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

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