Member-only story
Two days ago 100 dedicated climate justice activists, most of them young people, descended upon a site near Roanoke, Va. where the fracked-gas Mountain Valley Pipeline is being built. We arrived there a little before 6:30 am, before the workers had arrived and several hours after we had left our action camp. We had gotten up at 2 am to make this action happen.
The action was a huge success, in many ways. The objective was to shut down the worksite for the day, and that happened! It happened most directly because 10 courageous climate warriors locked themselves both to pipeline construction vehicles and to massive, beautiful, wooden structures created by members of Appalachians Against Pipelines, the organizer of the action. It took until late afternoon for all of the climate warriors to be extracted by the police.
I took a bus from DC organized by Arm in Arm to and from the action camp in West Virginia. On the way back, in the evaluation of the action, someone commented on how near-miraculous the action was, all of the details which had to work together just so for it to be a success: 100-plus people from lots of different places coming together, learning about the plan, fitting in where they wanted to or where it was needed, practicing how we were going to get onto the site, and then in the early morning making it happen.
My thinking as to how this could happen is that one of, if not the, most important reasons was the inclusive and respectful culture which Appalachians Against Pipelines created there on the…
