: end up very anxious instead of us. But uh, he
Speaker 1: seems to I don't know. I'm telling you this. This
Speaker 1: is part two. I already said all that. Our producers,
Speaker 1: well Sophie and Ian, and our audio engineers Rory Hi Rory,
Speaker 1: and our theme music was written for by unwoman, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the fight to stop the Mountain Valley pipeline,
Speaker 1: which well it lost, but we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: it that and how in some ways it actually accomplished
Speaker 1: an awful lot because I think that it's cool people
Speaker 1: who did cool stuff. You probably noticed that. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to go back to my script now. As soon
Speaker 1: as the construction started, the pollution started. While people claim
Speaker 1: that natural gas is the cleaner alternative to coal, West
Speaker 1: Virginia residents post photos of polluted creeks in their own yards.
Speaker 1: More CITs started popping up, often on private land. Often
Speaker 1: property owners themselves were resisting on their own property. Other
Speaker 1: times property owners were just kind of not telling protesters
Speaker 1: to leave. Cynical accounts will accuse property owners of nimbiism
Speaker 1: or of just fighting for property rights in some individualist way.
Speaker 1: But I suspect that for most of these people it
Speaker 1: went way deeper than that. They were fighting for the
Speaker 1: little scraps of forest and stream and mountain that they
Speaker 1: were personally caretaking and often had been for generations. Becky
Speaker 1: Crabtree a grandmother, a high school teacher, and later a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two Democratic House of delegates candidate in West
Speaker 1: Virginia drove her own seventy one Pinto to block pipeline
Speaker 1: trenching on her own property and change herself to her
Speaker 1: car in the summer of twenty eighteen, after she'd been
Speaker 1: working within the system to fight the pipeline for years.
Speaker 1: This is our home was painted across the car. She
Speaker 1: told Vice News quote, I can't just teach my students
Speaker 1: about climate change and have them fill out a sentence
Speaker 1: about fossil fuel energy and its negative impact. I know
Speaker 1: what the impacts are. I have to live this. The
Speaker 1: cop who arrested her she'd taught him in third grade.
Speaker 1: This is a fight that is local, national, and international
Speaker 1: all at once. By the summer of twenty eighteen, people
Speaker 1: started locking themselves directly to construction equipment. If you ever
Speaker 1: want to get pedantic about something fun, that's what everyone
Speaker 1: does for fun. Right, You come up with a new
Speaker 1: topic to obsessively research every week. That's like normal, Right,
Speaker 1: I'm normal. Okay, you can spend your time learning about
Speaker 1: lock boxes. Lock Boxes are basically things that you can
Speaker 1: lock yourself to in order to do nonviolent direct action.
Speaker 1: They make yourself harder to move. Usually, lock boxes are
Speaker 1: built around a steel pipe with a little length of
Speaker 1: rebar welded inside. You stick your arms into the pipe
Speaker 1: and clip yourself into the rebar with a carabiner that
Speaker 1: has chained your wrist. These pipes can be embedded into
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. A barrel full of cement is
Speaker 1: a classic example. All the different styles of devices have
Speaker 1: their own cute names, like the black Bear, but there's
Speaker 1: one name that cops have picked up on and use
Speaker 1: as shorthand for every single lock box, probably because it
Speaker 1: sounds vaguely menacing, the sleeping dragon. Cops have to know
Speaker 1: that not every lock box is a sleeping dragon. But
Speaker 1: I sat in court as cops called every lock box
Speaker 1: a sleeping dragon. A sleeping dragon is real cool, though
Speaker 1: essentially it's a lock box buried in the ground and
Speaker 1: disguised like it's a pipe with rebar embedded into cement
Speaker 1: and then buried into the ground. They're cool because they
Speaker 1: can be built and set up any time, ready to
Speaker 1: deploy almost undetectable. People absolutely use sleeping dragons as part
Speaker 1: of this fight, but not every damn lock pox is
Speaker 1: a sleeping dragon. In twenty eighteen, people started locking themselves
Speaker 1: to things Some people even started locking down inside the
Speaker 1: boreholes that were waiting for the pipes. Most of these
Speaker 1: lockdowns last in the hours, not in the days, but
Speaker 1: they can significantly inflate costs for the pipeline construction company,
Speaker 1: and of course by valuable time while people fight in
Speaker 1: the courts. There are also dramatic photo ops which I
Speaker 1: actually don't say cynically but earnestly. It's really important that
Speaker 1: people realize that grandmas and young hippies and punks are
Speaker 1: locking themselves to equipment. It's perfectly legal to set up
Speaker 1: a tree sit on your own property, of course, and
Speaker 1: so many people did as much. The state, though, started
Speaker 1: serving injunctions against property owners to come on down from there. Basically,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, none of the actions
Speaker 1: were centrally planned and organized, merely that they were coordinated
Speaker 1: by disparate groups and people. I would quickly run out
Speaker 1: of space, well time space in my document that I'm
Speaker 1: writing the script in, but time and reading whatever. I
Speaker 1: would quickly run out of space time if I listed
Speaker 1: every organization that had some hand in the campaign to
Speaker 1: stop the pipeline, and there are a ton of civil
Speaker 1: suits against protesters and organizations that are ongoing, so I
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't list these organizations anyway. Peter's Mountain saw the
Speaker 1: first flurry of activity, but soon a new site of
Speaker 1: resistance popped up further into Virginia Poor Mountain, the Yellowfinch Sits.
Speaker 1: On September nineteenth, twenty eighteen, two sits went up fifty
Speaker 1: five and sixty feet in the air, this time still
Speaker 1: on a steep chunk of land. One sit was in
Speaker 1: a chestnut oak. The other wasn't a pine until it
Speaker 1: too was moved to an oak. These sits were on
Speaker 1: private property, blocking the way of the pipeline. The owner
Speaker 1: never asked the protesters to leave, nor did the owner
Speaker 1: tell them to be there. These sits were supported by
Speaker 1: a large, diverse direct action camp on the ground. Most
Speaker 1: anyone who was interested could come out simply by filling
Speaker 1: out an intake form. One of the major advantages of
Speaker 1: nonviolent direct action is that it's a sort of above
Speaker 1: ground criminality. One of the disadvantages of nonviolent direct action
Speaker 1: is that at least three times in this script, I've
Speaker 1: accidentally written it as nonviolent direction action, where I just
Speaker 1: took the word direct and action and stuck them together.
Speaker 1: But you didn't need to know that. I didn't need
Speaker 1: to tell you that the supporters of the tree set
Speaker 1: not of my bad spelling. The supporters of the tree
Speaker 1: st camping on private land weren't committing a crime. But
Speaker 1: many of the people involved in the direct action were
Speaker 1: convicted of various offenses throughout the years. Yet, while the
Speaker 1: camps and movements had to maintain some level of security
Speaker 1: and develop a security culture, they were still able to
Speaker 1: be open enough to bring new people into the movement.
Speaker 1: And that's like something I'll go on about all the time,
Speaker 1: is that we need to get better at bringing people
Speaker 1: into the movement. And I think that this above ground criminality,
Speaker 1: non violent direct action, it's a very effective way of
Speaker 1: doing it. This is one of the biggest advantages of
Speaker 1: this style of campaign. It's radical enough to genuinely threaten
Speaker 1: the powers that be, yet approachable enough to build a
Speaker 1: large movement and help people begin to learn that they
Speaker 1: too can challenge power. There's no roster of how many
Speaker 1: people supported this movement because there was never any central organization.
Speaker 1: All I can say for anything like certain is that
Speaker 1: somewhere around one hundred and twenty five people were arrested
Speaker 1: in total, Over the course of the campaign, Soon the state,
Speaker 1: getting desperate, started throwing terrorism charges around. The first tear
Speaker 1: charges were against people who locked themselves to an MVP
Speaker 1: helicopter while it was on the ground. The helicopter was
Speaker 1: being used to buzz and harass the sits, so people
Speaker 1: locked themselves to it. After those people caught terrorism charges.
Speaker 1: Less than a week later, other supporters locked themselves to
Speaker 1: a welding sled. This is a welding sled as a
Speaker 1: construction device without its own locomotion. It's like dragged around
Speaker 1: by another vehicle. People kept getting this bogus joy riding
Speaker 1: felony charge for being attached to vehicles. So in this
Speaker 1: case because somehow it's like misappropriating the vehicle whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's bullshit. So in this case they attached to a
Speaker 1: non vehicle, the welding sled with a banner that read
Speaker 1: MVP are the real terrorists. The people who locked themselves
Speaker 1: to a welding sled got terrorism charges too. The terrorism
Speaker 1: charges didn't stick overall. The state didn't really get too
Speaker 1: many heavy charges to stick to anyone in this campaign,
Speaker 1: but they didn't expect their charges to stick. As best
Speaker 1: as I can tell, they overcharged protesters on purpose for
Speaker 1: a bunch of reasons. First, as I talked about in
Speaker 1: the court episode on it could Happen here, it seems
Speaker 1: as though MVP's main tactic was to try to drag
Speaker 1: out court as long as possible to keep activists tied
Speaker 1: up with legal shit so they couldn't return to the woods. Second,
Speaker 1: they wanted to intimidate people, and third, by overcharging with
Speaker 1: ridiculous felonies like kidnapping and joy riding, it becomes much
Speaker 1: easier to get people to plead a lesser charges. Yet,
Speaker 1: no one on the entire campaign, with over one hundred arrests,
Speaker 1: was ever found guilty of or pleaded guilty to a
Speaker 1: felony charge. It helped that the prosecution was often remarkably
Speaker 1: and humorously incompetent. In the summer of twenty nineteen, someone
Speaker 1: locked themselves to a sleeping dragon, an actual sleeping dragon,
Speaker 1: a lock box embedded into the ground. So there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of charges in Virginia that are really similar to
Speaker 1: each other, like obstruction of free passage and then trespass.
Speaker 1: The first obstruction of free passage is basically an anti
Speaker 1: picketing charge about blockading a business. The latter is for
Speaker 1: trespassing on private land. One activist was charged with obstruction
Speaker 1: of free passage. The prosecution filed to have it changed
Speaker 1: to trespass, but the judge never ruled on that change.
Speaker 1: So the prosecution spent the entire trial building a case
Speaker 1: for a charge that the defendant wasn't being charged with.
Speaker 1: And so the defense just kind of like tried not
Speaker 1: to laugh the whole time. They just like tried to
Speaker 1: keep a straight face while they watched this whole case
Speaker 1: be built for the wrong charge. And in the closing arguments,
Speaker 1: the defense were like, well, good job proving the charge
Speaker 1: that this wasn't about, and the defendant was acquitted. But
Speaker 1: if you want to be acquitted, you should consider one
Speaker 1: of our most important sponsors. Hi, Margaret Kiljoy. Here, boy,
Speaker 1: the world sure is a mess right now. Huh. Seems
Speaker 1: like every day there are more and more reasons to
Speaker 1: get out into the streets and protest. That's why when
Speaker 1: I get arrested, there's only one strategy. I trust, I
Speaker 1: shut the fuck up. I say, I would like to
Speaker 1: remain silent, I would like to talk to my lawyer,
Speaker 1: and then I shut the fuck up. In the United States,
Speaker 1: of America. It's constitutionally protected and recommended by the National
Speaker 1: Lawyer's Guild. That's shut thch f u c k up.
Speaker 1: Once again, that's shut thch e f uck up. Because
Speaker 1: you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can
Speaker 1: talk yourself into a conviction.
Speaker 2: Providing identification to law enforcement required in some states and situations,
Speaker 2: giving them an address expedient in most circumstances. Never discuss
Speaker 2: the events leading to arrest with anyone except your lawyer, doctor,
Speaker 2: or therapist. Hosting pictures of protests and actions on social
Speaker 2: media may lead to complications. If you have already talked
Speaker 2: to cops or experienced confusion about talking to cops, call
Speaker 2: your attorney immediately, as these may be signs of more
Speaker 2: serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops
Speaker 2: does not provide legal advice in the foregoing statements are
Speaker 2: for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions,
Speaker 2: consult an attorney, and we're back.
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, as the fight raged in the Woods,
Speaker 1: the Fourth District Court issued a stop work order to MVP.
Speaker 1: This court, the United States Court of Appeals for the
Speaker 1: Fourth District, is basically the Federal Appeals Court for much
Speaker 1: of the middle of the East Coast from DC down
Speaker 1: to North Carolina, including West Virginia and Virginia, so work
Speaker 1: was stopped for a while. Throughout twenty twenty, not much
Speaker 1: work was done building the pipeline. COVID lockdowns and revoked
Speaker 1: permits kept the destruction paused. By March twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: MVP got some of its permits back and tried to build,
Speaker 1: but famously they only managed to build eight miles of
Speaker 1: pipeline in all of twenty twenty one. By October they
Speaker 1: stopped for the winter. In twenty twenty one, the pipeline's
Speaker 1: water crossing permits were revoked as well, and the pipeline
Speaker 1: crosses perhaps thousands of creeks and rivers, so this was
Speaker 1: a pretty big deal. At the end of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: the Yellowfinch Tree sits were served with an injunction and
Speaker 1: told they had to come down. They didn't. In late
Speaker 1: March twenty twenty one, the two sitters, Ren an Acre
Speaker 1: were evicted by Cranes. One of the sitters, Wren, describing
Speaker 1: their experience, said, after months of hanging out with just
Speaker 1: Acre and playing guitar and magic the gathering all day,
Speaker 1: with occasional visits from cops yelling up at us and
Speaker 1: stapling things on trees, or from pipeline survey crews. I
Speaker 1: woke up one morning to about fifty cops in pipeline
Speaker 1: security forming a perimeter around the tree sits, mostly on
Speaker 1: the road below. They spent the first couple hours yelling
Speaker 1: lies to us on a bullhorn about letting us go
Speaker 1: home that night and reducing our charges, etc. While they
Speaker 1: brought in machinery to widen Yellowfinch Lane so that they
Speaker 1: could get a crane down it. They closed off the
Speaker 1: area to press, local supporters, etc. Allowing only people with
Speaker 1: addresses on the closed off streets through. By about midday,
Speaker 1: they had gotten a crane down Yellowfinch Lane, a one
Speaker 1: way dirt road, and started setting up to stabilize it
Speaker 1: and get cops on the little basket platform thing. They
Speaker 1: had to bring chainsaws up to clear their way through
Speaker 1: the canopy to get to the tree sits from the
Speaker 1: road and their crane. Once they got to me, my tree,
Speaker 1: a chestnut oak, was closer to the road than acres.
Speaker 1: They found me locked to the tree. After trying pain
Speaker 1: compliance techniques, they thought I was grabbing something inside the
Speaker 1: lock box rather than being clipped in. They had to
Speaker 1: go back down in their crane and get an angle
Speaker 1: grinder and generator to power the ankle grinder with and
Speaker 1: put it in their crane basket thing. I attached myself
Speaker 1: to every possible point of safety that I could while
Speaker 1: they were away, since they were going to be using
Speaker 1: an angle grinder near the ropes that kept me alive.
Speaker 1: It took them a while to grind through the lock
Speaker 1: box and unclip me, and then I went limp and
Speaker 1: they had to carry me into the crane basket. By
Speaker 1: the time I was down on the ground, almost twelve
Speaker 1: hours had passed, and it had also started to drizzle
Speaker 1: rain the way it does in Appalachia temperate rainforest. And
Speaker 1: all that. They carried me into the jail van by
Speaker 1: my wrists and ankles and took me away to the
Speaker 1: county jail. They came back for Acre the next day,
Speaker 1: while I was denied bond at my arraignment and carted
Speaker 1: off to the regional jail. Ren and Acre, the two
Speaker 1: sitters served the longest sentences of the campaign, with a
Speaker 1: judge deciding that in the interest of fairness, the sitters
Speaker 1: would serve one day in jail for every day it
Speaker 1: could be proven they were in the trees, and they
Speaker 1: proved they were in the trees based on social media posts.
Speaker 1: One sitter got around three months, the other around four months.
Speaker 1: Wren said about their time in the tree, quote, the
Speaker 1: part that I loved the most about Yellowfinch was the
Speaker 1: ground support camp. It was what I first fell in
Speaker 1: love with when I arrived there for the first time,
Speaker 1: and that love was what inspired me to stay in
Speaker 1: the tree through the winter. Once the ground Support Camp
Speaker 1: was evicted by injunction, of course I got frustrated with
Speaker 1: it and with some of the people who lived there
Speaker 1: at times. But I loved that place because we got
Speaker 1: to build it to be a better version of the
Speaker 1: world we live in now. Not perfect, but better than
Speaker 1: what we've got. And most importantly, ours was a rotating
Speaker 1: community of almost entirely queer people. The vibes of the
Speaker 1: camp fluctuated as members came and went, but we all
Speaker 1: got to do whatever we felt like doing all day,
Speaker 1: and somehow that came together into everything getting done mostly
Speaker 1: and us taking care of each other. My favorite part
Speaker 1: of the day was always in the evening, when We
Speaker 1: would all gather round the fire for dinner and to
Speaker 1: play music and talk about books. We were all passing
Speaker 1: around to each other and what we had done that
Speaker 1: day or wanted to do the next day, or political
Speaker 1: theory or dreams literal and metaphorical. The other thing I
Speaker 1: loved about that place was the spirit of mutual aid
Speaker 1: that ran through it. Local people would bring us food
Speaker 1: and other supplies and hang out for a few hours,
Speaker 1: telling us their stories. It was a place for building connections,
Speaker 1: including to the mountains around us, and for taking care
Speaker 1: of each other. There was, at various times a garden,
Speaker 1: a trampoline, a shed with all of our books, several
Speaker 1: iterations of shudders and compost piles, a drawbridge over the
Speaker 1: creek that ran down by the road, a group therapy circle,
Speaker 1: and various other hippie projects. We foraged and received gifts,
Speaker 1: and the tree sits opened up my mind to the
Speaker 1: way the world could be instead of the way the
Speaker 1: world is. And then one more quote from one of
Speaker 1: the sitters. On May eighth, twenty twenty one, one of
Speaker 1: the sitters wrote the following statement from jail, Hi, everyone,
Speaker 1: you probably just saw my sentence in the paper. I
Speaker 1: want folks to know, regardless of how I've been charged,
Speaker 1: I stand behind my actions. I'll go day for day,
Speaker 1: tree for jail, any day of the week to stop
Speaker 1: the damn pipeline. I want people watching who may consider
Speaker 1: taking action against injustice to not be dissuaded by the law,
Speaker 1: to know the court is only there to protect the
Speaker 1: interests of the wealthy corporate elite, that by jailing people
Speaker 1: for protecting the land and water, they show us time
Speaker 1: and time again how the judicial system is a right
Speaker 1: hand in colonialism and how it wears the blood of
Speaker 1: innocent life left in its wake. Refugees from climate change
Speaker 1: are on the rise, Immigrants remain locked in cages, separated
Speaker 1: from their families, dying at our border, and the jail
Speaker 1: are packed with people preyed upon by both the state
Speaker 1: and the prison industry, exploited for labor and cash and
Speaker 1: tax cuts. Prison is modern slavery and should be abolished.
Speaker 1: To those reading this weighing the efficacy of their actions
Speaker 1: planning for the next protest, never forget that you are
Speaker 1: standing for what is right. They may have me in
Speaker 1: a concrete box, but the woods and nature is something
Speaker 1: I hold with me always. I can still feel the
Speaker 1: coming bird song and blossoms of late spring like a
Speaker 1: steady pulse. I can feel the soil and running water
Speaker 1: in my blood. To believe this world was given to
Speaker 1: us to do what we want to it. To build
Speaker 1: monuments to our own ego is backwards and dangerous. We
Speaker 1: are only a small part of this place, and our
Speaker 1: relationship with the land and air and water is critical.
Speaker 1: It is a fatal error to alienate and place ourselves
Speaker 1: above all the crawling and swimming and flying and growing things.
Speaker 1: Earth comes first. Remember, show the world what you believe
Speaker 1: in land for its own autonomy, dirt for dirt's sake,
Speaker 1: and me, Margaret, I have to say ads for ads sake. No, no, well,
Speaker 1: here's ads anyway. And we're back after work, slow into
Speaker 1: a crawl. In twenty twenty one, there was no work
Speaker 1: done at all on the pipeline. In twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: it was looking for good reason, like the incredible amount
Speaker 1: of work done by activists was paying off. But the
Speaker 1: thing is, while courts and activists and communities wanted to
Speaker 1: stop this pipeline, the federal government and the fossil fuel
Speaker 1: industries really wanted it, and they were willing to do
Speaker 1: just about anything to make it happen. Before the current administration,
Speaker 1: it would be easy to say fossil fuel infrastructure is
Speaker 1: not the future of energy, and everybody knows it. A
Speaker 1: number of minority shareholders in the project in MVP started
Speaker 1: quietly distancing themselves from MVP as the years went on.
Speaker 1: To quote the Virginia Mercury in an article from twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, quote, if there ever was a jackpot for MVP,
Speaker 1: it is gone by now. Today demand for methane gas
Speaker 1: is cooled in the face of cheap wind and solar,
Speaker 1: while MVP's costs have ballooned to six point six billion
Speaker 1: from the initial projection of three point twenty five billion.
Speaker 1: Analysts say MVP's competitive advantage is evaporated and its prospects
Speaker 1: for profitability look grim. End quote. The demand for the
Speaker 1: methane gas the pipeline transports, they say, quote has always
Speaker 1: been hypothetical. If there's a direct villain in this story,
Speaker 1: it would be former US Senator Joe Manchin, who is
Speaker 1: infamous right now is the guy who called himself a
Speaker 1: Democrat but clearly wasn't a democrat, and like, look, I
Speaker 1: have no particular love for the Democratic Party, but Joe Manchin,
Speaker 1: who retired this year, simply wasn't one. Even he finally
Speaker 1: acknowledged it formally leaving the party in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: He is basically just like a fossil fuels guy, best
Speaker 1: as I can figure. He used his position as a
Speaker 1: swing vote by being registered as a Democrat to force
Speaker 1: through legislation that directly prevents life on Earth from being
Speaker 1: able to continue into the future. And I hate how
Speaker 1: hyperbolic that sounds, but it's true. Climate change is the
Speaker 1: single biggest issue in the world right now. Because it
Speaker 1: is the issue that sits above every other single issue,
Speaker 1: all life on Earth hangs in the balance, and Joe
Speaker 1: Manson works tirelessly to make sure that the United States
Speaker 1: works against life on Earth. In twenty twenty two, he
Speaker 1: held climate change legislation hostage until it included large carve
Speaker 1: outs for drilling in fossil fuels. He shot down provisions
Speaker 1: life provide tax credits to people who buy Union made
Speaker 1: electric cars, as far as I was told by activists
Speaker 1: on the ground. He also tried unsuccessfully to get the
Speaker 1: MVP written directly into that bill. Then, finally, in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, the Bastard pulled it off. In twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three's Fiscal Responsibility Act, which is about the debt ceiling.
Speaker 1: He managed to get in a piece that says, quote,
Speaker 1: the Congress hereby finds and declares that the timely completion
Speaker 1: of construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline is
Speaker 1: required in the national interest to quote West Virginia Metro
Speaker 1: News quote. That section goes on to say that Congress
Speaker 1: ratifies and approves all permits and other approvals required for
Speaker 1: construction and initial operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The
Speaker 1: section specifies that the approvals should occur no later than
Speaker 1: twenty one days after the passage of the bill. The
Speaker 1: bill goes on to say that no court would have
Speaker 1: jurisdiction to review the federal regulatory actions end quote. It
Speaker 1: was an essence Congress overriding the courts, shifting jurisdiction and
Speaker 1: saying all the regulation and permits just don't matter, because
Speaker 1: we want this pipeline, this destructive pipeline clinging to an
Speaker 1: outmoded and wildly dangerous technology. At the beginning of these episodes,
Speaker 1: I talked about how the fight against the pipeline it
Speaker 1: was a process of disillusionment for many of the activists
Speaker 1: and people in the surrounding communities. But the fact that
Speaker 1: they had fought the pipeline in the woods and the
Speaker 1: courts and won. The fact that all that could be
Speaker 1: struck away simply by a Congress that says, yeah, but
Speaker 1: we don't actually care, in a bill that wasn't even
Speaker 1: about the pipeline was perhaps the ultimate disillusionment. Because the
Speaker 1: Fourth District kept finding the project to be illegal, that
Speaker 1: court's jurisdiction was revoked essentially, and the District of Columbia
Speaker 1: Court of Appeals was given jurisdiction over the pipeline, even
Speaker 1: though the DC Court of Appeals is a court of
Speaker 1: appeals wait for it DC. Things that happen in DC,
Speaker 1: where famously the MVP does not run. I talked to
Speaker 1: more on the ground activist than legal activists for this episode.
Speaker 1: It's possible there is more I've yet to learn about
Speaker 1: what justification could be given for transferring this jurisdiction. Despite
Speaker 1: having its jurisdiction revoked, the Fourth Circuit Court attempted a
Speaker 1: stop work order on the pipeline based on its previous rulings.
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court looked at that from the Fourth Circuit
Speaker 1: Court and vacated this stay. Basically, it was like no,
Speaker 1: or you can ignore that, without even giving a justification
Speaker 1: for why they did that. It was a shadow docket,
Speaker 1: which is roughly when the Supreme Court says something about
Speaker 1: injunctions or stays without actually doing the whole like hearings
Speaker 1: and oral arguments and final judgments and you know, judicial process.
Speaker 1: So why was the MVP built despite only the rich
Speaker 1: and powerful wanting it? Well, because the rich and powerful
Speaker 1: wanted it. To hell with democracy. After the highest levels
Speaker 1: of power said fuck you were killing your mountains each shit,
Speaker 1: people refused to give up. They wanted it, seems to
Speaker 1: go down fighting. Around fifty of the one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five arrests during the campaign were all in the
Speaker 1: last year of the campaign, when it was no longer
Speaker 1: about delaying the pipeline so that the courts could fight
Speaker 1: it out, but instead about saying, don't fuck with the earth,
Speaker 1: you fox, we fucking live here. Maybe they wouldn't have
Speaker 1: cussed so much. Maybe they would have who knows. Lots
Speaker 1: of different people were involved. The trials I went to
Speaker 1: were for three different actions that happened after the construction
Speaker 1: resumed in twenty twenty three in twenty twenty four, including
Speaker 1: two lockdowns on equipment and one person who crawled into
Speaker 1: a length of pipe and remained there for almost two
Speaker 1: days to stop construction. Other times there were a bunch
Speaker 1: of mass walk ons, where people would swarm construction sites
Speaker 1: and by their presence make work impossible. Sometimes those people
Speaker 1: were arrested. Sometimes they managed to disappear into the woods.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the people who've managed to disappear into the woods
Speaker 1: were arrested later were followed out of the woods by drones.
Speaker 1: The very last action was a tripod at Yellowfinch. A
Speaker 1: twenty foot aluminum tripod was set up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the road in the exact spot where a banner
Speaker 1: had read years earlier, Welcome to Yellowfinch. During the sits,
Speaker 1: an activist sat in a hammock up at the top
Speaker 1: of the tripod while supporters rallied around the base. Tripods
Speaker 1: and another non tree st aerial blockades are precarious things,
Speaker 1: and it's important to keep eyes on them at all
Speaker 1: times from the ground to keep the cops from doing
Speaker 1: anything outrageously dangers. When the cops came, they issued a
Speaker 1: trespassing order to get the rally to move down the
Speaker 1: road like the support people out of sight of what
Speaker 1: they were doing. The cops told the sitter to come down.
Speaker 1: The sitter said, basically, you'll have to come up and
Speaker 1: get me. So the cops brought a contraption. Police documents
Speaker 1: called it the Rook, and it was basically an armored
Speaker 1: skid steer like a forklift, with a little armored elevator
Speaker 1: thing on the front instead of a fork the kind
Speaker 1: of weird military hardware cops are all getting these days.
Speaker 1: Cops went up on the Rook and pulled the sitter
Speaker 1: into it, taking their cafea and helmet, which were never returned.
Speaker 1: Thanks to this flurry of action, the activists delayed the
Speaker 1: project successfully for another half a year or so, but
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four, the pipeline was finished and fracked
Speaker 1: gas began to move. When I went down for the trials,
Speaker 1: I watched some of the bravest people I've ever met
Speaker 1: standing in front of a judge and be told by
Speaker 1: a prosecutor that there was paradoxically something wrong with trying
Speaker 1: to save the world. After the trial, I asked people
Speaker 1: what lessons they learned, and I got some interesting answers.
Speaker 1: One person talked about how important the art from the
Speaker 1: movement will remain. Another person told me that you have
Speaker 1: to invite people in, that you have to make it
Speaker 1: easy for people to join. You can't just tell people
Speaker 1: something is happening. You have to tell them that they're
Speaker 1: welcome to come, that you'll drive them, that you'll sit
Speaker 1: with them, that you'll buddy up with people. I got
Speaker 1: told that you have to extend a little more trust
Speaker 1: to people than you're comfortable with. People implied that having
Speaker 1: an open camp with a simple onboarding process for new
Speaker 1: volunteers was a strength of this movement. Activist movements have
Speaker 1: always been infiltrated by the state, and likely always will be.
Speaker 1: Forced Defense movements in particular have a fairly major history
Speaker 1: of infiltration from the eighties and nineties and early aughts.
Speaker 1: But as far as I can tell, and I asked around,
Speaker 1: no one is aware of any informant coming forward as
Speaker 1: a state's witness in any trial. That doesn't mean there
Speaker 1: weren't informants, just that none of them felt it worth
Speaker 1: blowing their own cover. The open movement did not cost
Speaker 1: them any particular jail time or arrest, it seems, and
Speaker 1: I also got told something i'd seen in the messaging
Speaker 1: for the entire campaign on press releases and banners, that
Speaker 1: people knew this campaign was about much more than land rights.
Speaker 1: People knew that it wasn't nimbiism, that many, perhaps most
Speaker 1: of the people were fighting against capitalism and colonialism. People
Speaker 1: knew that getting this land back into the hands of
Speaker 1: indigenous stewardship was essential. Whenever I think about hard fought
Speaker 1: activist campaigns that we quote unquote lost, I think back
Speaker 1: to an essay written by one of my favorite authors,
Speaker 1: the late David Graber. The essay is called The Shock
Speaker 1: of Victory. I first read it when it came out
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven, and it fundamentally shifted something
Speaker 1: in me. See. I came up in activism in the
Speaker 1: alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early two thousands,
Speaker 1: when we tried to stop free trade agreements from stripping
Speaker 1: natural resources from developing nations. I got arrested a couple
Speaker 1: of times during all of that, and I got punched
Speaker 1: by more than one cop along the way. I gathered
Speaker 1: up all this experience and all this trauma, and I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure what to do with it because I thought
Speaker 1: we'd lost. Then here comes one of the greatest thinkers
Speaker 1: of the twenty first century, and he wrote this essay saying, basically,
Speaker 1: anarchists and activists, we don't know when we've won. He
Speaker 1: uses two movements as examples, the anti nuclear movement of
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and the alter globalization movement to the
Speaker 1: turn of the millennium. He says that activists often have
Speaker 1: short term, medium term, and long term goals. A short
Speaker 1: term goal might be stop the following nuclear power plant
Speaker 1: from being built. A medium term goal might be end
Speaker 1: the expansion of nuclear infrastructure. The long term goal might
Speaker 1: be destroy the state and capitalism and living in egalitarian,
Speaker 1: free society. Time after time, we lose our short term goals.
Speaker 1: When people throw their queer shoulders to the wheel trying
Speaker 1: to stop a pipeline like the Mountain Valley, they often fail.
Speaker 1: The state just keeps raising the stakes, and raising the stakes,
Speaker 1: and raising the stakes, pulling out all the stops to
Speaker 1: crush the movement. In this case, they caused a constitutional crisis.
Speaker 1: There's no particular reason Congress should have been able to
Speaker 1: overrule the courts and change jurisdiction and ignore all the
Speaker 1: permitting procedures to make this happen. They will do anything
Speaker 1: to win. The state absolutely refuses to lose face. But
Speaker 1: both of the movements that Graber discussed did win their
Speaker 1: medium term goals. Nuclear Power when out of vote after
Speaker 1: fierce opposition, even if the specific instruction of the specific
Speaker 1: plants that were opposed went through, and the Global Movement
Speaker 1: for Economic Justice did not stop the individual free trade
Speaker 1: agreements that it opposed, but it did end the consensus
Speaker 1: that the neoliberal agenda was the best one. It ended
Speaker 1: the proliferation of comparable deals. So we don't win our
Speaker 1: long term goals yet, and we often lose our short
Speaker 1: term goals though. I have been to forests that still
Speaker 1: exist because of comparable campaigns. But just by fighting like
Speaker 1: fucking hell, we make the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure
Speaker 1: all the harder. I'm not so sure that the fight
Speaker 1: against MVP lost. I suspect, in fact, it was part
Speaker 1: of a larger winning strategy. At the opening of that
Speaker 1: essay by Graver, he says, quote odd though it may
Speaker 1: seem the ruling classes live in fear of us, they
Speaker 1: appear to still be haunted by the possible ability that
Speaker 1: if average Americans really got wind of what they were
Speaker 1: up to, they might all end up hanging from trees.
Speaker 1: I know it seems implausible, but it's hard to come
Speaker 1: up with any other explanation for the way that they
Speaker 1: go into panic mode the moment there is any sign
Speaker 1: of mass mobilization and especially mass direct action end quote.
Speaker 1: I think this helps explain that after the last criminal
Speaker 1: trial in February, the people I talked to didn't sound
Speaker 1: or seem defeated. They were full of life. I am
Speaker 1: sure that many of them were burned out, exhausted. The
Speaker 1: pipeline they'd all risked so much to fight was in operation,
Speaker 1: but I didn't see anyone in despair. I didn't see
Speaker 1: a movement that was acting like it had lost, but
Speaker 1: one that was proud, that had learned a lot, that
Speaker 1: was ready to inspire the next movement. That's particularly interesting
Speaker 1: to note right now, because almost everyone I know is
Speaker 1: struggled against despair in the face of the rise of
Speaker 1: fascism and the rising temperatures. Maybe acting with agency, in
Speaker 1: acting in line with our values is the thing that
Speaker 1: can keep us tethered in the storm. We are feeling
Speaker 1: the first winds of today, and maybe the way we
Speaker 1: get ourselves tethered like that is to build community together
Speaker 1: wherever we are, to stop fighting about bullshit, to de
Speaker 1: escalate our conflicts, and seek mediation for the valid critiques
Speaker 1: that we have of one another. Because, as Jamie Hale
Speaker 1: told me the other day, divide and conquer as a
Speaker 1: tactic as old as time. We can be accepting and loving.
Speaker 1: And that's the end of the episode about this thing.
Speaker 1: But there's still ongoing civil litigation basically, like all of
Speaker 1: the money that the company lost it's trying to recoup
Speaker 1: by suing the shit out of everyone, and so all
Speaker 1: of that is still going on. If you want to
Speaker 1: support activists and help them defend themselves against this litigation,
Speaker 1: you can join me in donating into the Appalachian Legal
Speaker 1: Defense Fund, which you can find at bit dot l Y.
Speaker 1: That's b I T period l Y slash a p
Speaker 1: P Legal Defense. That's a P P l E G
Speaker 1: A L D E F E N s E. All right,
Speaker 1: and that's the end of this episode. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: have a Kickstarter. I already told you that we'll be
Speaker 1: back soon with more cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Thanks everyone for being you. Let's outlive the Bastards.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
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Speaker 1: Get your podcasts.