The Property Rights and Pipeline Center is very concerned about resident rights to their lands and forests

News Report from the Allegheny Blue Ridge Alliance, May 28, 2021

The Property Rights and Pipeline Center, a national coalition of which ABRA is a member, this week released five new mini-documentary films about the unjust manner in which the power of eminent domain is granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

These are excellent depictions of the issues involving eminent domain use to take farmers lands for private gain. Pipelines involve more than the taking of land. The disturbances, noises, air pollution fumes, and water pollution are extreme. Safety issues are due to leaks, fires and explosions.

Kudos to our filmmaker friend and colleague Sarah Hazelgrove for creating such compelling stories! Each video is 12-14 minutes long.

Links for all are below:

• A Town at Risk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsCVUSWkSAU

• Averitt Family ACP – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXLABUIgNpU

• Megan Holleran Fighting the Constitution Pipeline – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sljN2RmGWg

• The Hero from the Holler – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMe-nrvmNTY

• Landowners vs The Law – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrTufM0W3D4

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See also: The Property Rights and Pipeline Center (PRPC) is committed to ending the use of eminent domain for oil and gas pipelines and associated infrastructure. We are determined to fight oil and gas infrastructure that takes land without the consent of its owners and puts treacherous pipelines under their homes and in protected forests, water supplies, farms and neighborhoods.

The fact is, we don’t need these pipelines — there is currently an oil and gas glut. Energy demand is generally flat in many cases and going down around the country. Pipelines leak and explode all the time and in many cases are used to move product for overseas export; not for our energy needs at all. Americans treasure their right to own and enjoy their property. Companies that foul the local environment and add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere should not take Americans property against their will.

Across America, more municipalities, citizens and landowners every day push back as pipeline companies threaten their land and safety. Many property rights and pipeline fights and legal battles are going on today throughout the country. We hope to join the many voices together so that we can speak with a powerful, unified voice for property rights and a clean energy future in all corners of this country.

Surface mining, road and pipeline construction are destructive

From an Article by Brett Israel, UC Berkeley News, March 29, 2018

Photo: Land degradation, caused by human activities like natural resource extraction and pipeline construction, is a global threat to humans and animals

More than 100 experts from 45 countries have published a three-year study of the Earth’s land degradation, calling the problem “critical” and saying that worsening land conditions undermine the well-being of 3.2 billion people.

The report was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on March 26. Providing the best-available evidence for the dangers of land degradation for policymakers, the report draws on more than 3,000 scientific, government, indigenous and local knowledge sources.

Rapid expansion and unsustainable management of croplands and grazing lands is the most extensive cause of land degradation, creating significant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, which include food security, water purification, energy sources and other contributions essential to people, the report says. The problem is so critical that a co-chair of the report said, “The degradation of the Earth’s land surface through human activities is pushing the planet towards a sixth mass species extinction.”

Land degradation is also an underappreciated factor contributing to global conflict and migration, among other problems, according to study co-author Matthew Potts, UC Berkeley associate professor in forest economics in the College of Natural Resources.

“Land degradation presents unique and persistence challenges to humanity,” Potts said. “This assessment shows that we are at a crossroads and must take urgent action to combat land degradation and restore degraded land if we want to create a happy and healthy planet for all humanity.”

Wendell Berry at home

Wendell Berry’s Farm Manifesto Taking Root

Source: www.courier-journal.com

The book’s theme was simple — that the health of land and the health of people were inseparable. It represented at once a cry of lament and a manifesto written in prophetic fury against industrial-scale agriculture, strip mining and other land exploitation.

In that 1977 work, “The Unsettling of America,” Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote, “We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason.”

People “no longer know the earth we come from,” Berry wrote. “… The people responsible for strip-mining, clear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences.”

This week, some of the nation’s top names in movements promoting sustainable environmental and agricultural practices are gathering in Kentucky to assess the growing influence of the book. Three and a half decades after its publication, “it is remarkable how current and relevant the book is in its critique of industrial culture and in its proposals for a better way forward,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School.

Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, an organizer of the conference on “From Unsettling to Resettling,” said that when her father wrote the book, he had barely any allies outside his family. “And now look,” said Berry, who, like her 78-year-old father, operates a farm in Henry County, Ky. “Good people have this on their minds everywhere.”

People are far more concerned now about supporting local food markets, knowing what’s in their food and preserving the land, Mary Berry said. Still, at the same time, the losses in family farms and topsoil continue.

Conference features speakers –  The conference — which is fully booked — is scheduled for Friday at the Brown Hotel in Louisville and Saturday at St. Catharine College in Washington County and features such speakers as Bill McKibben, a journalist who has sounded the alarm on global warming; Wes Jackson, president of the Kansas-based Land Institute and a leader in the sustainable-agriculture movement; and both Mary and Wendell Berry.

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Commentary Added to Article:

“Our Land and a Sustainable Future”

S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

At one time, almost anyone living in town in the United States was no more than one or two generations removed from the farm. Now cities have absorbed so much of the population many are separated from the farm by several generations. Food has become a commodity. It comes in discrete, wrapped easily merchantable packages. The consumer generally doesn’t know where it comes from, and is encouraged to think it ultimately comes from the corporation that packaged it. They say, “Not to worry, it’s good stuff.”

So the finite nature and the details of process of the world’s food supply is disguised behind the corporate veil, just as is the limitations of the world’s energy supply; and, its unsavory processes are hidden. Only 15% of the food dollar goes to the farmer, and the average item on your plate travels 1600 miles from production to consumption.

I remember reading an article in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several years ago, which showed a graph of the population of China against a several thousand year time line on which was marked the introduction of new crops. Millet, dry land rice, barley, wheat, paddy rice, sweet potatoes, corn, potatoes.

As each new crop introduction occurred, a new step in population also occurred, showing the population was limited by food supply. Our friends who depend on corporations wholly for food might have the idea that the market will spare them. Others may think God will spare humans the fate of microorganisms growing in a Petri plate. But the fate of the Chinese shows us otherwise. God didn’t give us our big brain without the obligation to cooperate and use it.

Corporations operate like primitive slash and burn agriculture. They find a resource and use it until exhaustion, then move the business on to fresh ground. For the primitive slash and burn farmers, the biological world seemed infinite, and in a few decades it repaired itself. The mineral resource world our species is exploiting today is limited and non-renewable. Fossil fuel reserves are very limited given the worlds huge population, and nature can never repair the shortages on a practical time scale.

Environmental protection and energy conservation, including energy efficiency, are essential for a sustainable earth. We may never reach full sustainability, but we certainly must try harder to come as close as we can.  My grandchildren and theirs .  ..   …