On this episode, we talk about the 2018 battles we saw in court and on the ground to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile interstate natural gas line connecting the Marcellus Shale formation in northern Appalachia with lines in the Southeast U.S. We hear a segment from West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia involving Mason’s reporting on tree sits to block the line in April. We hear more reporting from over the summer with the Mountain Valley Watch, a group of citizen scientists monitoring pipeline construction. And we wrap up with a look at where the movement goes from here, via a visit by a former Virginia State Water Control Board member to the Bent Mountain community on Jan. 2, 2019.
https://blueridgefreestate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/brfs-new-year-pipeline.mp3
Mason’s interview with Brittany Patterson was first aired on Inside Appalachia, and later on West Virginia Morning.
For background, read Mason’s 2015 Roanoke Business story on the various pipeline proposals and his 2014 Grist story about how craft brewers were lining up against them.
The tree sits first went up on Peters Mountain, beside the Appalachian Trail near the Virginia/West Virginia line, in late February. In early April, a mother and daughter stationed themselves in trees on their land in Bent Mountain, and later that month, tree-sitters went up in Franklin County, to the east.
Mason’s first story on the tree sits appeared in Blue Ridge Outdoors in late April and covered what had happened up to that point. In early May, however, Red and Minor Terry, the mother-daughter pair on Bent Mountain, were forced down by a court order. Mason live-tweeted their descent and collected those tweets at Medium. Another story also was published by Blue Ridge Outdoors.
When Mason was writing that first story for Blue Ridge Outdoors, a guy said to me, “Those people are way too late. They should have been fighting it years ago.” Thing is, the pipeline opponents HAVE been fighting for years, and they’ve more or less done everything right along the way: Packing open houses, filing public comments that right time, activating opposition around assets such as the Appalachian Trail, collecting scientific data to refute the pipeline’s filings, etc.
So he wrote a story for Belt Magazine specifically for the Rust Belt, Appalachian & Midwestern communities that stand in the paths of more than 100 pipelines planned for the near future, many of them moving fracked natural gas from the Marcellus & Utica shale formations. What can they learn from the tree sits & the broader fight against the Mountain Valley Pipeline? Read that story here.
You can also read his story about the Mountain Valley Watch at Southeast Energy News.
If you want to hear more about the resistance to pipelines, listen to the End of the Line podcast.
And for more about Dihydrogen Monoxide, check out DHMO.org.
