Theresa Terry stayed in this “tree house” for three weeks protesting the MVP

From an Article by Mason Adams, Mother Jones Magazine, 5/25/20

“Life in these mountains ain’t always been easy, so people around here take a stand when they see something they don’t agree with—and I’m one of them,” says walrus-mustached Jammie Hale in his thick southwestern Virginia mountain accent. “People that grow up in places like this, seeing their environment destroyed, it stirs them, it causes people to want to get involved, and that’s why I’m here.”

In a documentary-style video produced by Unicorn Riot, a left-wing media collective, in 2018, Hale explains his decision to join a protest movement taking on the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile long, nearly 42-inch-wide pipeline intended to move natural gas from the fracking fields of northern West Virginia to a terminal in southern Virginia that connects to markets and export terminals on the East Coast.

Settled in among the hardwood trees on Peters Mountain, near where he’s been occupying an aerial platform with another (pseudonymous) activist known as Nutty, he talks of his family’s 150-plus years in Giles County, Virginia, and how that history motivates him to do all he can to prevent the pipeline from crossing the Appalachian Trail.

Yellow Finch, as the encampment has come to be called, is giving its full-time activists, most of whom are in their 20s, an on-the-ground education in Appalachian direct action. They’re learning how to talk to media, to establish and maintain a defensible blockade in the forest, and to survive a winter in the mountains, all in a region written off by much of the US as “Trump country.”

Less explored is the region’s significant history of activism that brought together outsiders and locals to resist corporate exploitation, from the labor organizing by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones on behalf of West Virginia miners in the 1910s and ’20s, to the Mountain Justice campaign against mountaintop removal coal mining a century later. Some veterans of the latter campaign are now working with the folks at Yellow Finch, applying lessons learned in the current fight against fossil fuels.

The camp lies at the base of the steep Blue Ridge Plateau; to reach it, you must drive carefully up a twisting mountain backroad and then back down a dirt road that follows a stream. Steep slopes rise up on either side, and the contrast between sides of the hollow stand as a testament to the activists’ success in delaying pipeline construction. On one side, the forest has been stripped bare, replanted with grass, and shored up with silt fences and green, mulch-stuffed fabric socks to prevent erosion. The other side of the hollow, home to the Yellow Finch encampment, remains wooded.

The camp is set about 50 yards up from the road, firmly planted into the hillside. A couple of hastily erected plywood buildings covered in handmade art and cardboard signs serve as a sleeping area and pantry. Tarps nailed to the side of the bunkhouse and nearby trees cover a makeshift kitchen, scattered with dishes, cooking gear, herbal tinctures, nutritional yeast, and other supplies.

The number of activists that call the camp home fluctuates with the weather and the need for additional people to sustain the camp. A 27-year-old activist called Gator fondly describes the camp’s occupants as “a bunch of badass queer anarchists that held it down for a long period of time.” They come from all over and vary in age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and family backgrounds, but they’re united in their desire to protect the mountains.

They found the camp through a variety of paths; several cut their teeth in other movements, organizing against the mining of frac sand, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mass incarceration, and police violence. They discovered Yellow Finch through word of mouth, on news sites popular with anarchists like It’s Going Down and Unicorn Riot, and Appalachians Against Pipelines, the campaign’s quasi-official Facebook page. Several came after seeing the video that featured Hale.

§ To be continued as Part 2.

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See also: Judge dismisses lawsuit that contested Mountain Valley’s power of eminent domain — Article by Laurence Hammack, Roanoke Times, May 14, 2020

Legal action has failed, once again, to undo the taking of private land for a natural gas pipeline through Southwest Virginia. “This case presents the latest trickle in a veritable flood of litigation” against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote in an opinion last week dismissing the lawsuit.

Three couples with land in the pipeline’s path had sued Mountain Valley and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, alleging that the commission should not have given a corporate venture the right to seize their property by eminent domain.

HOWEVER, LEGAL CASES HAVE RESULTED IN THE FOLLOWING:

Three sets of permits — for the pipeline to pass through the Jefferson National Forest, to cross hundreds of streams and wetlands, and to be built in a way that does not jeopardize endangered species — were set aside after lawsuits were filed by environmental groups.

Construction is currently stalled as Mountain Valley works to regain permits from a variety of federal agencies. Executives with EQM Midstream, the lead partner in a joint venture of five energy companies building the pipeline, said in a conference call Thursday that there was still a “narrow path” to their goal of completing the project by the end of the year.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the Living

“Labor Day recognizes the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, laws, and well-being of the country.”

Source: Wikipedia on the World Wide Web, September 3, 2018

Mary G. Harris Jones (baptized 1837; died 1930), known as Mother Jones, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent organized labor representative and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World.

Jones worked as a teacher and dressmaker, but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. From 1897, at about 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

Important achievements despite prison sentences

During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary Jones arrived in June 1912, speaking and organizing despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners. Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Jones was arrested on 13 February 1913 and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder among other charges, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. During house arrest at Mrs. Carney’s Boarding House, she acquired a dangerous case of pneumonia.

After 85 days of confinement, her release coincided with Indiana Senator John W. Kern’s initiation of a Senate investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. Mary Lee Settle describes Jones at this time in her 1978 novel The Scapegoat. Several months later, she helped organize coal miners in Colorado. Once again she was arrested, served some time in prison, and was escorted from the state in the months prior to the Ludlow Massacre. After the massacre, she was invited to meet face-to-face with the owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The meeting prompted Rockefeller to visit the Colorado mines and introduce long-sought reforms.

Mother Jones championed the laborers of West Virginia

From an Article by Alexander C. Kaufman, Mother Jones Magazine, August 17, 2018

Fracking companies used 770 percent more water per well in 2016 than in 2011 across all the United States’ major gas- and oil-producing regions, according to a new study.

The number of new fracking wells decreased as gas prices fell, but the amount of water used per well skyrocketed, with up to 1,440 percent more toxic wastewater generated in the first year of each new well’s production period by 2016.

The research, published Wednesday afternoon in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, raises new concerns that hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique used to extract oil and gas trapped deep in bedrock, imperils vital drinking water reserves.

In regions where the warming climate is drying sources of fresh water, fracking intensifies pressure on an already-strained system while increasing the availability of fuels that cause emissions, speeding up the rise in temperatures.

Fracking also produces huge volumes of wastewater laced with cancer-causing chemicals, salts and naturally-occurring radioactive material that can cause earthquakes and contaminate aquifers when pumped underground.

“We saw this dramatic rise in water use and wastewater,” Avner Vengosh, a co-author of the study and professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a phone interview. “They’re drilling much more.”

The study found that if gas and oil prices rise and production increases to the levels of the early 2010s, when fracking first took off, water use and wastewater production could multiply 50-fold for gas drilling and 20-fold for oil extraction by 2030. Even if future drilling rates stay at 2016 levels, the study predicts “a large increase of the total water use for both unconventional oil and shale gas basins,” with a surge in wastewater creation to match.

To conduct the analysis, the researchers compared well information from the US Energy Information Agency and state environmental and natural resource agencies to data collected by the services DrillingInfo and the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry. The data set covered six years and more than 12,000 individual wells.

Mounting research shows that rising fossil fuel emissions, which increase the temperature of the planet, pose grave risks to water supplies. Water levels in 21 of the world’s 47 largest known aquifers are trending negative, according to a 2015 study published by a group of NASA scientists in the journal Water Resources Research. Another NASA study, published in the journal Nature in May, found that California alone lost four gigatons of water from 2007 to 2015.

The demand for water, driven largely by agriculture, is on pace to increase by 55 percent globally between 2000 and 2050. Food production already accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawals around the world, but, by some estimates, farmers need to increase water use by 69 percent to feed the total global population by the year 2035.

“At a time when large parts of our county are suffering through persistent droughts and year-round fire seasons, it’s truly unconscionable that the fossil fuel industry would be allowed to divert vast volumes of water to fracking for oil and gas,” Seth Gladstone, a spokesman for the environmental group Food & Water Watch, said in an email. “The fact that the burning of this oil and gas is driving our climate chaos and intensifying the droughts and fires makes this reality all the more shameful and absurd.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby, declined to comment on the findings of the study before it was released, stating that it would review the details of the report. But, in an email, spokesman Reid Porter said the industry focuses on “reclaiming and practical reuse of waste, using treatments that reduce the waste produced, thereby reducing the amounts that have to be disposed.”

Despite oil and gas industry pushback, other research shows wastewater can contaminate drinking water. In April 2016, former Environmental Protection Agency scientist Dominic DiGiulio concluded that methanol, a chemical that causes permanent nerve damage and blindness, seeped from unlined pits holding fracking wastewater into a massive aquifer in Wyoming.

The EPA later found diesel and benzene, a carcinogen, in wells near the water reserve, but held off on linking the contaminants to fracking, which the Obama administration touted for increasing natural gas production and reducing the nation’s reliance on carbon dioxide-spewing coal.

In December 2016, the EPA issued a landmark finding that fracking can contaminate water.

But the agency failed to put any regulations in place to establish a national standard for addressing the issue before President Donald Trump took office, installing former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man with brazenly public ties to the oil and gas industry, as EPA administrator. Almost immediately after the Senate confirmed his nomination, Pruitt began eliminating regulations on the fracking industry.

“We don’t have a national policy, and each state will have different ways of dealing with [fracking],” study co-author Vengosh said. “Given that there’s no uniform regulation in the US, and the weakening of the EPA to have no say in anything these days, that could be a problem.”

Fracking isn’t the only source of contaminants putting stress on water systems. The study comes amid rising concerns over perfluorinated chemicals, including compounds used in firefighting foam and nonstick Teflon, in water sources across the country.

A growing number of states are setting strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemicals, which remain in the water for decades. But the EPA has yet to regulate perfluorinated chemicals―and went as far as to suppress a federal report that recommended lowering the maximum limit by nearly seven times the current standard.