​We four grannies deployed before dawn on a road near the Mountain Valley pipeline right-of-way across the Greenbrier River, each with one foot inside a concrete barrel, sitting in our famous rocking chairs, holding a banner that said, Rocking Chair Rebellion. Ahead of us was another rocker holding a sign in bold red letters, STOP ELDERS AHEAD, so cars coming our way would have plenty of notice to stop. Another two women locked down to the drill that was preparing to bore under the Greenbrier – a beautiful river I’d walked along last year as part of the Walk for Appalachia’s Future that, at 162 miles, is the longest undammed river in the eastern U.S.

As the sky lightened, we noticed a big stretch of beautiful white, pink and yellow wildflowers on the other side of the railroad tracks. The fog that covers the valleys here was ethereal.

We stopped work for a total of five hours, and were charged with trespassing, obstructing an officer, and violating West Virginia’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which had just gone into effect. All misdemeanors, although the cops said we’d be charged with domestic terrorism felonies if we didn’t leave, and that was a possibility. These new laws in many states around the country are meant to intimidate folks from taking action to protect the real critical infrastructure – the pure, delicious drinking water, clean air and beautiful mountains. The MVP is being built across the steepest terrain in the country, threatening landslides. Thanks to the blog Heated, I learned that a  peer-reviewed study in 2021 found that the MVP has the highest landslide risk out of all the long-distance gas pipelines in the U.S. ​

And then there is the karst, which makes the river one of the worst possible places to drill. From Wikipedia: "The unique karstlands of the Greenbrier River Valley constitute one of the world's densest sinkhole plains, with an average of 18 sinkholes per square kilometer. This green "moonscape" of collapsed craters is a unique problem for development as the ground is prone to subsidization. It is impossible to tell how large a cave system is by looking at the surface, and developers often build their structures too close to the open spaces beneath the ground."

There’s also a big problem with the coating on the pipes having deteriorated after they sat in the sun for five or six years. Best practice is to recoat them at the factory, but the company is just burying some of them without recoating at all, increasing the risk of ruptures and explosions.

So, building the pipeline is the real crime, and could only finally go forward when the US Congress, at Sen. Joe Manchin’s bidding (with full backing from Sen. Chuck Schumer and President Biden), took the matter out of the hands of the Fourth Circuit appeals court (which had consistently ruled against the MVP, for its many violations). Then the US Supreme Court approved all the remaining permits.

The cops complimented us on our creativity, and after arresting us and tossing rocking chairs and red umbrellas (decorated with NO MVP signage) aside, they chuckled over the STOP ELDERS AHEAD sign and threw it into their truck. I’m sure it’s gracing the wall of some police department.

An action a few days earlier saw two more activists – a young person and an elder – lock down to MVP machinery in nearby Montgomery County, VA. We held a rally at the site with a big banner proclaiming, “Young and old unite – No MVP.” They were also charged with misdemeanors.

When the sheriff arrived at our action, he said we should leave because, “You have zero chance of stopping this pipeline. There’s too much money behind it and the country is too divided.”

What is the role of nonviolent direct action (NVDA) in campaigns to stop the fossil infrastructure that’s killing the planet and ruining the lives and livelihoods of local residents? I had that question before heading down to Appalachia. I think it’s a dance between the occupiers – like the Yellow Finch aerial blockade of the pipeline route that lasted 932 days and, according to the company, cost $213,000 in delays and security expenses – and the surveyors who document every violation along the route, and the legal defenders who fight for our rights in court. Also all the local people who hate this pipeline and come out to support in various ways.

One local woman told me we have to keep disrupting because we can’t just let it be built without doing everything in our power, nonviolently, to stop it. Another friend said it’s important to show solidarity with those on the front lines, and by doing that we build the power needed for the next fight. Sitting on the wide porch, looking out over the beautiful mountains, the fog and the nighttime stars, I felt very much a part of a wonderful community where people love and support each other. Also, I haven’t laughed so much maybe ever. It gives us the strength to go on.

​We four grannies deployed before dawn on a road near the Mountain Valley pipeline right-of-way across the Greenbrier River, each with one foot inside a concrete barrel, sitting in our famous rocking chairs, holding a banner that said, Rocking Chair Rebellion. Ahead of us was another rocker holding a sign in bold red letters, STOP ELDERS AHEAD, so cars coming our way would have plenty of notice to stop. Another two women locked down to the drill that was preparing to bore under the Greenbrier – a beautiful river I’d walked along last year as part of the Walk for Appalachia’s Future that, at 162 miles, is the longest undammed river in the eastern U.S.

As the sky lightened, we noticed a big stretch of beautiful white, pink and yellow wildflowers on the other side of the railroad tracks. The fog that covers the valleys here was ethereal.

We stopped work for a total of five hours, and were charged with trespassing, obstructing an officer, and violating West Virginia’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which had just gone into effect. All misdemeanors, although the cops said we’d be charged with domestic terrorism felonies if we didn’t leave, and that was a possibility. These new laws in many states around the country are meant to intimidate folks from taking action to protect the real critical infrastructure – the pure, delicious drinking water, clean air and stable land. The MVP is being built across the steepest mountains in the country, threatening landslides. And then there is the karst, which make the river one of the worst possible places to drill.  

From Wikipedia: The unique karstlands of the Greenbrier River Valley constitute one of the world's densest sinkhole plains, with an average of 18 sinkholes per square kilometer. This green "moonscape" of collapsed craters is a unique problem for development as the ground is prone to subsidization. It is impossible to tell how large a cave system is by looking at the surface, and developers often build their structures too close to the open spaces beneath the ground.

There’s also a big problem with the coating on the pipes having deteriorated after they sat in the sun for five or six years. Best practice is to recoat them at the factory, but the company is just burying them without recoating at all, increasing the risk of ruptures and explosions.

So, building the pipeline is the real crime, and could only finally go forward when the US Congress, at Sen. Joe Manchin’s bidding (with full backing from Sen. Chuck Schumer and President Biden), took the matter out of the hands of the Fourth Circuit appeals court (which had consistently ruled against the MVP, for its many violations). Then the US Supreme Court threw out existing court challenges.

The cops complimented us on our creativity, and after arresting us and tossing rocking chairs and red umbrellas (decorated with NO MVP signage) aside, they chuckled over the STOP ELDERS AHEAD sign and threw it into their truck. I’m sure it’s gracing the wall of some police department.

An action a few days earlier saw two more activists – a young person and an elder – lock down to MVP machinery in nearby Montgomery County, VA. We held a rally at the site with a big banner proclaiming, “Young and old unite – No MVP.” They were also charged with misdemeanors.

When the sheriff arrived at our action, he said we should leave because, “You have zero chance of stopping this pipeline. There’s too much money behind it and the country is too divided.”

What is the role of nonviolent direct action (NVDA) in campaigns to stop the fossil infrastructure that’s killing the planet and ruining the lives and livelihoods of local residents? I had that question before heading down to Appalachia. After all, it’s the court fights that seem to make the biggest difference – although companies also just ignore inconvenient court rulings like that against the Dakota Access pipeline, where a federal judge ordered the oil to stop flowing until an Environmental Impact Statement was approved, but it’s still operating.
​
One local woman told me we have to keep disrupting because we can’t just let it be built without doing everything in our power, nonviolently, to stop it. Another friend said it’s important to show solidarity with those on the front lines, and by doing that we build the power needed for the next fight. Sitting on the wide porch, looking out over the beautiful mountains, the fog and the nighttime stars, I felt very much a part of a beautiful community where people love and support each other. Also, I haven’t laughed so much maybe ever. It gives us the strength to go on.

​UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is my favorite diplomat, even though – or really because – he’s not very diplomatic. He’s been calling out countries and corporations for years for ignoring the climate crisis, declaring after the world’s hottest week in July, that “Climate change is out of control. If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation.” Last year he declared new funding for fossil fuel exploration “delusional,” and said, “Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future.”

Guterres is sponsoring a “climate ambition summit” Sept. 20, where a country’s price of admission is a commitment to cease approving new fossil fuel projects. I’m not sure how many countries could qualify – certainly not the United States, where the Biden administration has been greenlighted major new fossil fuel projects, including, most recently, two huge gas and oil projects in Alaska and the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline (MVP) through West Virginia and southwestern Virginia, and possibly North Carolina. (Photo above is of an MVP resister locked down to a huge piece of heavy equipment on Aug. 25. See their quote below.) The Arctic is heating up four times faster than the Earth as a whole, and the oil companies are going to have to refreeze the melting permafrost to even try to carry out their Alaska projects. The MVP project is blasting through some of the steepest, most unstable terrain in the country, inviting landslides and contamination of some of the purest water in the world.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Biden, and his energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, went to bat for the MVP and made sure completing it was a requirement included in Section 324 of the debt ceiling bill (the Financial Responsibility Act) passed in early June. It gave a 21-day deadline for all approvals to be granted, and said any appeals would be transferred from the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, VA – which had issued several rulings against the project and in defense of our bedrock environmental laws – to the DC Circuit Court. The truth is, the MVP can’t be built without breaking these laws. The 4th Circuit had been considering two appeals, but just threw in the towel on Aug. 11, saying the inclusion of Section 324 tied the court’s hands. One of the judges, Roger Gregory, wrote:

“…Section 324 is a blueprint for construction of a natural gas pipeline by legislative fiat. If that provision is likewise constitutionally sanctioned, the Congress will have found a way to adjudicate by legislating for particular cases and for particular litigants, no different than the governmental excesses our Framers sought to avoid. For that reason, I fear Congress has employed this Court’s constitutionally directed deference to legislative prerogatives to undermine the Constitution and in the process, it has made the Court an accessory to its deeds. If that is so, I wonder if Section 324 is a harbinger of erosion not just to the environment, but to our republic.”

The sad fact is that despite the support for renewable energy in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden is in essence an all-of-the-above energy promoter, just as Obama was before him, even though the climate crisis is so much worse now.

Tens of thousands of people will gather Sept. 17, before the summit, for a March to End Fossil Fuels and to demand that Pres. Biden declare a climate emergency, which would open the door to his taking emergency executive actions. The Center for Biological Diversity outlines five such actions: reinstate the ban on crude oil exports; end oil and gas drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf; restrict international trade and private investment in fossil fuels; grow domestic manufacturing for clean energy and transportation to speed the nationwide transition off fossil fuels; and build resilient and distributed renewable energy systems in climate-vulnerable communities.

Ever since I covered the obscenity of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia starting in 2009 – a process literally blowing the tops off the mountains to access the coal seams beneath – I have felt a deep connection to the land and the people of southern Appalachia. I walked/drove along the 302-mile MVP pipeline route last year as part of the Walk for Appalachia’s Future, and participated in several protests in DC. The fight to stop the MVP, the Alaska projects, and other fossil fuel projects will be a critical part of the march on Sept. 17. We need to End Fossil Fuels to keep rising sea levels from washing over our Connecticut shoreline, to keep heat waves and flooding due to heavy rainfall from getting even worse, and to keep ever more intense wildfires, whether far away, like in Hawaii, or near, from polluting our air. All are symptoms of our localized climate crisis.

For more info visit https://www.endfossilfuels.us/

Quote from pipeline fighter above and below: “I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I came in as a friend, an ally from another state with no concrete connection to this fight. But you can’t spend time here without falling in love with the people and the place. You can’t come here and ignore the pain that this pipeline has caused. Ponds have dried up, livestock have died, family lands have been abandoned because people can’t look out their windows without being reminded of the destruction being forced on them by corporations and politicians that don’t care if they live or die. Without wondering if today’s the day that the pipe blows and turns their family to ash. Appalachians have been fighting this pipeline since day one and will keep fighting until it’s stopped for good. Doom to the pipeline."

​

The contradictions are heightening.

After the debt ceiling bill included the requirement to complete the fracked gas Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – when it couldn’t be built legally – several hundred of us gathered outside the White House on June 8 to raise our voices against the ecocide the Biden administration is overseeing. Several dozen of us risked arrest, with 20 of us elders and youth tied together with bandanas and scarves while sitting in rocking chairs (a continuation of the Rocking Chair Rebellion initiated by Beyond Extreme Energy and expanded by Third Act, two groups of mostly elders).

We had to raise our voices through our KN95 masks, since the air quality in Washington, D.C. was hazardous from all the climate change-impacted wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada. We all thought that would be a perfect day for Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and use his executive authority to DO something positive for the climate instead of all the horrible, destructive actions he’s taken lately to worsen the climate crisis, like approving the MVP, the Willow Project in Alaska (the largest oil drilling project ever on federal public lands) and a huge LNG project in Alaska (involving 870 miles of pipelines, a gas treatment plant and a huge liquefaction facility) – when the Arctic is already warming four times faster than the planet as a whole.

For example, Biden could halt crude oil exports, end offshore drilling and stop hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment in fossil fuel projects abroad. More ideas here from the Center for Biological Diversity.
 
I was happy to be tied to Rylee Haught, a militant 24-year-old from West Virginia, who is passionate about stopping the MVP but perhaps equally passionate about stopping all fossil fuel development. She’s part of the youth-led group Climate Defiance, which, though less than a year old, has been generating headlines not only in the progressive media but in the NYT, Washington Post and many other mainstream outlets for their very loud and angry but nonviolent confrontations with Biden administration energy officials (and Biden himself at one protest). Clarification: they are non-violent, but they are often roughed up by the protectors of the status quo. Case in point: a protest against Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in Michigan in mid-June.  These young people (and at least one older person) were disgusted by Granholm saying, “People are dying (due to the climate crisis). I’d be out there with them (protesters)…on the other hand…”

Here's a video clip of what happened.
And here’s the link to donate to them, which I just did and encourage you to do:

Here is a link to a 15-minute compilation of highlights from our June 8 action at the White House; and here’s a link to my Between the Lines segment featuring 5-1/2 minutes of the speech by Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, representing the environmental justice district of Detroit, MI, as she risked arrest with us.

 In the end, nobody was arrested.

And here’s a link to this week’s Between the Lines segment, an interview with one of the leaders of the Climate Justice Alliance, representing 70 grassroots climate/enviro groups, about another poison pill in the debt ceiling bill: the so-called “permitting reform” that is reducing the impact that ordinary people can have on proposed projects that would directly affect them through the National Environmental Policy Act.

​





​There it is in black and white, in the text of the debt ceiling agreement between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy: a whole section [p. 95] on pushing the Mountain Valley pipeline to completion, overriding the well-reasoned decisions of government regulatory agencies and courts, not to mention the dogged, passionate opposition of residents along the 302-mile route of this fracked gas pipeline. If completed, it would bring up to two billion cubic feet per day of fracked gas from northern West Virginia through that state and Virginia, making a mockery of Biden's claim to be the Climate President.

Natalie Cox, a spokesperson for the Mountain Valley project, said Monday that developers are “grateful for the full support of the White House, as well as the strong leadership of Democratic and Republican legislators for recognizing the Mountain Valley Pipeline as a critical energy infrastructure project.” She's got that right.

I’m devoting the rest of my post to my friend and MVP fighter from VA, Deborah Kushner, who sent out this post after the debt ceiling deal was released. See the action items at the end so you can help turn back this travesty:

“Some of you have had the good fortune to have visited Southwest VA and WV [I have! MT], to meet and stand with the amazing scrappy and stoic people who live there. Some of you have witnessed the cruel devastation wrought on that stunning landscape by the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which for 9 years has laid waste to the region. Land has been seized through eminent domain, ancient aquifers have been fouled, sole water sources for communities have dried up or been polluted, public roads have been buried under 9” of mud because of inadequate ‘erosion control devices,’ construction has caused landslides that have threatened more than one home, pipe sections have floated downstream after heavy rains. Many sections of pipe still sit above ground, exposed to the elements for years, consistently corroding, years past the pipe manufacturer’s recommended time limit for exposure to UV rays. Unique perched aquifers have been damaged. Endangered species’ habitat has been compromised. The list of harms goes on and on…

"For years, this unneeded, unwanted, dangerous project has been stalled with court challenges and revoked permits, but now it’s being fast-tracked – leaping over judicial lawsuits, environmental reviews, and permitting processes in a desperate attempt to complete the project so that it can yearly add the equivalent of 19 million passenger cars and lock us into decades more fossil fuel consumption. And so greedy petro barons like WV Sen. Joe Manchin can profit from this archaic industry that is killing the planet and all life.

"On June 8 at 2pm, your friends and neighbors will gather at the White House to demand an alteration to our government’s crash course towards planetary annihilation.
The fight for a livable present and future is here and now. Stands are being taken across the globe to sever the oil and gas/ government/ financial industry connections. This particular fight is at our doorstep. These are our neighbors who we must protect. This is our planet that we are fighting for. [I'll be there. Contact me for more info if you can join me. MT]

"These wrongs won’t be corrected overnight, and the powers that be are well dug in. They won’t give up easily, so we must be unrelenting in our demands. Numbers count. This is the work we’re here for. See you there. We’ll be in excellent company in this most worthy of fights.

The important thing is to continue to show up and speak out. Don’t agonize, organize! It will take all of us – see you out there!”

Other Actions to Take (Thanks to POWHR, Appalachian Voices, and others):

• Make a call to House members before Wednesday - MAY 31 - to tell them to reject the Dirty Debt Ceiling Deal – we need a clean debt ceiling bill! 
• VA Sen. Tim Kaine is proposing an amendment that will strip out MVP approval from the bill. Send an email to your senators to ask them to demand a clean debt ceiling bill!
• Post on Social Media – hold elected officials accountable 

Plan to be in SWVA should MVP construction start

• Train to be a Legal Observer by signing up here: appalachianjustice@nlg.org. Virtual training will be held over 2 days, June 1 & June 4 at 6:30 pm. Please email if you want to sign up and welcome others. In-person training will take place in Montgomery County and Bent Mountain /Floyd in July and August. Actual dates /times for in-person training is still tbd. 

 

• Volunteer with Mountain Valley Watch to monitor construction for violations here (can be done virtually or in person):  Sign up to learn more here! 

You could say the biggest global banks are guilty of mass murder. Their investments in fossil fuel development continue and their profits have soared beyond belief since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, fossil-fueled climate chaos and attendant human and ecosystem destruction is ramping up at a terrifying pace.

The newest report from Rainforest Action Network and other groups, Banking on Climate Chaos 2023, just came out with a lot of discouraging data. (Click here for a link to the report and an interview with the lead researcher.)  But it also provides fodder for the resistance.

On March 21 I was with hundreds of elders and others at the flagship Rocking Chair Rebellion in DC, which focused on the four biggest U.S. banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America – with a 24-hour rocking chair sit-in, followed by a rally, followed by a march past branches of all four banks, followed by a massive protest outside two of the banks, which ended before anyone was arrested. Click here and here for three brief but fiery speeches from the rally. 

Actions took place in more than a hundred cities around the U.S., all initiated by a one-year-old organization for those over 60, called Th!rd Act, in alliance with faith communities, labor, environmental groups and more.

The next day, 10 of us from Th!rd Act and Beyond Extreme Energy went back to the Chase bank, sat in a circle on the comfortable rug in the lobby, and read an indictment of Chase as the worst offender in funding fossil fuels. (It was taken over just this year by a Canadian bank, but historically Chase is by far the biggest investor in dirty energy.) We sang classic songs with new lyrics, read the Washington Post story in that day’s paper about the latest and scariest report from the IPCC (the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and when the staff asked us to leave, we said we’d leave when Chase stops its dirty investments. (10-minute video here). The cops came and arrested us, and we spent 10 hours in a D.C. lockup before being charged with unlawful entry (a silly charge since the bank was open when we entered) and given a court date a few weeks hence.

Before that day arrived, charges were dropped, leaving us free to pursue other criminal banksters, like Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, which all had their annual shareholder meetings in late April, in New York, San Francisco and Charlotte, NC, respectively. There were lively, creative nonviolent direct actions at all of them, perhaps the most impressive being at the Wells Fargo headquarters, where activists unfurled a huge banner from atop the building and shut the whole thing down. I was at Citi Plaza in NYC, where we held a fun rally the day before the shareholders’ meeting, and several small groups spray-chalked “No new oil” and “Climate Criminal” on the banks’ windows. (It looks like paint but washes right off.)

It was disappointing to hear that support for decarbonizing the banks’ investments actually went down from last year. I don’t understand how these people think. When we were flyering the thousands of Citi employees leaving their fancy high-rise, about 1 in every 8 took a flyer; almost all of them were polite even as they declined; a few of them “wished us luck,” whatever that means; one responded, “I’m Canadian” – sorry, see bank reference above; and one yelled at me, “You effing people don’t have a clue!” I asked him what his clue was, but he didn’t answer. 

Luckily, people are taking bold, creative actions all over the world, especially young people, and now elders in an organized way.  Things look very bad, but it's worth it to keep fighting if it saves just one person from dying from climate disaster.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.                      Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

I was part of the Rocking Chair Rebellion, a group of 10 elders (and one young supporter) who traveled to Atlanta during the Week of Action Against Cop City, when the local opposition to a militarized police training facility called for support against an increasingly violent police response and increasingly heavy-handed legal ramifications. Forest defender Tortuguita was killed by police on Jan. 18 (see my previous post here), and 19 protesters had already been charged with domestic terrorism – a felony calling for up to 35 years in prison – when the specific “crimes” they’d been charged with were no more than trespassing or sitting in trees.

When we gathered Sunday evening at our AirBnB to finalize our plans, we didn’t know that police at that very hour had again raided the forest while a music festival was going on with hundreds of attendees, including children. The raid was apparently in response to a smaller group of camouflaged protesters who destroyed some equipment and threw projectiles at the police at another site in the forest; 23 more people were charged with domestic terrorism, most of whom had nothing to do with that action. Since almost all the arrestees are from out of state, they were denied bail because they have “no local ties,” even though local organizers had invited people to come down to be in solidarity.

The next day, Monday, we visited the Atlanta headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, the general contractor for Cop City, and five of its other construction sites around Atlanta. We held banners, passed out flyers and otherwise let the company know that we want to  Stop Cop City and Let Atlanta Breathe. (That's me in  photo below, holding the left banner, wearing a hard hat.) Our main purpose was to show that it’s not just young people who are opposed to this project, whose official name is the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Plans include shooting ranges, roads for high-speed chases, a mock town to practice urban warfare, and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, all to be built on 85 acres in the middle of the South Atlanta Forest, that was the former site of a prison farm and was land the Muscogee Creek indigenous residents called Weelaunee before they were expelled almost 200 years ago on the Trail of Tears. A group of Muscogee arrived from Oklahoma on Wednesday to deliver an expulsion order to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and demand that the land be returned to them.

Our flyers said Cop City would increase the use of militarized policing of the already overpoliced Black and brown neighborhoods adjacent to the site; destroy acres of trees, which are badly needed to reduce the flooding that already occurs in local communities, to clean the air where residents already suffer from high asthma rates, and to reduce the urban heat island effect; exacerbate climate change, and greatly increase noise and particulate pollution. We added that Nature has its own right to exist, and provides beauty and tranquility for humans and other living things; and that the City of Atlanta could find much better uses for the $30 million it has promised toward building this $90 million facility, like funding non-police responses to improve security and improving health care for its most at-risk residents.

Our efforts reached thousands of motorists, pedestrians and construction workers with information about the project, and we were only threatened with arrest once. We felt like it was a small but useful contribution.

The majority of our group departed on Tuesday, but I stuck around with a few others to participate in two actions in downtown Atlanta. One was a march to various corporate supporters of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), which is the private entity behind Cop City, investing $60 million into the project.

There were fewer than a hundred marchers, and it seemed like more cops than protesters. They were decked out in riot gear, many carrying long guns, some of which were loaded with pepper balls. They had an honest-to-god tank parked nearby. They seemed to be on all sides of us and were very intimidating; we were afraid of getting kettled and arrested (and who knows what else). I couldn’t afford to get arrested just then due to an important upcoming commitment, so I peeled off and kept a little distance, when I ran into some young people who had done the same. Then I had some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about being in the movement. They asked me how I decided what level of risk to take, and I found myself telling them that elders – who are retired, have no kids or parents to care for, and don’t have to worry about a criminal record getting them fired from a job or unable to get a job – have the least to lose but often are more conservative than the young ones who have everything to lose. They are leading with their anger and their love and we must support them!

Later that day we finally got to see the forest. We got a tour from someone staying there, and walked among dozens of tents where young people had re-occupied the forest after everyone had been cleared out on Sunday. There were cooking and washing stations and lots of literature available at the welcome table in the parking lot. It was a beautiful day and the forest was lovely and serene.

Although 70 percent of the people who testified at a 17-hour public hearing two years ago were against Cop City, it’s unclear to me how that translates to the general population; most of the people we encountered said they knew nothing about the actual plan, and a few were in support.

In addition to Cop City, there is a plan to consume many more acres of forest to build a film production studio. All this construction would be in direct contradiction to a plan adopted about six years ago to conserve the forest – called the fourth lung of Atlanta – as passive recreational space, where the trees would not only clean the air for a mostly Black neighborhood adjacent to it where families already suffer high rates of asthma, but reduce flooding and help mitigate climate change. By the way, the weather was unseasonably warm while we were there, with highs in early March around 80 on Monday and Tuesday.

Stop Cop Stop is a leaderless – or leader-full – movement promoting independent action and diversity of tactics. The mantra is, Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and don’t criticize what others do. That was crystalized for me when I met a young woman who’d been at the music festival Sunday night. “We weren’t expecting” the police response, she said. I said something like, “I guess only the people destroying the equipment expected it,” and she responded, completely non-judgmentally, “We may have different approaches, but we all have the same goal.”

Opponents of Cop City posit that this type of militant action likely caused the first general contractor (before Brasfield & Gorrie) to quit, and has kept the project from moving forward so far in any significant way. They may very well be right.

I met a lot of brave young people and local, especially African American, residents who are defending the forest and calling for the end of Cop City as if their lives depend on it. In some ways, they do -- it's the campaigns against environmental racism, police abuse and climate change all in one package. We can learn a lot from what feels like a watershed struggle for environmental, climate and racial justice.

Click here, here, and here  for past interviews and background about Stop Cop City, including one from the Week of Action, and here for an update on Tortuguita's killing after an independent autopsy showed he was likely in a cross-legged sitting position with his hands raised when he was shot. The press conference featuring their parents, brother and the family's attorneys starts around 6:30 in the video. Visit here to learn more and take action: donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, email or call local politicians and the corporations funding the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Here I am ready for a bike ride in my t-shirt and shorts on February 16, when we broke not just the daily record, but the monthly record, for the high temperature. It was 68 degrees.

But it wasn’t just one day. Since December there have been just a handful of what we used to call “normal” weather days, which included cold, some snow, some ice. This year the overnight temps rarely dropped below 30 degrees, and daytime temps were almost always in the 40s, and 50s, sometimes 60s.

Twenty years ago, a climate change study in Connecticut predicted we’d have a climate like North Carolina’s by 2050 if we didn’t take action to reduce global heating. It’s here now, folks.

As a Buffalo native, I think snow is normal in winter and I actually love snow, as long as it’s fluffy. It’s great for cross-country skiing and nothing could be prettier to look out on while cozily ensconced in a warm home.

I am aware that many people don’t have a warm home – or any home – and I would say this non-winter winter has been a blessing for them. And I see many advantages myself. As an elder, I haven’t had to be super-careful about slipping on the ice, since there hasn’t been any. It sure makes winter biking easy and enjoyable, since the bane of my winter cycling has always been a nose that won’t stop running and is hard to address while wearing a balaclava. And really – what’s not to like about a beautiful warm day?

I try to appreciate the lovely weather as it comes and not think too much about what it portends for the summer. Last summer was hideous – with at least a six-week-long heat wave from mid-July through August (and maybe September, it’s hard to remember). I can only guess that the steady warming of our Connecticut climate will bring the same or worse this year.

I find it infuriating and depressing that none of the meteorologists on TV and even the local NPR station ever breathe the words “climate change” or “global heating.” They’ll laugh and say it’s another above normal day, but never an explanation of this very clear trend.

I interviewed a Congressional candidate last year who had worked as a TV meteorologist for an Illinois station for 20 years – and talked about climate change. He made the connections to people’s lives, like how the hotter, drier weather – punctuated by heavier rainstorms – affected farming in the region. He said he was in the first class of TV meteorologists who was trained by Climate Matters in the Newsroom, now called Climate Central. Here’s a link to the audio and transcription on Between the Lines. I sent a note to my local TV station encouraging them to get with the program. I’ll let you know if anything happens.
 
 

What can you say about a young activist killed by police while trying to stop the destruction of an urban forest for the construction of a militarized police training facility to practice urban warfare? It marks an escalation of repression against the environmental justice/climate movement in the U.S. of the kind more commonly associated with Brazil or Mexico. It has prompted rallies and vigils around the country, including in Connecticut.

On January 18, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, 26, who took the forest name Tortuguita (“Little Turtle”) or Tort, was shot by police who were raiding various camps and tree sits in the forest that comprised the movement to Stop Cop City. The official police story – amplified by the mass media, the mayor and Governor Brian Kemp – is that someone shot first at the officers, injuring one, and the police returned fire. They said no camera footage is available, and they didn’t produce a gun for several days that they now say was bought legally by Paez Terán. They have also told conflicting versions of what happened. In one version police say they surrounded the tent while Tort was inside, leading to speculation that the officer was injured by friendly fire.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, a private entity, got permission from the city to build an actual town on 100 acres of forest, the better to practice urban policing. Not just activists, but local residents from the neighboring part of the city, which is majority people of color and lower income, oppose the project. Part of the forest is a public park, used by people on a daily basis.

From mid-December until mid-January, a total of 19 people have been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism,” but the putative actions by the protesters that prompted the charges have not been specified. For most, their only crime was trespassing, a misdemeanor. The raids on the forest defenders have been carried out by an almost unprecedented collaboration of local, county, state and federal authorities, including the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The opposition to Cop City – focused on racial and environmental injustice and climate concerns – has been militant and decentralized, with some people carrying out sabotage of heavy machinery and focusing their ire on the CEOs of companies participating in or funding the project. Some consider destruction of property violence, while others don’t, but it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of killing another human being. Tortuguita (who used they/them pronouns) declared on several occasions to reporter David Peisner their commitment to non-violence, if not as a belief system at least as a strategy: “The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win. We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win. We don’t want more people to die. We don’t want Atlanta to turn into a war zone.” I urge everyone to check out the full story by Peisner in The Bitter Southerner. 

Peisner even speculated that Tort might have been telling him what he wanted to hear about nonviolence, but concluded they were most likely sincere, based on how they lived their life. They were a trained medic and volunteered with Food Not Bombs. I have met countless young people engaged in frontline fights around the country who remind me of Tort: smart, extremely brave, loving, mostly anarchists and committed to nonviolence.

A week before Tortuguita was killed, I interviewed a local resident who has been active in the fight to Stop Cop City. I spoke to her again after their death, and she said, “Folks who live here are incredibly grateful for all the support we’ve gotten – vigils, donations to a memorial fund, notes of condolence; donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and some people have traveled to Atlanta to stand in solidarity. We are continuing to push because police and politicians are out of control. We’re calling for an independent investigation that does not include law enforcement.” Click here to help.  

Tortuguita’s mother hopes to travel to the U.S. from her home in Panama to pursue justice for her son.

Anyone in Connecticut who wants to work on this issue can sign up for a zoom meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 31. 
 

Remember the Keystone XL pipeline fight? After more than 10 years of struggle that involved thousands of people and all kinds of tactics,  including a lot of non-violent direct actions at critical points directed at critical targets; the creation of the CIA – the Cowboys and Indians Alliance fighting together on the Great Plains to stop the Black Snake; and the involvement of a myriad of climate orgs, it finally died when President Joe Biden made cancellation of the State Department approval for it to cross the Canada-US border one of his very first actions in office, back in January, 2021.

But there was already an existing Keystone pipeline, running from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Oklahoma. It has leaked more than a dozen times since becoming operational in 2010, and on Dec. 7 the biggest leak to date occurred, spilling 588,000 gallons – almost enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool – onto the Kansas soil.

We fought the Line 3 pipeline in more recent years – another Black Snake, this one running from the Alberta tar sands to Wisconsin, across the entire state of Minnesota and its indigenous wild rice lakes. It became operational in October 2021, just five months after our affinity group, the Mayflies, blocked two entrances to the Enbridge man camp for pipeline workers for part of one day. The pipeline immediately started spilling drilling fluids into the pristine waters of northern Minnesota. And I just learned while researching this post that the original Line 3 leaked 1.7 million gallons of crude oil on March 3, 1991. There have also been leaks along the infamous Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), which has been operating illegally for the past two years in violation of a court order requiring the company to do a full Environmental Impact Statement. Which, of course, should have been done BEFORE construction.

Those of us fighting fossil pipelines always say it’s a matter of when, not if, a pipeline will leak, or in the case of gas, maybe explode.

On the brighter side, I want to mention some of the successes we’ve had in the past several years, and the amazing people who made success possible.

In 2016, six members of Beyond Extreme Energy from as far away as North Carolina arrived in cold, snowy western Massachusetts for the Martin Luther King Day weekend walk against the Northeast Energy Direct (NED) gas pipeline proposed by Kinder Morgan. Boy was it cold! With the wind chill on the third day the temperature was 6 degrees. But our hearts were warmed by the amazing people we met, including several “raging Grannies” who helped power the walk by singing old tunes with fresh lyrics. We were fed and housed along the walk, and you can imagine how delicious a hot meal was when we came in from the cold. We made a few good friends on that walk that we’ve continued to work with. Oh, and the pipeline was cancelled!
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Some of us did another walk in March 2017 across eastern North Carolina to oppose the 600-mile Atlantic Coast fracked gas pipeline (ACP) that was planned to cross West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, possibly extending to an LNG (liquefied “natural” gas) export terminal in South Carolina. While not as cold as Massachusetts, it was still chilly for camping, so we camped inside many of the days. It was organized by APPPL, the NC Alliance to Protect the People and the Places We Live, and included my friends from western NC as well as powerful African American and indigenous leaders from the poorer eastern part of the state, which is where the pipeline was scheduled to be built, after the whiter, wealthier residents of the central part of the state objected to the original path through their communities. Nothing new there.

There was also very effective organizing against the ACP by a coalition in WV and VA called ABRA, the Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance. All that organizing paid off when the company trying to build the pipeline pulled the plug in July 2020.

And we have stopped Sen. Joe Manchin's dirty deal three times in Congress, and we will stop the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP)!

So we end the year with some wins and some losses (coal use reached an all-time high this year), keeping in mind and heart the long view – that we do as much as we can while we’re here to preserve the quality of life on earth for all. And if we fail on any given day to do so, we try not to waste energy beating ourselves up about it.