Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that where there's
Speaker 1: people doing bad stuff, there's people who try to stop
Speaker 1: people from doing bad stuff by doing cool things. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret Kildoy. This week, I'm going to do
Speaker 1: something a little bit different than usual. I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk about a social movement that is maybe not even
Speaker 1: in the past tense, a social movement I just a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago attended a court case related to I'm
Speaker 1: also doing it without a guest, without a producer. Well,
Speaker 1: actually I have several amazing producers, including Sophie and Ian
Speaker 1: and of course Rory are audio engineer, Hi Rory, and
Speaker 1: our theme music was written for us by one woman.
Speaker 1: But no one else is on the call. It's just
Speaker 1: me and you, dear listener. The last time I did
Speaker 1: this sort of scripted episode, best as I can recall,
Speaker 1: was last autumn, when I went down for a day
Speaker 1: to talk to folks during Hurricane Helene relief in western
Speaker 1: North Carolin. This episode comes from a similar place. I
Speaker 1: drove down to southwest Virginia to observe the final criminal
Speaker 1: trials for protesters who worked for six years or ten years,
Speaker 1: depending on how you count it to stop a natural
Speaker 1: gas pipeline called the Mountain Valley Pipeline owned by a
Speaker 1: company called Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, built by a company
Speaker 1: called Equatrans Midwest Stream Core not Core Corp. I'm just
Speaker 1: used to seeing Corp and thinking Core because of the Marines.
Speaker 1: That's unrelated. I've done my usual research for this episode,
Speaker 1: but for an awful lot of it, my sources are
Speaker 1: just my own conversations with activists. This probably means my
Speaker 1: own usual biases will be compounded and more of what
Speaker 1: I say will be harder to prove accurate. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, I think it helps me weave a better narrative,
Speaker 1: one that is more accurate to the actual shape of
Speaker 1: the movement. It's taken me a long time to accept
Speaker 1: that sometimes I'm a journalist now instead of a participant
Speaker 1: in this or that movement. But being a journalist is
Speaker 1: also kind of fun going somewhere and meeting amazing, passionate
Speaker 1: people who accomplished something unimaginable together, then trying my hardest
Speaker 1: to do their story justice while trying to remain as
Speaker 1: accurate to the facts as I can. It's fun. The
Speaker 1: shortest version of the story might go something like this.
Speaker 1: A company wanted to move fract gas through West Virginia
Speaker 1: into regular Virginia. Damn the consequences. An awful lot of
Speaker 1: people from all walks of life said the fuck you will,
Speaker 1: and they said it collectively. By twenty eighteen, they began
Speaker 1: to use direct action to stop construction of the pipeline,
Speaker 1: using tree sts and tripods and lock boxes and all
Speaker 1: the various nonviolent direct action skills honed by eco defenders
Speaker 1: over the past forty years or so to slow down
Speaker 1: and stop construction on the pipeline, while environmental lawyers and
Speaker 1: public groups worked in the courts to prove just how untenable,
Speaker 1: ill advised, and undesired this pipeline was. After years of
Speaker 1: work in courtrooms and on remote mountaintops, they even won.
Speaker 1: For a while, work stopped and the MVP project seemed
Speaker 1: dead in its tracks. But the story of the Mountain
Speaker 1: View Pipeline is the story of the discrepancy between how
Speaker 1: people assume that democratic government should work and how it
Speaker 1: actually works within capitalist society. Before direct action got involved,
Speaker 1: endless well reasoned arguments were offered against the project from
Speaker 1: all corners, at least one local I talked to who
Speaker 1: was involved in the fight from the beginning started off
Speaker 1: believing that his government worked for him. People filed complaints
Speaker 1: and made arguments against the project during public commenting periods.
Speaker 1: Disillusionment set in as the regulating bodies proved that they
Speaker 1: weren't asking for public comments so that they could decide
Speaker 1: whether or not the project should go forward, but to
Speaker 1: get their own legal arguments in order in order to
Speaker 1: make sure that the project could go forward. Then, of course,
Speaker 1: years later, the pipeline seemed defeated in both the woods
Speaker 1: and the courts, but the fossil fuel industry has never
Speaker 1: been afraid of moving or demolishing mountains, both literally and figuratively.
Speaker 1: The Democratic Senator from West Virginia, Joe Mansion, spent years
Speaker 1: trying to hold climate change legislation hostage to get the
Speaker 1: MVP project to bypass environmental regulation, and in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: under Joe Biden, he succeeded. It took a minor constitutional
Speaker 1: crisis and a transparent rejection of democratic and legislative process
Speaker 1: to get the MVP completed. The anti pipeline activists not
Speaker 1: ones to give up easily or at all went down fighting,
Speaker 1: with lockdowns and walk ons happening for months. In the end,
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four, the pipeline was completed. These days,
Speaker 1: it pipes fracked natural gas across the Appalachians, deepening this
Speaker 1: country's reliance on the fossil fuel infrastructure that seems poised
Speaker 1: to doom us all. The pipeline was, by most reasonable assessments,
Speaker 1: and for most people in the area and world, a
Speaker 1: bad idea. From the simplest and most localized perspective, it's
Speaker 1: a three hundred and three mile long scar cut across
Speaker 1: forests and mountains, rivers and streams. It's worse than that,
Speaker 1: though activists refer to it as a ticking time bomb,
Speaker 1: and they're not wrong to say that long delays in
Speaker 1: the construction have left sections of the pipe exposed to
Speaker 1: the elements. Even pipeline executives testified that this was disastrous
Speaker 1: to the safety of the peipe. Robert Cooper was the
Speaker 1: senior vice president for engineering and construction of the MVP,
Speaker 1: and in court he testified about the protective coding on
Speaker 1: all the pipes themselves. Quote, as it sits in the sun,
Speaker 1: it ages or oxidizes and actually becomes thinner prior to
Speaker 1: it becoming too thin to use. You have to protect
Speaker 1: it from the sun. He testified to that in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: and some of the pipe didn't go into the ground
Speaker 1: until twenty twenty four. The thing is, gas pipelines explode
Speaker 1: all of the time. In August twenty nineteen, a sixty
Speaker 1: year old pipeline exploded in Kentucky and killed one person
Speaker 1: and drove seventy five people from their homes. The explosion
Speaker 1: was caused by the degradation of the protective coating on
Speaker 1: the pipe, which wasn't helped by the fact that Enbridge,
Speaker 1: the owner of that particular pipe, was apparently responsible for
Speaker 1: its own integrity assessments. But don't worry. Enbridge released a
Speaker 1: statement to say, to quote the Kentucky news site WLKY quote,
Speaker 1: it was deeply sorry and it has worked diligently to
Speaker 1: improve the safety of its pipelines. In August twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: a natural gas pipeline owned by Kinder Morgan exploded in Arizona.
Speaker 1: To quote the National Transportation Safety Board's report, the rupture
Speaker 1: resulted in the release of natural gas vapor that ignited
Speaker 1: and exploded. The explosion and gas fed fire destroyed a
Speaker 1: farmhouse four hundred fifty one feet away, killing two of
Speaker 1: the three occupants and seriously injuring the other. And then
Speaker 1: when the Safety Board investigated, they said contributing to the
Speaker 1: rupture was Kinder Morgan's failure to record the correct coating
Speaker 1: type used for this segment of the pipeline, leading to
Speaker 1: a risk assessment that did not fully identify the risk
Speaker 1: of stress corrosion cracking. The list of pipeline accidents in
Speaker 1: the United States on Wikipedias spanned six different pages. Between
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four and twenty thirteen, there were at least
Speaker 1: nine hundred and forty one serious incidents across the US,
Speaker 1: killing three hundred and sixty three people and leaking uncountable
Speaker 1: quantities of gas and oil into the environment. A Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal article, you Know that notorious lefty rag points
Speaker 1: out that leaks are chronically under reported by and two
Speaker 1: federal agencies, and most are only detected by folks on
Speaker 1: the ground. Not only is there no reason to suspect
Speaker 1: that the MVP was built any better than any of
Speaker 1: these other pipelines, but we know that large lengths of
Speaker 1: pipe were left exposed to the elements. Locals report pipelines
Speaker 1: just left in standing water on their property for years.
Speaker 1: We also know that the regulatory agency pH MSA, the
Speaker 1: Pipelines and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, has already cited Equitrands
Speaker 1: for building below specification. From everyone I've talked to, the
Speaker 1: Appalachian Mountains are a particularly perilous place to bury pipelines
Speaker 1: due to the shifting of the ancient mountains, and Equatrand's
Speaker 1: own environmental impact report admits that the majority of the
Speaker 1: pipeline is in landslide prone regions. And of course it
Speaker 1: is frankly reprehensible to expand fossil fuel infrastructure as the
Speaker 1: reality of climate change has set in. It's not like
Speaker 1: loading fuel into a house that might catch fire. It's
Speaker 1: like loading fuel into a house that's already burning, but
Speaker 1: you know what else is burning hot. The Sweet deals
Speaker 1: on products and services that support this very podcast, and
Speaker 1: we're back. People in Central Apalachia are pretty used to
Speaker 1: being extracted from and cast aside by the state and capitalism.
Speaker 1: Not all of them would frame it with those words.
Speaker 1: Some would. This has always been a place the rest
Speaker 1: of the country forgets about. I am willing to bet
Speaker 1: the majority of listeners couldn't name a single city in
Speaker 1: West Virginia. Charleston, the capital, is about half the size
Speaker 1: of tiny little Asheville, North Carolina, for comparison. I grew
Speaker 1: up visiting West Virginia as a kid, but the first
Speaker 1: time I really spent time there was almost fifteen years ago,
Speaker 1: working a little bit with folks fighting mountaintop removal coal mining.
Speaker 1: While I was there, I realized just how extracted from
Speaker 1: this region is. Almost No one cares about the people here,
Speaker 1: certainly not the politicians. In the coal fields, people's houses
Speaker 1: are covered in coal dust. Entire towns are regularly wiped
Speaker 1: off the map as coal companies buy up the property
Speaker 1: and just demolish it. The labor wars raged here for
Speaker 1: generations for a hundred years. There's still some fight in people,
Speaker 1: as the fight against this pipeline proves, but by and
Speaker 1: large the unions were broken by the companies in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Workers were replaced with dynamite and companies just
Speaker 1: started leveling entire mountains. The working class was driven from
Speaker 1: the area or driven into poverty. Industrial accidents are somehow
Speaker 1: routine in the area, and I met person after person
Speaker 1: with stories about sludge pouring through the valleys, killing and
Speaker 1: ruining as it went out. West more Land is public
Speaker 1: land on the east coast. Most of it is privately
Speaker 1: owned for the MVP. Landowners were offered easements, but if
Speaker 1: they didn't sign, the land was eminent domained away from them.
Speaker 1: It's like mugging someone with a gun and then asking
Speaker 1: to borrow their wallet. If there's a place where companies
Speaker 1: thought that they could get away with just fucking everyone over,
Speaker 1: with building a time bomb under everyone's land, it's Central Appalacha.
Speaker 1: It turned out, though, that Appalachia knows how to throw down.
Speaker 1: The fight against the MVP was one of the most
Speaker 1: engaging and long lasting non violent direct action campaigns in
Speaker 1: US history. Its tree SATs were the longest lasting east
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi. The pipeline was supposed to cost three
Speaker 1: billion dollars and take a year to build. Instead, it
Speaker 1: took six and a half years and cost at least
Speaker 1: six point six billion dollars, and the fight against it
Speaker 1: brought people together from across cultural, political and class lines.
Speaker 1: One of the people I sat down to talk to
Speaker 1: was there from the beginning because he lives in the area.
Speaker 1: He says it started in twenty fourteen or so when
Speaker 1: folks started getting letters and visits talking about easements and
Speaker 1: eminent domain. He wasn't an activist at that point, near
Speaker 1: as I can tell, nor was he one of the
Speaker 1: landowners whose property was at stake. He was just fight
Speaker 1: waiting for his community. Folks who were getting those letters
Speaker 1: started comparing notes on Facebook and elsewhere, and soon enough
Speaker 1: folks got together. This was old school organizing. They built
Speaker 1: phone trees, they went neighbor to neighbor. It was a
Speaker 1: mix of people right from the jump, including environmentalists with
Speaker 1: deep roots in the area. This is, as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: the part of the country where companies like to destroy
Speaker 1: unions and blow up entire mountains, landowners and concern neighbors.
Speaker 1: That very first meeting, they thought they might get a
Speaker 1: dozen or so people at the local community center, but
Speaker 1: one man I talked to remembers just getting up over
Speaker 1: and over again to get more chairs. As people poured in.
Speaker 1: They weren't overall people with strong political allegiances in any direction,
Speaker 1: but one by one people stood up and spoke earnestly,
Speaker 1: forcefully about how they needed to build solidarity with one
Speaker 1: another and fight this pipeline to save their communities. It
Speaker 1: was really early on that people realized this pipeline would
Speaker 1: affect everyone in the watershed. Die tracing in the area
Speaker 1: revealed that anything spilled in one area would wind up
Speaker 1: bubbling out of the earth seven miles downstream. The people
Speaker 1: who started the campaign started out working within the system.
Speaker 1: They worked with environmental lawyers, and they spoke with regulatory agencies.
Speaker 1: They filed public comments and went to public comment meetings.
Speaker 1: They fought against the permitting of the pipeline. I'm sure
Speaker 1: some of them came in cynical, but not the man
Speaker 1: I talked to. He thought, because he had no reason
Speaker 1: to think otherwise, that the democratic process and regulatory agencies
Speaker 1: existed to serve the public, to serve the community. He
Speaker 1: thought that if enough people spoke clearly enough, with enough
Speaker 1: facts on their side, that the government would listen. The
Speaker 1: main governmental order organization they were speaking to and hoping
Speaker 1: to get justice from was FERK, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 1: But soon enough they realized that all of their public
Speaker 1: comments weren't stopping the pipeline. They were working as what
Speaker 1: I guess you might compare to bug reports. The activists
Speaker 1: were having their words used against them as Ferk worked
Speaker 1: hand in hand with MVP to guide them through the
Speaker 1: permitting process, all the public comments working to help highlight
Speaker 1: which of their arguments they needed to shore up. To
Speaker 1: be clear, the year's long work in public comments did
Speaker 1: absolutely have a purpose. The activist attorneys working in the
Speaker 1: courts to stop the case expressed their gratitude because all
Speaker 1: of that work with commenting and fighting for permits helped
Speaker 1: them build their case. But the Department of Environmental Quality
Speaker 1: eventually gave MVP their permits, and by twenty eighteen, construction
Speaker 1: was slated to start. Actually, construction was slated to both
Speaker 1: start and finish in twenty eighteen, but when construction started,
Speaker 1: the direct action campaign against the pipeline kicked off. To
Speaker 1: be clear, something like that takes preparation. Movement elders started
Speaker 1: holding Direct Action one oh one trainings as far back
Speaker 1: as twenty sixteen, teaching skills like liaisoning with police, how
Speaker 1: to do soft blockades, all kinds of skills for what
Speaker 1: is worth. These are the sorts of trainings it's worth
Speaker 1: going to, even if you don't have an immediate plan
Speaker 1: to use the skills you learn. There there are a
Speaker 1: lot of ways to do activism and nonviolent direct action
Speaker 1: and blockading and such isn't the only one, but it's
Speaker 1: one that's worth knowing about. Something that comes up again
Speaker 1: and again in environmental campaigns is that companies will usually
Speaker 1: start work before everything is sorted in court. It's easy
Speaker 1: to clear cut a forest or bury a pipeline and
Speaker 1: then say, well, looks like the courts wouldn't have let
Speaker 1: us do that in the end, but we already did it, so,
Speaker 1: oh well, that's where direct action comes in. Ferk The
Speaker 1: Energy Commission issued a tolling order to let pipeline construction
Speaker 1: start in twenty eighteen, despite the fact that there were
Speaker 1: all sorts of appeals and lawsuits working their way through
Speaker 1: the courts at the time, and in fact courts would
Speaker 1: eventually declare the whole thing illegal time and time again.
Speaker 1: So MVP started work, so people started stopping them. Maybe
Speaker 1: The first action was a tree set that went up
Speaker 1: in January twenty eighteen up on Peters Mountain, a mountain
Speaker 1: which divides Regular Virginia from West Virginia. The Appalachian Trail
Speaker 1: runs along the ridge, so the pipeline was planned to
Speaker 1: be and eventually built, bored through the mountain to run
Speaker 1: under the famous trail this first tree set. Look. I
Speaker 1: love Appalachia, but if you live out west, it's hard
Speaker 1: to be impressed by the name nature here out east.
Speaker 1: The mountains here are absolutely ancient, so they've been worn
Speaker 1: down over millions of years. They aren't the towering young
Speaker 1: peaks we have out west, and colonizers have been here
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years longer, so old growth is remarkably
Speaker 1: rare on the ground. Which is to say, if you
Speaker 1: look at photos of this first tree set, which you
Speaker 1: should do, it sort of seems like a little thing,
Speaker 1: not the epic redwoods and dug firs people have sat
Speaker 1: in out west. The sit looks to me from a
Speaker 1: photo to be maybe thirty feet in the air in
Speaker 1: what I'm guessing is an oak. That little tree set
Speaker 1: stopped the construction in its tracks, a one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five foot wide swath of destruction stopped completely by sitters,
Speaker 1: high on a steep mountain, a four hour hike from
Speaker 1: the nearest road in the dead of winter. I am
Speaker 1: not alone in my admiration of these four. Local news
Speaker 1: from the time is full of farmers and other locals
Speaker 1: admiring their bravery, but do you know what else those
Speaker 1: people might have admired. They might have admired the amazing
Speaker 1: deals that we offer here on all of our advertisers. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's funny. I don't think any of our ads are
Speaker 1: really even offering you discounts, but they are offering to
Speaker 1: talk at you. So that's something, right? Does it fill
Speaker 1: the void? Who knows? And we're back soon after, while
Speaker 1: the tree sit was still standing, a monopod went up
Speaker 1: a tree sit. You can probably sort of imagine what
Speaker 1: a tree set is. It's a platform, maybe a four
Speaker 1: by eight sheet of plywood, for example, Suspend it high
Speaker 1: up in a tree. You sit on that platform, tree sit.
Speaker 1: It keeps me people from cutting down that tree. Especially
Speaker 1: in the winter. You're likely to string up tarps and
Speaker 1: other shelter over the platform to keep the weather off
Speaker 1: of you. To explain a monopod, I should probably explain
Speaker 1: a tripod. A tripod as well. It's a big, tall
Speaker 1: thing built out of three poles. You can PLoP one
Speaker 1: down in a roadway and have someone climb up to
Speaker 1: where the three poles meet, and suddenly it is much
Speaker 1: harder to drive down that road. But aerial protest technology
Speaker 1: developed fast a while back, and there are now bipods
Speaker 1: and monopods too. Essentially, the role of the extra poles
Speaker 1: is taken up by rope. By making particularly precarious structures,
Speaker 1: protesters are able to more effectively stop traffic and logging
Speaker 1: and such. So folks set up a monopod made out
Speaker 1: of a felled tree right on the Forest Service Road,
Speaker 1: tied to the Forest Service gate, so is better to
Speaker 1: stop traffic, and in particular, as I under stand it,
Speaker 1: to stop traffic and therefore police from reaching the tree sit.
Speaker 1: You can and should look up pictures of all of
Speaker 1: these protests to get a sense of what they looked like.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to describe a monopod by description. They're
Speaker 1: very logical once you look at a picture of them,
Speaker 1: and you can look up photos on the social media
Speaker 1: of Appalachians against Pipelines is a really good source for that.
Speaker 1: I looked at lots of their Facebook. I literally read
Speaker 1: through and scrolled through their entire many years of Facebook,
Speaker 1: but there's photos there. The cops laid siege to the
Speaker 1: monopod and tried to starve the sitter out. They set
Speaker 1: up noise machines to irritate the sitter they shone lights,
Speaker 1: They tried to drive the sitter to sleeplessness and madness.
Speaker 1: It seems there's a precedent here that's worth noting. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, during protests to stop cutting in
Speaker 1: Mount Hood National Forests in Oregon, a forest defender named
Speaker 1: Trey Arrow climbed into one of the trees without a platform,
Speaker 1: an informal tree set. The cops shone lights, blasted music,
Speaker 1: and just kept him from sleeping. After a forty five
Speaker 1: hours stand off, Trey Arrow fell sixty feet to the ground,
Speaker 1: fracturing his pelvis, breaking his ribs, and collapsing one of
Speaker 1: his lungs. He survived. Trying to keep someone from sleeping
Speaker 1: while they are perched thirty feet in the air is,
Speaker 1: from my point of view, a fundamentally violent act. But
Speaker 1: this sitter, the one we've moved back over to Virginia,
Speaker 1: this sitter had a platform and presumably a harness. When
Speaker 1: the police laid siege to the monopod, they closed the
Speaker 1: roads to keep people from driving up to support the activists.
Speaker 1: A local, a self described mountain person named Jamie Hale,
Speaker 1: grew up hunting and fishing in the area, so he
Speaker 1: blazed a new trail. Literally, he forged a new hiking
Speaker 1: trail in the area and mark marked it with tape
Speaker 1: so that others could follow the hail trail he called it.
Speaker 1: I told most of the people I interviewed that I
Speaker 1: was foregoing names since there was still so much ongoing
Speaker 1: with the campaign, but he said more or less, well,
Speaker 1: I'm Jamie Hale, and it was the hail trail with pride.
Speaker 1: He told me that after he blazed that two mile trail,
Speaker 1: folks started setting up a camp up there on the
Speaker 1: steep mountain side, just outside the police cordon. Slanty camp
Speaker 1: they called it because it was well slanty. Sit down
Speaker 1: on a chair and at some point you'll fall over
Speaker 1: or write a passage wherever you slept in your tent,
Speaker 1: you woke up at the bottom of it. Jamie described
Speaker 1: how everyone marched up and down that trail for months,
Speaker 1: including a local news anchor who walked it all in heels,
Speaker 1: impressing everyone. Public perception of protesters is it's sort of paradoxical.
Speaker 1: People act like protesters are at the same time know
Speaker 1: nothing Nimbi type not in my backyard types, only concerned
Speaker 1: about their own property values, and at the same time
Speaker 1: they're somehow also out of state outside agitators who don't
Speaker 1: actually care about the region and are just addicted to
Speaker 1: the self righteousness of activism. I didn't join the MVP protests,
Speaker 1: much to my regret. I only met some of the
Speaker 1: activists when I came down as a journalist to cover
Speaker 1: the last criminal trial the campaign at the end of February.
Speaker 1: You can hear my coverage or that particular trial in
Speaker 1: those particular cases over on. It could happen here from
Speaker 1: March fourth, twenty twenty five. But the activists I met,
Speaker 1: they made sense to me. Mountain people, hippies, and punks
Speaker 1: were the three words I heard used to describe the
Speaker 1: sorts of folks there, and to be honest, most people
Speaker 1: I met were some combination of all three of those things.
Speaker 1: These weren't distinct camps or distinct identities, as best as
Speaker 1: I could tell, just some adjectives that got thrown around.
Speaker 1: I asked people what they wanted to have conveyed through
Speaker 1: media coverage, and a few things came up. The fact
Speaker 1: that a lot of the young queer punks and hippies,
Speaker 1: the college kids, and the activist types, a lot of
Speaker 1: them were from the area, or from comparable areas. They
Speaker 1: weren't specifically an outside force, and they sure as hell
Speaker 1: weren't there to teach the locals how to fight. They
Speaker 1: were there to support the fight. Or again, they were
Speaker 1: from there in the first place. Plenty of the locals,
Speaker 1: landowners and otherwise had been part of land defense campaigns
Speaker 1: before as well. Like I said, Appalachia is a region
Speaker 1: with a long history of extraction and a long history
Speaker 1: of resistance. All of us, of course, have skin in
Speaker 1: the game when it comes to stopping climate change. But
Speaker 1: the outside agitator claims against the MVP protesters is particularly
Speaker 1: and wildly misguided. While some folks have laudably come from
Speaker 1: very far away to support the fight, most of the
Speaker 1: cars in the parking lot at the court were Virginia
Speaker 1: and West Virginia. I bet there were some North Carolina
Speaker 1: and Ohio around, maybe Maryland. Meanwhile, the representatives for MVP
Speaker 1: who arrived for the trial their truck had Oklahoma plates.
Speaker 1: For all of the big talk about bringing jobs to
Speaker 1: the region, it instead brought outside labor. Almost all of
Speaker 1: the money for the project left the region immediately. Appalachia
Speaker 1: is a place that value is extracted from, not a
Speaker 1: place where value is brought. The other thing the activist
Speaker 1: I met wanted to stress was that their respect and
Speaker 1: learning went both directions, between the older local folks and
Speaker 1: the younger activists. I can't speak to it happening in
Speaker 1: this case in particular, but environmental activism often shows people
Speaker 1: who grew up urban or suburban just how wonderful rural
Speaker 1: life can be. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself. I
Speaker 1: became a tree sitter years ago. The first time I
Speaker 1: spent in West Virginia was looking at mountaintop removal sites.
Speaker 1: And now I live here, and I spend my days
Speaker 1: looking at trees and mountains and talking to my neighbors
Speaker 1: about trees and mountains. When I say cultural exposure went
Speaker 1: both ways, I mean both ways. I talked to Jamie
Speaker 1: Hale and some other folks about what the multiculturalism of
Speaker 1: the movement looked like. He told me that divide and
Speaker 1: conquers the enemy's oldest and strongest strategy, that it's better
Speaker 1: to be accepting and loving. He told me that he
Speaker 1: grew up hunting and trapping in a place that was
Speaker 1: ninety five percent white, and he hadn't met too many
Speaker 1: queer folks before the pipeline fight started. The first meeting
Speaker 1: he went to. The pronoun part of the introductions made
Speaker 1: no sense to him, seemed weird to him. Soon enough,
Speaker 1: he learned how important pronouns were to people's sense of self,
Speaker 1: and it was no problem for him to accept them.
Speaker 1: He and other folks like him, of course, have been
Speaker 1: an integral part of the movement since the beginning, had
Speaker 1: at least as much to offer to folks who came
Speaker 1: from a more activist background, because yeah, we're stronger together.
Speaker 1: People I talked to were very aware of how as
Speaker 1: people living in Central Appalachia, the world doesn't give a
Speaker 1: shit about them, how people who should know better say
Speaker 1: things like, well, those people vote a certain way, so
Speaker 1: they deserve whatever happens to them. The movement was ideologically
Speaker 1: diverse as well, because it wasn't really built along ideological lines.
Speaker 1: You weren't going to find any maga hats, but there
Speaker 1: were liberals, progressives, anarchists, and dependents. Whoever decided to do
Speaker 1: an action, the movement agreed to honor their messaging around
Speaker 1: that action. People weren't afraid to tie their struggle against
Speaker 1: the pipeline to larger issues and decolonization. And land back
Speaker 1: were on people's minds and in their messaging. So yeah,
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, the direct action campaign kicked off, and
Speaker 1: it kicked off strong. The monopod lasted fifty four days
Speaker 1: despite the twenty four hour siege. Then hours before the
Speaker 1: monopod sitter came down, a skypod went up just up
Speaker 1: the road, like zero point two miles away. So the
Speaker 1: monopod sitter came down and the road was still completely
Speaker 1: blocked by protesters. One person telling me the story, whose
Speaker 1: name I forgot to write down, ironically enough, said quote,
Speaker 1: I am willing to go on record here to say
Speaker 1: that that was very, very funny. A skypod is well, okay,
Speaker 1: so it's a monopod without the mono, a platform suspended
Speaker 1: over a roadway, tied into things nearby, usually trees. The
Speaker 1: skypod lasted nine days. The tree sit, the one that
Speaker 1: started it all further into the wilderness, lasted ninety six days.
Speaker 1: And of course, just like to understand it strategically, part
Speaker 1: of the reason that that trise it lasted so long
Speaker 1: is because these other sits were set up ahead of it,
Speaker 1: so then the treset couldn't be evicted because he had
Speaker 1: these other you know this layered sense of security like
Speaker 1: old castles. You all spend all of your time reading
Speaker 1: about old castles, right, that's not just me multiple layers
Speaker 1: of defense, it's very effective. And meanwhile, crucially activists were
Speaker 1: working in the courts. Speaking of layered methods of defense, well, actually,
Speaker 1: I guess in this comparison, the court would be the offense,
Speaker 1: and the tree sits and such are the defense. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the tree sits, the blockades, those are the sexiest actions
Speaker 1: in a campaign like this, and often the ones with
Speaker 1: the most personal risk, but they're just part of a campaign.
Speaker 1: The legal team, while work was stopped on the mountain,
Speaker 1: got the National Forest permits for the pipeline revoked. It
Speaker 1: would take an entire season of this show to track
Speaker 1: all the ins and out both of every action that
Speaker 1: happened and every time that permits were revoked and reinstated.
Speaker 1: So don't consider this a blow by blow, but instead
Speaker 1: the best overview of the campaign that have been able
Speaker 1: to cobble together from interviews, press releases, and news reports
Speaker 1: over the ten years of the campaign. MVP was dead
Speaker 1: set on building every mile they could, even when they
Speaker 1: were not allowed to build the entire thing. They were
Speaker 1: counting on the state in the end having their backs.
Speaker 1: Considering we watched both presidential candidates in twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: run on drill baby drill platforms, I can understand their confidence.
Speaker 1: So despite permits being revoked for miles of the pipeline,
Speaker 1: the construction crew started digging and blasting and felling and
Speaker 1: drilling everywhere else they could. But people kept fighting. How
Speaker 1: they kept fighting? What exactly it looked like. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about that on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger. Ye
Speaker 1: cliffhanger time. You certainly can't go and read about this
Speaker 1: campaign elsewhere. You have to wait till Wednesday. But do
Speaker 1: you know what you don't have to wait till Wednesday
Speaker 1: to do? Well, I'm currently kickstarting a book, unless you're
Speaker 1: listening to this in the future, in which case I've
Speaker 1: already kickstarted a book. But well, maybe I'll be kickstarting
Speaker 1: a different book at that point. That seems to be
Speaker 1: something I do a lot. Anyway, I am currently kickstarting
Speaker 1: a book called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. It
Speaker 1: is the third book in the Danielle Kaine series, which
Speaker 1: is about punk rock travelers going around and fighting demons
Speaker 1: running for Magic Feds. And book three is actually kind
Speaker 1: of standalone. It's kind of a prequel, but also as
Speaker 1: part of the kickstarter, I'm doing audiobooks for the first
Speaker 1: two books, and you can also hear me read both
Speaker 1: of those books. I read the first book, The Lamb
Speaker 1: Will Slaughter the Lion to Robert Evans on Coolson Media
Speaker 1: Book Club a couple of years ago, and I'm actually
Speaker 1: right now the process of reading Robert Evans The second book,
Speaker 1: The Barrel Will Send what it may, so you can
Speaker 1: check that out on Sundays on this feed or that
Speaker 1: it could happen here feed, or just search for it anyway.
Speaker 1: I hope all of you are doing as well as
Speaker 1: you can, and I will talk to you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. A more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.