How did this victory happen? And can it be replicated?
, a media organization covering ecology, justice, and culture in the South, about the people who dedicated years to successfully busting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
While we’re building this huge project that’ll make your energy cheaper, we’ll provide thousands of jobs and in construction, and in general, it’ll be an economic boon for the areaAs the pipeline project grew more complicated, with construction delays and legal challenges, its costs ballooned. So the promise of cheap gas seemed like less and less of a sure thing.
One of the spots I went to in Virginia was Bath County, which has this place called Little Valley, which is this tiny narrow hollow with this creek running through it. I met this couple who had this land that had been in this woman’s family for hundreds of years. This pipeline was going to cut right across their property. I saw pieces of that throughout the whole route, these very small and significant attachments to the landscapes that people had because their families had grown up there.
It creates these divides that aren’t necessarily accurate. It doesn’t have to be a pipeline or nothing. It doesn’t have to be coal or nothing. But that’s the easy explanation people are given. When you have that combined with the fact that there are very few jobs and a lot of problems with a lack of hospitals, a lack of resources in general, no clean water—a lot of places like that make a project like this have more weight than you would imagine.
Gary had been fighting all this for a really long time and has been on TV and quoted in newspapers and has literally never stopped. He convinced Joyner to join in the fight for other issues in their community. Joyner created this local group and took on, like, every industrial project that has come through this area in the past several years. It’s especially significant in this area of North Carolina because the environmental justice movement started a country over.
So many of the papers along the route are weeklies, and a lot of them are very clearly pro-business, pro-industry. Without local news, you realize how easily the narrative of economic versus environmental can manifest. That’s how you get such big divides in a lot of these places.
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