Part Two: The Fight Against the Mountain Valley Pipeline

during the break between part one and part two? You had to wait two days, but I just recorded part one and then stopped and went and refilled my water bottle and looked out the window at my dog that's sleeping in the yard in the sun. His little chest moves up and down. It's very nice, it's very relaxing. Highly recommend pets good for anxiety. I think there might be anxiety sponges, though, because I think that our pets end up very anxious instead of us. But uh, he

seems to I don't know. I'm telling you this. This is part two. I already said all that. Our producers, well Sophie and Ian, and our audio engineers Rory Hi Rory, and our theme music was written for by unwoman, and we're talking about the fight to stop the Mountain Valley pipeline, which well it lost, but we're going to talk about it that and how in some ways it actually accomplished an awful lot because I think that it's cool people who did cool stuff. You probably noticed that. I'm just

going to go back to my script now. As soon as the construction started, the pollution started. While people claim that natural gas is the cleaner alternative to coal, West Virginia residents post photos of polluted creeks in their own yards. More CITs started popping up, often on private land. Often property owners themselves were resisting on their own property. Other times property owners were just kind of not telling protesters

to leave. Cynical accounts will accuse property owners of nimbiism or of just fighting for property rights in some individualist way. But I suspect that for most of these people it went way deeper than that. They were fighting for the little scraps of forest and stream and mountain that they

were personally caretaking and often had been for generations. Becky Crabtree a grandmother, a high school teacher, and later a twenty twenty two Democratic House of delegates candidate in West Virginia drove her own seventy one Pinto to block pipeline trenching on her own property and change herself to her car in the summer of twenty eighteen, after she'd been working within the system to fight the pipeline for years.

This is our home was painted across the car. She told Vice News quote, I can't just teach my students about climate change and have them fill out a sentence about fossil fuel energy and its negative impact. I know what the impacts are. I have to live this. The cop who arrested her she'd taught him in third grade. This is a fight that is local, national, and international all at once. By the summer of twenty eighteen, people

started locking themselves directly to construction equipment. If you ever want to get pedantic about something fun, that's what everyone does for fun. Right, You come up with a new topic to obsessively research every week. That's like normal, Right, I'm normal. Okay, you can spend your time learning about lock boxes. Lock Boxes are basically things that you can lock yourself to in order to do nonviolent direct action.

They make yourself harder to move. Usually, lock boxes are built around a steel pipe with a little length of rebar welded inside. You stick your arms into the pipe and clip yourself into the rebar with a carabiner that has chained your wrist. These pipes can be embedded into all sorts of things. A barrel full of cement is

a classic example. All the different styles of devices have their own cute names, like the black Bear, but there's one name that cops have picked up on and use as shorthand for every single lock box, probably because it sounds vaguely menacing, the sleeping dragon. Cops have to know that not every lock box is a sleeping dragon. But I sat in court as cops called every lock box

a sleeping dragon. A sleeping dragon is real cool, though essentially it's a lock box buried in the ground and disguised like it's a pipe with rebar embedded into cement and then buried into the ground. They're cool because they can be built and set up any time, ready to deploy almost undetectable. People absolutely use sleeping dragons as part of this fight, but not every damn lock pox is

a sleeping dragon. In twenty eighteen, people started locking themselves to things Some people even started locking down inside the boreholes that were waiting for the pipes. Most of these lockdowns last in the hours, not in the days, but they can significantly inflate costs for the pipeline construction company, and of course by valuable time while people fight in the courts. There are also dramatic photo ops which I

actually don't say cynically but earnestly. It's really important that people realize that grandmas and young hippies and punks are locking themselves to equipment. It's perfectly legal to set up a tree sit on your own property, of course, and so many people did as much. The state, though, started serving injunctions against property owners to come on down from there. Basically, as far as I can tell, none of the actions were centrally planned and organized, merely that they were coordinated

by disparate groups and people. I would quickly run out of space, well time space in my document that I'm writing the script in, but time and reading whatever. I would quickly run out of space time if I listed every organization that had some hand in the campaign to stop the pipeline, and there are a ton of civil suits against protesters and organizations that are ongoing, so I

probably wouldn't list these organizations anyway. Peter's Mountain saw the first flurry of activity, but soon a new site of resistance popped up further into Virginia Poor Mountain, the Yellowfinch Sits. On September nineteenth, twenty eighteen, two sits went up fifty five and sixty feet in the air, this time still on a steep chunk of land. One sit was in a chestnut oak. The other wasn't a pine until it too was moved to an oak. These sits were on

private property, blocking the way of the pipeline. The owner never asked the protesters to leave, nor did the owner tell them to be there. These sits were supported by a large, diverse direct action camp on the ground. Most anyone who was interested could come out simply by filling out an intake form. One of the major advantages of nonviolent direct action is that it's a sort of above

ground criminality. One of the disadvantages of nonviolent direct action is that at least three times in this script, I've accidentally written it as nonviolent direction action, where I just took the word direct and action and stuck them together. But you didn't need to know that. I didn't need to tell you that the supporters of the tree set not of my bad spelling. The supporters of the tree

st camping on private land weren't committing a crime. But many of the people involved in the direct action were convicted of various offenses throughout the years. Yet, while the camps and movements had to maintain some level of security and develop a security culture, they were still able to be open enough to bring new people into the movement. And that's like something I'll go on about all the time, is that we need to get better at bringing people

into the movement. And I think that this above ground criminality, non violent direct action, it's a very effective way of doing it. This is one of the biggest advantages of this style of campaign. It's radical enough to genuinely threaten the powers that be, yet approachable enough to build a large movement and help people begin to learn that they too can challenge power. There's no roster of how many people supported this movement because there was never any central organization.

All I can say for anything like certain is that somewhere around one hundred and twenty five people were arrested in total, Over the course of the campaign, Soon the state, getting desperate, started throwing terrorism charges around. The first tear charges were against people who locked themselves to an MVP helicopter while it was on the ground. The helicopter was being used to buzz and harass the sits, so people locked themselves to it. After those people caught terrorism charges.

Less than a week later, other supporters locked themselves to a welding sled. This is a welding sled as a construction device without its own locomotion. It's like dragged around by another vehicle. People kept getting this bogus joy riding felony charge for being attached to vehicles. So in this case because somehow it's like misappropriating the vehicle whatever. Anyway, it's bullshit. So in this case they attached to a non vehicle, the welding sled with a banner that read

MVP are the real terrorists. The people who locked themselves to a welding sled got terrorism charges too. The terrorism charges didn't stick overall. The state didn't really get too many heavy charges to stick to anyone in this campaign, but they didn't expect their charges to stick. As best as I can tell, they overcharged protesters on purpose for

a bunch of reasons. First, as I talked about in the court episode on it could Happen here, it seems as though MVP's main tactic was to try to drag out court as long as possible to keep activists tied up with legal shit so they couldn't return to the woods. Second, they wanted to intimidate people, and third, by overcharging with ridiculous felonies like kidnapping and joy riding, it becomes much

easier to get people to plead a lesser charges. Yet, no one on the entire campaign, with over one hundred arrests, was ever found guilty of or pleaded guilty to a felony charge. It helped that the prosecution was often remarkably and humorously incompetent. In the summer of twenty nineteen, someone locked themselves to a sleeping dragon, an actual sleeping dragon,

a lock box embedded into the ground. So there's a bunch of charges in Virginia that are really similar to each other, like obstruction of free passage and then trespass. The first obstruction of free passage is basically an anti picketing charge about blockading a business. The latter is for trespassing on private land. One activist was charged with obstruction of free passage. The prosecution filed to have it changed to trespass, but the judge never ruled on that change.

So the prosecution spent the entire trial building a case for a charge that the defendant wasn't being charged with. And so the defense just kind of like tried not to laugh the whole time. They just like tried to keep a straight face while they watched this whole case be built for the wrong charge. And in the closing arguments, the defense were like, well, good job proving the charge that this wasn't about, and the defendant was acquitted. But if you want to be acquitted, you should consider one

of our most important sponsors. Hi, Margaret Kiljoy. Here, boy, the world sure is a mess right now. Huh. Seems like every day there are more and more reasons to get out into the streets and protest. That's why when I get arrested, there's only one strategy. I trust, I shut the fuck up. I say, I would like to remain silent, I would like to talk to my lawyer, and then I shut the fuck up. In the United States, of America. It's constitutionally protected and recommended by the National

Lawyer's Guild. That's shut thch f u c k up. Once again, that's shut thch e f uck up. Because you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can talk yourself into a conviction.

serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops does not provide legal advice in the foregoing statements are for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions, consult an attorney, and we're back.

permits kept the destruction paused. By March twenty twenty one, MVP got some of its permits back and tried to build, but famously they only managed to build eight miles of pipeline in all of twenty twenty one. By October they stopped for the winter. In twenty twenty one, the pipeline's water crossing permits were revoked as well, and the pipeline crosses perhaps thousands of creeks and rivers, so this was

a pretty big deal. At the end of twenty twenty, the Yellowfinch Tree sits were served with an injunction and told they had to come down. They didn't. In late March twenty twenty one, the two sitters, Ren an Acre were evicted by Cranes. One of the sitters, Wren, describing their experience, said, after months of hanging out with just Acre and playing guitar and magic the gathering all day, with occasional visits from cops yelling up at us and

stapling things on trees, or from pipeline survey crews. I woke up one morning to about fifty cops in pipeline security forming a perimeter around the tree sits, mostly on the road below. They spent the first couple hours yelling lies to us on a bullhorn about letting us go home that night and reducing our charges, etc. While they brought in machinery to widen Yellowfinch Lane so that they

could get a crane down it. They closed off the area to press, local supporters, etc. Allowing only people with addresses on the closed off streets through. By about midday, they had gotten a crane down Yellowfinch Lane, a one way dirt road, and started setting up to stabilize it and get cops on the little basket platform thing. They had to bring chainsaws up to clear their way through the canopy to get to the tree sits from the

road and their crane. Once they got to me, my tree, a chestnut oak, was closer to the road than acres. They found me locked to the tree. After trying pain compliance techniques, they thought I was grabbing something inside the lock box rather than being clipped in. They had to go back down in their crane and get an angle grinder and generator to power the ankle grinder with and

put it in their crane basket thing. I attached myself to every possible point of safety that I could while they were away, since they were going to be using an angle grinder near the ropes that kept me alive. It took them a while to grind through the lock box and unclip me, and then I went limp and they had to carry me into the crane basket. By the time I was down on the ground, almost twelve hours had passed, and it had also started to drizzle

rain the way it does in Appalachia temperate rainforest. And all that. They carried me into the jail van by my wrists and ankles and took me away to the county jail. They came back for Acre the next day, while I was denied bond at my arraignment and carted

off to the regional jail. Ren and Acre, the two sitters served the longest sentences of the campaign, with a judge deciding that in the interest of fairness, the sitters would serve one day in jail for every day it could be proven they were in the trees, and they proved they were in the trees based on social media posts. One sitter got around three months, the other around four months. Wren said about their time in the tree, quote, the part that I loved the most about Yellowfinch was the

ground support camp. It was what I first fell in love with when I arrived there for the first time, and that love was what inspired me to stay in the tree through the winter. Once the ground Support Camp was evicted by injunction, of course I got frustrated with it and with some of the people who lived there at times. But I loved that place because we got to build it to be a better version of the world we live in now. Not perfect, but better than

what we've got. And most importantly, ours was a rotating community of almost entirely queer people. The vibes of the camp fluctuated as members came and went, but we all got to do whatever we felt like doing all day, and somehow that came together into everything getting done mostly and us taking care of each other. My favorite part of the day was always in the evening, when We would all gather round the fire for dinner and to

play music and talk about books. We were all passing around to each other and what we had done that day or wanted to do the next day, or political theory or dreams literal and metaphorical. The other thing I loved about that place was the spirit of mutual aid that ran through it. Local people would bring us food and other supplies and hang out for a few hours, telling us their stories. It was a place for building connections, including to the mountains around us, and for taking care

of each other. There was, at various times a garden, a trampoline, a shed with all of our books, several iterations of shudders and compost piles, a drawbridge over the creek that ran down by the road, a group therapy circle, and various other hippie projects. We foraged and received gifts, and the tree sits opened up my mind to the way the world could be instead of the way the world is. And then one more quote from one of

the sitters. On May eighth, twenty twenty one, one of the sitters wrote the following statement from jail, Hi, everyone, you probably just saw my sentence in the paper. I want folks to know, regardless of how I've been charged, I stand behind my actions. I'll go day for day, tree for jail, any day of the week to stop

the damn pipeline. I want people watching who may consider taking action against injustice to not be dissuaded by the law, to know the court is only there to protect the interests of the wealthy corporate elite, that by jailing people for protecting the land and water, they show us time and time again how the judicial system is a right hand in colonialism and how it wears the blood of

innocent life left in its wake. Refugees from climate change are on the rise, Immigrants remain locked in cages, separated from their families, dying at our border, and the jail are packed with people preyed upon by both the state and the prison industry, exploited for labor and cash and tax cuts. Prison is modern slavery and should be abolished. To those reading this weighing the efficacy of their actions planning for the next protest, never forget that you are

standing for what is right. They may have me in a concrete box, but the woods and nature is something I hold with me always. I can still feel the coming bird song and blossoms of late spring like a steady pulse. I can feel the soil and running water in my blood. To believe this world was given to us to do what we want to it. To build monuments to our own ego is backwards and dangerous. We are only a small part of this place, and our relationship with the land and air and water is critical.

It is a fatal error to alienate and place ourselves above all the crawling and swimming and flying and growing things. Earth comes first. Remember, show the world what you believe in land for its own autonomy, dirt for dirt's sake, and me, Margaret, I have to say ads for ads sake. No, no, well, here's ads anyway. And we're back after work, slow into a crawl. In twenty twenty one, there was no work

done at all on the pipeline. In twenty twenty two, it was looking for good reason, like the incredible amount of work done by activists was paying off. But the thing is, while courts and activists and communities wanted to stop this pipeline, the federal government and the fossil fuel industries really wanted it, and they were willing to do just about anything to make it happen. Before the current administration, it would be easy to say fossil fuel infrastructure is

not the future of energy, and everybody knows it. A number of minority shareholders in the project in MVP started quietly distancing themselves from MVP as the years went on. To quote the Virginia Mercury in an article from twenty twenty three, quote, if there ever was a jackpot for MVP,

it is gone by now. Today demand for methane gas is cooled in the face of cheap wind and solar, while MVP's costs have ballooned to six point six billion from the initial projection of three point twenty five billion. Analysts say MVP's competitive advantage is evaporated and its prospects for profitability look grim. End quote. The demand for the methane gas the pipeline transports, they say, quote has always

been hypothetical. If there's a direct villain in this story, it would be former US Senator Joe Manchin, who is infamous right now is the guy who called himself a Democrat but clearly wasn't a democrat, and like, look, I have no particular love for the Democratic Party, but Joe Manchin, who retired this year, simply wasn't one. Even he finally acknowledged it formally leaving the party in twenty twenty four. He is basically just like a fossil fuels guy, best

as I can figure. He used his position as a swing vote by being registered as a Democrat to force through legislation that directly prevents life on Earth from being able to continue into the future. And I hate how hyperbolic that sounds, but it's true. Climate change is the single biggest issue in the world right now. Because it is the issue that sits above every other single issue, all life on Earth hangs in the balance, and Joe Manson works tirelessly to make sure that the United States

works against life on Earth. In twenty twenty two, he held climate change legislation hostage until it included large carve outs for drilling in fossil fuels. He shot down provisions life provide tax credits to people who buy Union made electric cars, as far as I was told by activists on the ground. He also tried unsuccessfully to get the MVP written directly into that bill. Then, finally, in twenty

twenty three, the Bastard pulled it off. In twenty twenty three's Fiscal Responsibility Act, which is about the debt ceiling. He managed to get in a piece that says, quote, the Congress hereby finds and declares that the timely completion of construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline is required in the national interest to quote West Virginia Metro News quote. That section goes on to say that Congress ratifies and approves all permits and other approvals required for

construction and initial operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The section specifies that the approvals should occur no later than twenty one days after the passage of the bill. The bill goes on to say that no court would have

jurisdiction to review the federal regulatory actions end quote. It was an essence Congress overriding the courts, shifting jurisdiction and saying all the regulation and permits just don't matter, because we want this pipeline, this destructive pipeline clinging to an outmoded and wildly dangerous technology. At the beginning of these episodes, I talked about how the fight against the pipeline it was a process of disillusionment for many of the activists

and people in the surrounding communities. But the fact that they had fought the pipeline in the woods and the courts and won. The fact that all that could be struck away simply by a Congress that says, yeah, but we don't actually care, in a bill that wasn't even

about the pipeline was perhaps the ultimate disillusionment. Because the Fourth District kept finding the project to be illegal, that court's jurisdiction was revoked essentially, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals was given jurisdiction over the pipeline, even though the DC Court of Appeals is a court of appeals wait for it DC. Things that happen in DC, where famously the MVP does not run. I talked to more on the ground activist than legal activists for this episode.

It's possible there is more I've yet to learn about what justification could be given for transferring this jurisdiction. Despite having its jurisdiction revoked, the Fourth Circuit Court attempted a stop work order on the pipeline based on its previous rulings. The Supreme Court looked at that from the Fourth Circuit Court and vacated this stay. Basically, it was like no, or you can ignore that, without even giving a justification

for why they did that. It was a shadow docket, which is roughly when the Supreme Court says something about injunctions or stays without actually doing the whole like hearings and oral arguments and final judgments and you know, judicial process. So why was the MVP built despite only the rich and powerful wanting it? Well, because the rich and powerful wanted it. To hell with democracy. After the highest levels of power said fuck you were killing your mountains each shit,

people refused to give up. They wanted it, seems to go down fighting. Around fifty of the one hundred and twenty five arrests during the campaign were all in the last year of the campaign, when it was no longer about delaying the pipeline so that the courts could fight it out, but instead about saying, don't fuck with the earth, you fox, we fucking live here. Maybe they wouldn't have cussed so much. Maybe they would have who knows. Lots

of different people were involved. The trials I went to were for three different actions that happened after the construction resumed in twenty twenty three in twenty twenty four, including two lockdowns on equipment and one person who crawled into a length of pipe and remained there for almost two days to stop construction. Other times there were a bunch of mass walk ons, where people would swarm construction sites and by their presence make work impossible. Sometimes those people

were arrested. Sometimes they managed to disappear into the woods. Sometimes the people who've managed to disappear into the woods were arrested later were followed out of the woods by drones. The very last action was a tripod at Yellowfinch. A twenty foot aluminum tripod was set up in the middle of the road in the exact spot where a banner had read years earlier, Welcome to Yellowfinch. During the sits, an activist sat in a hammock up at the top

of the tripod while supporters rallied around the base. Tripods and another non tree st aerial blockades are precarious things, and it's important to keep eyes on them at all times from the ground to keep the cops from doing anything outrageously dangers. When the cops came, they issued a trespassing order to get the rally to move down the road like the support people out of sight of what they were doing. The cops told the sitter to come down.

The sitter said, basically, you'll have to come up and get me. So the cops brought a contraption. Police documents called it the Rook, and it was basically an armored skid steer like a forklift, with a little armored elevator thing on the front instead of a fork the kind of weird military hardware cops are all getting these days. Cops went up on the Rook and pulled the sitter into it, taking their cafea and helmet, which were never returned.

Thanks to this flurry of action, the activists delayed the project successfully for another half a year or so, but in twenty twenty four, the pipeline was finished and fracked gas began to move. When I went down for the trials, I watched some of the bravest people I've ever met standing in front of a judge and be told by a prosecutor that there was paradoxically something wrong with trying

to save the world. After the trial, I asked people what lessons they learned, and I got some interesting answers. One person talked about how important the art from the movement will remain. Another person told me that you have to invite people in, that you have to make it easy for people to join. You can't just tell people something is happening. You have to tell them that they're welcome to come, that you'll drive them, that you'll sit

with them, that you'll buddy up with people. I got told that you have to extend a little more trust to people than you're comfortable with. People implied that having an open camp with a simple onboarding process for new volunteers was a strength of this movement. Activist movements have always been infiltrated by the state, and likely always will be. Forced Defense movements in particular have a fairly major history of infiltration from the eighties and nineties and early aughts.

But as far as I can tell, and I asked around, no one is aware of any informant coming forward as a state's witness in any trial. That doesn't mean there weren't informants, just that none of them felt it worth blowing their own cover. The open movement did not cost them any particular jail time or arrest, it seems, and I also got told something i'd seen in the messaging for the entire campaign on press releases and banners, that people knew this campaign was about much more than land rights.

People knew that it wasn't nimbiism, that many, perhaps most of the people were fighting against capitalism and colonialism. People knew that getting this land back into the hands of indigenous stewardship was essential. Whenever I think about hard fought activist campaigns that we quote unquote lost, I think back to an essay written by one of my favorite authors, the late David Graber. The essay is called The Shock

of Victory. I first read it when it came out in two thousand and seven, and it fundamentally shifted something in me. See. I came up in activism in the alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early two thousands, when we tried to stop free trade agreements from stripping natural resources from developing nations. I got arrested a couple of times during all of that, and I got punched

by more than one cop along the way. I gathered up all this experience and all this trauma, and I wasn't sure what to do with it because I thought we'd lost. Then here comes one of the greatest thinkers of the twenty first century, and he wrote this essay saying, basically, anarchists and activists, we don't know when we've won. He uses two movements as examples, the anti nuclear movement of the nineteen eighties and the alter globalization movement to the

turn of the millennium. He says that activists often have short term, medium term, and long term goals. A short term goal might be stop the following nuclear power plant from being built. A medium term goal might be end the expansion of nuclear infrastructure. The long term goal might be destroy the state and capitalism and living in egalitarian, free society. Time after time, we lose our short term goals.

When people throw their queer shoulders to the wheel trying to stop a pipeline like the Mountain Valley, they often fail. The state just keeps raising the stakes, and raising the stakes, and raising the stakes, pulling out all the stops to crush the movement. In this case, they caused a constitutional crisis. There's no particular reason Congress should have been able to overrule the courts and change jurisdiction and ignore all the

permitting procedures to make this happen. They will do anything to win. The state absolutely refuses to lose face. But both of the movements that Graber discussed did win their medium term goals. Nuclear Power when out of vote after fierce opposition, even if the specific instruction of the specific plants that were opposed went through, and the Global Movement for Economic Justice did not stop the individual free trade agreements that it opposed, but it did end the consensus

that the neoliberal agenda was the best one. It ended the proliferation of comparable deals. So we don't win our long term goals yet, and we often lose our short term goals though. I have been to forests that still exist because of comparable campaigns. But just by fighting like fucking hell, we make the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure all the harder. I'm not so sure that the fight against MVP lost. I suspect, in fact, it was part

of a larger winning strategy. At the opening of that essay by Graver, he says, quote odd though it may seem the ruling classes live in fear of us, they appear to still be haunted by the possible ability that if average Americans really got wind of what they were up to, they might all end up hanging from trees.

I know it seems implausible, but it's hard to come up with any other explanation for the way that they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of mass mobilization and especially mass direct action end quote. I think this helps explain that after the last criminal trial in February, the people I talked to didn't sound or seem defeated. They were full of life. I am sure that many of them were burned out, exhausted. The pipeline they'd all risked so much to fight was in operation,

but I didn't see anyone in despair. I didn't see a movement that was acting like it had lost, but one that was proud, that had learned a lot, that was ready to inspire the next movement. That's particularly interesting to note right now, because almost everyone I know is struggled against despair in the face of the rise of fascism and the rising temperatures. Maybe acting with agency, in acting in line with our values is the thing that

can keep us tethered in the storm. We are feeling the first winds of today, and maybe the way we get ourselves tethered like that is to build community together wherever we are, to stop fighting about bullshit, to de escalate our conflicts, and seek mediation for the valid critiques that we have of one another. Because, as Jamie Hale told me the other day, divide and conquer as a tactic as old as time. We can be accepting and loving. And that's the end of the episode about this thing.

But there's still ongoing civil litigation basically, like all of the money that the company lost it's trying to recoup by suing the shit out of everyone, and so all of that is still going on. If you want to support activists and help them defend themselves against this litigation, you can join me in donating into the Appalachian Legal Defense Fund, which you can find at bit dot l Y. That's b I T period l Y slash a p P Legal Defense. That's a P P l E G A L D E F E N s E. All right,

and that's the end of this episode. And yeah, I have a Kickstarter. I already told you that we'll be back soon with more cool people who did cool stuff. Thanks everyone for being you. Let's outlive the Bastards.