Part Two: The Fight Against the Mountain Valley Pipeline

Margaret continues an epic tale of treesits, blockades, and resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure and environmental destruction.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, cool people who did cool stuff as
their new jingle. I hope it's not. I hope I
never do it again. I'm your rest, Margaret Kiljoy. This
is part two of a two parter about the fight
against the Mountain Valley pipeline. And as you've probably noticed,
this is a different format than usual. Usually I talked

(00:23):
to a guest, and this time I talked just to
you into the microphone. Do you know what I did
during the break between part one and part two? You
had to wait two days, but I just recorded part
one and then stopped and went and refilled my water
bottle and looked out the window at my dog that's
sleeping in the yard in the sun. His little chest

(00:44):
moves up and down. It's very nice, it's very relaxing.
Highly recommend pets good for anxiety. I think there might
be anxiety sponges, though, because I think that our pets
end up very anxious instead of us. But uh, he
seems to I don't know. I'm telling you this. This
is part two. I already said all that. Our producers,

(01:06):
well Sophie and Ian, and our audio engineers Rory Hi Rory,
and our theme music was written for by unwoman, and
we're talking about the fight to stop the Mountain Valley pipeline,
which well it lost, but we're going to talk about
it that and how in some ways it actually accomplished
an awful lot because I think that it's cool people

(01:27):
who did cool stuff. You probably noticed that. I'm just
going to go back to my script now. As soon
as the construction started, the pollution started. While people claim
that natural gas is the cleaner alternative to coal, West
Virginia residents post photos of polluted creeks in their own yards.
More CITs started popping up, often on private land. Often

(01:48):
property owners themselves were resisting on their own property. Other
times property owners were just kind of not telling protesters
to leave. Cynical accounts will accuse property owners of nimbiism
or of just fighting for property rights in some individualist way.
But I suspect that for most of these people it
went way deeper than that. They were fighting for the

(02:11):
little scraps of forest and stream and mountain that they
were personally caretaking and often had been for generations. Becky
Crabtree a grandmother, a high school teacher, and later a
twenty twenty two Democratic House of delegates candidate in West
Virginia drove her own seventy one Pinto to block pipeline

(02:32):
trenching on her own property and change herself to her
car in the summer of twenty eighteen, after she'd been
working within the system to fight the pipeline for years.
This is our home was painted across the car. She
told Vice News quote, I can't just teach my students
about climate change and have them fill out a sentence

(02:53):
about fossil fuel energy and its negative impact. I know
what the impacts are. I have to live this. The
cop who arrested her she'd taught him in third grade.
This is a fight that is local, national, and international
all at once. By the summer of twenty eighteen, people

(03:15):
started locking themselves directly to construction equipment. If you ever
want to get pedantic about something fun, that's what everyone
does for fun. Right, You come up with a new
topic to obsessively research every week. That's like normal, Right,
I'm normal. Okay, you can spend your time learning about
lock boxes. Lock Boxes are basically things that you can

(03:35):
lock yourself to in order to do nonviolent direct action.
They make yourself harder to move. Usually, lock boxes are
built around a steel pipe with a little length of
rebar welded inside. You stick your arms into the pipe
and clip yourself into the rebar with a carabiner that
has chained your wrist. These pipes can be embedded into

(03:57):
all sorts of things. A barrel full of cement is
a classic example. All the different styles of devices have
their own cute names, like the black Bear, but there's
one name that cops have picked up on and use
as shorthand for every single lock box, probably because it
sounds vaguely menacing, the sleeping dragon. Cops have to know

(04:28):
that not every lock box is a sleeping dragon. But
I sat in court as cops called every lock box
a sleeping dragon. A sleeping dragon is real cool, though
essentially it's a lock box buried in the ground and
disguised like it's a pipe with rebar embedded into cement
and then buried into the ground. They're cool because they

(04:49):
can be built and set up any time, ready to
deploy almost undetectable. People absolutely use sleeping dragons as part
of this fight, but not every damn lock pox is
a sleeping dragon. In twenty eighteen, people started locking themselves
to things Some people even started locking down inside the

(05:09):
boreholes that were waiting for the pipes. Most of these
lockdowns last in the hours, not in the days, but
they can significantly inflate costs for the pipeline construction company,
and of course by valuable time while people fight in
the courts. There are also dramatic photo ops which I
actually don't say cynically but earnestly. It's really important that

(05:32):
people realize that grandmas and young hippies and punks are
locking themselves to equipment. It's perfectly legal to set up
a tree sit on your own property, of course, and
so many people did as much. The state, though, started
serving injunctions against property owners to come on down from there. Basically,

(05:53):
as far as I can tell, none of the actions
were centrally planned and organized, merely that they were coordinated
by disparate groups and people. I would quickly run out
of space, well time space in my document that I'm
writing the script in, but time and reading whatever. I
would quickly run out of space time if I listed

(06:15):
every organization that had some hand in the campaign to
stop the pipeline, and there are a ton of civil
suits against protesters and organizations that are ongoing, so I
probably wouldn't list these organizations anyway. Peter's Mountain saw the
first flurry of activity, but soon a new site of
resistance popped up further into Virginia Poor Mountain, the Yellowfinch Sits.

(06:40):
On September nineteenth, twenty eighteen, two sits went up fifty
five and sixty feet in the air, this time still
on a steep chunk of land. One sit was in
a chestnut oak. The other wasn't a pine until it
too was moved to an oak. These sits were on
private property, blocking the way of the pipeline. The owner

(07:02):
never asked the protesters to leave, nor did the owner
tell them to be there. These sits were supported by
a large, diverse direct action camp on the ground. Most
anyone who was interested could come out simply by filling
out an intake form. One of the major advantages of
nonviolent direct action is that it's a sort of above

(07:24):
ground criminality. One of the disadvantages of nonviolent direct action
is that at least three times in this script, I've
accidentally written it as nonviolent direction action, where I just
took the word direct and action and stuck them together.
But you didn't need to know that. I didn't need
to tell you that the supporters of the tree set

(07:46):
not of my bad spelling. The supporters of the tree
st camping on private land weren't committing a crime. But
many of the people involved in the direct action were
convicted of various offenses throughout the years. Yet, while the
camps and movements had to maintain some level of security
and develop a security culture, they were still able to
be open enough to bring new people into the movement.

(08:09):
And that's like something I'll go on about all the time,
is that we need to get better at bringing people
into the movement. And I think that this above ground criminality,
non violent direct action, it's a very effective way of
doing it. This is one of the biggest advantages of
this style of campaign. It's radical enough to genuinely threaten
the powers that be, yet approachable enough to build a

(08:31):
large movement and help people begin to learn that they
too can challenge power. There's no roster of how many
people supported this movement because there was never any central organization.
All I can say for anything like certain is that
somewhere around one hundred and twenty five people were arrested
in total, Over the course of the campaign, Soon the state,

(08:54):
getting desperate, started throwing terrorism charges around. The first tear
charges were against people who locked themselves to an MVP
helicopter while it was on the ground. The helicopter was
being used to buzz and harass the sits, so people
locked themselves to it. After those people caught terrorism charges.

(09:15):
Less than a week later, other supporters locked themselves to
a welding sled. This is a welding sled as a
construction device without its own locomotion. It's like dragged around
by another vehicle. People kept getting this bogus joy riding
felony charge for being attached to vehicles. So in this
case because somehow it's like misappropriating the vehicle whatever. Anyway,

(09:37):
it's bullshit. So in this case they attached to a
non vehicle, the welding sled with a banner that read
MVP are the real terrorists. The people who locked themselves
to a welding sled got terrorism charges too. The terrorism
charges didn't stick overall. The state didn't really get too

(09:59):
many heavy charges to stick to anyone in this campaign,
but they didn't expect their charges to stick. As best
as I can tell, they overcharged protesters on purpose for
a bunch of reasons. First, as I talked about in
the court episode on it could Happen here, it seems
as though MVP's main tactic was to try to drag

(10:20):
out court as long as possible to keep activists tied
up with legal shit so they couldn't return to the woods. Second,
they wanted to intimidate people, and third, by overcharging with
ridiculous felonies like kidnapping and joy riding, it becomes much
easier to get people to plead a lesser charges. Yet,

(10:41):
no one on the entire campaign, with over one hundred arrests,
was ever found guilty of or pleaded guilty to a
felony charge. It helped that the prosecution was often remarkably
and humorously incompetent. In the summer of twenty nineteen, someone
locked themselves to a sleeping dragon, an actual sleeping dragon,

(11:02):
a lock box embedded into the ground. So there's a
bunch of charges in Virginia that are really similar to
each other, like obstruction of free passage and then trespass.
The first obstruction of free passage is basically an anti
picketing charge about blockading a business. The latter is for
trespassing on private land. One activist was charged with obstruction

(11:26):
of free passage. The prosecution filed to have it changed
to trespass, but the judge never ruled on that change.
So the prosecution spent the entire trial building a case
for a charge that the defendant wasn't being charged with.
And so the defense just kind of like tried not
to laugh the whole time. They just like tried to

(11:46):
keep a straight face while they watched this whole case
be built for the wrong charge. And in the closing arguments,
the defense were like, well, good job proving the charge
that this wasn't about, and the defendant was acquitted. But
if you want to be acquitted, you should consider one
of our most important sponsors. Hi, Margaret Kiljoy. Here, boy,

(12:11):
the world sure is a mess right now. Huh. Seems
like every day there are more and more reasons to
get out into the streets and protest. That's why when
I get arrested, there's only one strategy. I trust, I
shut the fuck up. I say, I would like to
remain silent, I would like to talk to my lawyer,
and then I shut the fuck up. In the United States,
of America. It's constitutionally protected and recommended by the National

(12:33):
Lawyer's Guild. That's shut thch f u c k up.
Once again, that's shut thch e f uck up. Because
you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can
talk yourself into a conviction.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Providing identification to law enforcement required in some states and situations,
giving them an address expedient in most circumstances. Never discuss
the events leading to arrest with anyone except your lawyer, doctor,
or therapist. Hosting pictures of protests and actions on social
media may lead to complications. If you have already talked
to cops or experienced confusion about talking to cops, call
your attorney immediately, as these may be signs of more
serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops

(13:13):
does not provide legal advice in the foregoing statements are
for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions,
consult an attorney, and we're back.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
In twenty nineteen, as the fight raged in the Woods,
the Fourth District Court issued a stop work order to MVP.
This court, the United States Court of Appeals for the
Fourth District, is basically the Federal Appeals Court for much
of the middle of the East Coast from DC down
to North Carolina, including West Virginia and Virginia, so work

(13:48):
was stopped for a while. Throughout twenty twenty, not much
work was done building the pipeline. COVID lockdowns and revoked
permits kept the destruction paused. By March twenty twenty one,
MVP got some of its permits back and tried to build,
but famously they only managed to build eight miles of
pipeline in all of twenty twenty one. By October they

(14:11):
stopped for the winter. In twenty twenty one, the pipeline's
water crossing permits were revoked as well, and the pipeline
crosses perhaps thousands of creeks and rivers, so this was
a pretty big deal. At the end of twenty twenty,
the Yellowfinch Tree sits were served with an injunction and
told they had to come down. They didn't. In late

(14:32):
March twenty twenty one, the two sitters, Ren an Acre
were evicted by Cranes. One of the sitters, Wren, describing
their experience, said, after months of hanging out with just
Acre and playing guitar and magic the gathering all day,
with occasional visits from cops yelling up at us and
stapling things on trees, or from pipeline survey crews. I

(14:55):
woke up one morning to about fifty cops in pipeline
security forming a perimeter around the tree sits, mostly on
the road below. They spent the first couple hours yelling
lies to us on a bullhorn about letting us go
home that night and reducing our charges, etc. While they
brought in machinery to widen Yellowfinch Lane so that they
could get a crane down it. They closed off the

(15:17):
area to press, local supporters, etc. Allowing only people with
addresses on the closed off streets through. By about midday,
they had gotten a crane down Yellowfinch Lane, a one
way dirt road, and started setting up to stabilize it
and get cops on the little basket platform thing. They
had to bring chainsaws up to clear their way through

(15:39):
the canopy to get to the tree sits from the
road and their crane. Once they got to me, my tree,
a chestnut oak, was closer to the road than acres.
They found me locked to the tree. After trying pain
compliance techniques, they thought I was grabbing something inside the
lock box rather than being clipped in. They had to
go back down in their crane and get an angle

(16:00):
grinder and generator to power the ankle grinder with and
put it in their crane basket thing. I attached myself
to every possible point of safety that I could while
they were away, since they were going to be using
an angle grinder near the ropes that kept me alive.
It took them a while to grind through the lock
box and unclip me, and then I went limp and

(16:20):
they had to carry me into the crane basket. By
the time I was down on the ground, almost twelve
hours had passed, and it had also started to drizzle
rain the way it does in Appalachia temperate rainforest. And
all that. They carried me into the jail van by
my wrists and ankles and took me away to the
county jail. They came back for Acre the next day,

(16:41):
while I was denied bond at my arraignment and carted
off to the regional jail. Ren and Acre, the two
sitters served the longest sentences of the campaign, with a
judge deciding that in the interest of fairness, the sitters
would serve one day in jail for every day it
could be proven they were in the trees, and they
proved they were in the trees based on social media posts.

(17:04):
One sitter got around three months, the other around four months.
Wren said about their time in the tree, quote, the
part that I loved the most about Yellowfinch was the
ground support camp. It was what I first fell in
love with when I arrived there for the first time,
and that love was what inspired me to stay in
the tree through the winter. Once the ground Support Camp

(17:26):
was evicted by injunction, of course I got frustrated with
it and with some of the people who lived there
at times. But I loved that place because we got
to build it to be a better version of the
world we live in now. Not perfect, but better than
what we've got. And most importantly, ours was a rotating
community of almost entirely queer people. The vibes of the

(17:48):
camp fluctuated as members came and went, but we all
got to do whatever we felt like doing all day,
and somehow that came together into everything getting done mostly
and us taking care of each other. My favorite part
of the day was always in the evening, when We
would all gather round the fire for dinner and to
play music and talk about books. We were all passing

(18:08):
around to each other and what we had done that
day or wanted to do the next day, or political
theory or dreams literal and metaphorical. The other thing I
loved about that place was the spirit of mutual aid
that ran through it. Local people would bring us food
and other supplies and hang out for a few hours,
telling us their stories. It was a place for building connections,

(18:31):
including to the mountains around us, and for taking care
of each other. There was, at various times a garden,
a trampoline, a shed with all of our books, several
iterations of shudders and compost piles, a drawbridge over the
creek that ran down by the road, a group therapy circle,
and various other hippie projects. We foraged and received gifts,

(18:54):
and the tree sits opened up my mind to the
way the world could be instead of the way the
world is. And then one more quote from one of
the sitters. On May eighth, twenty twenty one, one of
the sitters wrote the following statement from jail, Hi, everyone,
you probably just saw my sentence in the paper. I

(19:15):
want folks to know, regardless of how I've been charged,
I stand behind my actions. I'll go day for day,
tree for jail, any day of the week to stop
the damn pipeline. I want people watching who may consider
taking action against injustice to not be dissuaded by the law,
to know the court is only there to protect the

(19:36):
interests of the wealthy corporate elite, that by jailing people
for protecting the land and water, they show us time
and time again how the judicial system is a right
hand in colonialism and how it wears the blood of
innocent life left in its wake. Refugees from climate change
are on the rise, Immigrants remain locked in cages, separated

(19:57):
from their families, dying at our border, and the jail
are packed with people preyed upon by both the state
and the prison industry, exploited for labor and cash and
tax cuts. Prison is modern slavery and should be abolished.
To those reading this weighing the efficacy of their actions
planning for the next protest, never forget that you are

(20:19):
standing for what is right. They may have me in
a concrete box, but the woods and nature is something
I hold with me always. I can still feel the
coming bird song and blossoms of late spring like a
steady pulse. I can feel the soil and running water
in my blood. To believe this world was given to
us to do what we want to it. To build

(20:40):
monuments to our own ego is backwards and dangerous. We
are only a small part of this place, and our
relationship with the land and air and water is critical.
It is a fatal error to alienate and place ourselves
above all the crawling and swimming and flying and growing things.
Earth comes first. Remember, show the world what you believe

(21:04):
in land for its own autonomy, dirt for dirt's sake,
and me, Margaret, I have to say ads for ads sake. No, no, well,
here's ads anyway. And we're back after work, slow into

(21:29):
a crawl. In twenty twenty one, there was no work
done at all on the pipeline. In twenty twenty two,
it was looking for good reason, like the incredible amount
of work done by activists was paying off. But the
thing is, while courts and activists and communities wanted to
stop this pipeline, the federal government and the fossil fuel
industries really wanted it, and they were willing to do

(21:53):
just about anything to make it happen. Before the current administration,
it would be easy to say fossil fuel infrastructure is
not the future of energy, and everybody knows it. A
number of minority shareholders in the project in MVP started
quietly distancing themselves from MVP as the years went on.

(22:13):
To quote the Virginia Mercury in an article from twenty
twenty three, quote, if there ever was a jackpot for MVP,
it is gone by now. Today demand for methane gas
is cooled in the face of cheap wind and solar,
while MVP's costs have ballooned to six point six billion
from the initial projection of three point twenty five billion.

(22:36):
Analysts say MVP's competitive advantage is evaporated and its prospects
for profitability look grim. End quote. The demand for the
methane gas the pipeline transports, they say, quote has always
been hypothetical. If there's a direct villain in this story,
it would be former US Senator Joe Manchin, who is

(22:57):
infamous right now is the guy who called himself a
Democrat but clearly wasn't a democrat, and like, look, I
have no particular love for the Democratic Party, but Joe Manchin,
who retired this year, simply wasn't one. Even he finally
acknowledged it formally leaving the party in twenty twenty four.
He is basically just like a fossil fuels guy, best

(23:18):
as I can figure. He used his position as a
swing vote by being registered as a Democrat to force
through legislation that directly prevents life on Earth from being
able to continue into the future. And I hate how
hyperbolic that sounds, but it's true. Climate change is the
single biggest issue in the world right now. Because it
is the issue that sits above every other single issue,

(23:41):
all life on Earth hangs in the balance, and Joe
Manson works tirelessly to make sure that the United States
works against life on Earth. In twenty twenty two, he
held climate change legislation hostage until it included large carve
outs for drilling in fossil fuels. He shot down provisions
life provide tax credits to people who buy Union made

(24:03):
electric cars, as far as I was told by activists
on the ground. He also tried unsuccessfully to get the
MVP written directly into that bill. Then, finally, in twenty
twenty three, the Bastard pulled it off. In twenty twenty
three's Fiscal Responsibility Act, which is about the debt ceiling.

(24:24):
He managed to get in a piece that says, quote,
the Congress hereby finds and declares that the timely completion
of construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline is
required in the national interest to quote West Virginia Metro
News quote. That section goes on to say that Congress

(24:45):
ratifies and approves all permits and other approvals required for
construction and initial operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The
section specifies that the approvals should occur no later than
twenty one days after the passage of the bill. The
bill goes on to say that no court would have
jurisdiction to review the federal regulatory actions end quote. It

(25:09):
was an essence Congress overriding the courts, shifting jurisdiction and
saying all the regulation and permits just don't matter, because
we want this pipeline, this destructive pipeline clinging to an
outmoded and wildly dangerous technology. At the beginning of these episodes,
I talked about how the fight against the pipeline it

(25:30):
was a process of disillusionment for many of the activists
and people in the surrounding communities. But the fact that
they had fought the pipeline in the woods and the
courts and won. The fact that all that could be
struck away simply by a Congress that says, yeah, but
we don't actually care, in a bill that wasn't even
about the pipeline was perhaps the ultimate disillusionment. Because the

(25:55):
Fourth District kept finding the project to be illegal, that
court's jurisdiction was revoked essentially, and the District of Columbia
Court of Appeals was given jurisdiction over the pipeline, even
though the DC Court of Appeals is a court of
appeals wait for it DC. Things that happen in DC,

(26:15):
where famously the MVP does not run. I talked to
more on the ground activist than legal activists for this episode.
It's possible there is more I've yet to learn about
what justification could be given for transferring this jurisdiction. Despite
having its jurisdiction revoked, the Fourth Circuit Court attempted a
stop work order on the pipeline based on its previous rulings.

(26:39):
The Supreme Court looked at that from the Fourth Circuit
Court and vacated this stay. Basically, it was like no,
or you can ignore that, without even giving a justification
for why they did that. It was a shadow docket,
which is roughly when the Supreme Court says something about
injunctions or stays without actually doing the whole like hearings

(27:01):
and oral arguments and final judgments and you know, judicial process.
So why was the MVP built despite only the rich
and powerful wanting it? Well, because the rich and powerful
wanted it. To hell with democracy. After the highest levels
of power said fuck you were killing your mountains each shit,

(27:22):
people refused to give up. They wanted it, seems to
go down fighting. Around fifty of the one hundred and
twenty five arrests during the campaign were all in the
last year of the campaign, when it was no longer
about delaying the pipeline so that the courts could fight
it out, but instead about saying, don't fuck with the earth,
you fox, we fucking live here. Maybe they wouldn't have

(27:44):
cussed so much. Maybe they would have who knows. Lots
of different people were involved. The trials I went to
were for three different actions that happened after the construction
resumed in twenty twenty three in twenty twenty four, including
two lockdowns on equipment and one person who crawled into
a length of pipe and remained there for almost two
days to stop construction. Other times there were a bunch

(28:07):
of mass walk ons, where people would swarm construction sites
and by their presence make work impossible. Sometimes those people
were arrested. Sometimes they managed to disappear into the woods.
Sometimes the people who've managed to disappear into the woods
were arrested later were followed out of the woods by drones.
The very last action was a tripod at Yellowfinch. A

(28:31):
twenty foot aluminum tripod was set up in the middle
of the road in the exact spot where a banner
had read years earlier, Welcome to Yellowfinch. During the sits,
an activist sat in a hammock up at the top
of the tripod while supporters rallied around the base. Tripods
and another non tree st aerial blockades are precarious things,

(28:53):
and it's important to keep eyes on them at all
times from the ground to keep the cops from doing
anything outrageously dangers. When the cops came, they issued a
trespassing order to get the rally to move down the
road like the support people out of sight of what
they were doing. The cops told the sitter to come down.
The sitter said, basically, you'll have to come up and

(29:15):
get me. So the cops brought a contraption. Police documents
called it the Rook, and it was basically an armored
skid steer like a forklift, with a little armored elevator
thing on the front instead of a fork the kind
of weird military hardware cops are all getting these days.
Cops went up on the Rook and pulled the sitter

(29:37):
into it, taking their cafea and helmet, which were never returned.
Thanks to this flurry of action, the activists delayed the
project successfully for another half a year or so, but
in twenty twenty four, the pipeline was finished and fracked
gas began to move. When I went down for the trials,
I watched some of the bravest people I've ever met

(29:59):
standing in front of a judge and be told by
a prosecutor that there was paradoxically something wrong with trying
to save the world. After the trial, I asked people
what lessons they learned, and I got some interesting answers.
One person talked about how important the art from the
movement will remain. Another person told me that you have

(30:21):
to invite people in, that you have to make it
easy for people to join. You can't just tell people
something is happening. You have to tell them that they're
welcome to come, that you'll drive them, that you'll sit
with them, that you'll buddy up with people. I got
told that you have to extend a little more trust
to people than you're comfortable with. People implied that having

(30:43):
an open camp with a simple onboarding process for new
volunteers was a strength of this movement. Activist movements have
always been infiltrated by the state, and likely always will be.
Forced Defense movements in particular have a fairly major history
of infiltration from the eighties and nineties and early aughts.
But as far as I can tell, and I asked around,

(31:05):
no one is aware of any informant coming forward as
a state's witness in any trial. That doesn't mean there
weren't informants, just that none of them felt it worth
blowing their own cover. The open movement did not cost
them any particular jail time or arrest, it seems, and
I also got told something i'd seen in the messaging
for the entire campaign on press releases and banners, that

(31:29):
people knew this campaign was about much more than land rights.
People knew that it wasn't nimbiism, that many, perhaps most
of the people were fighting against capitalism and colonialism. People
knew that getting this land back into the hands of
indigenous stewardship was essential. Whenever I think about hard fought
activist campaigns that we quote unquote lost, I think back

(31:52):
to an essay written by one of my favorite authors,
the late David Graber. The essay is called The Shock
of Victory. I first read it when it came out
in two thousand and seven, and it fundamentally shifted something
in me. See. I came up in activism in the
alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early two thousands,

(32:14):
when we tried to stop free trade agreements from stripping
natural resources from developing nations. I got arrested a couple
of times during all of that, and I got punched
by more than one cop along the way. I gathered
up all this experience and all this trauma, and I
wasn't sure what to do with it because I thought
we'd lost. Then here comes one of the greatest thinkers

(32:36):
of the twenty first century, and he wrote this essay saying, basically,
anarchists and activists, we don't know when we've won. He
uses two movements as examples, the anti nuclear movement of
the nineteen eighties and the alter globalization movement to the
turn of the millennium. He says that activists often have
short term, medium term, and long term goals. A short

(32:58):
term goal might be stop the following nuclear power plant
from being built. A medium term goal might be end
the expansion of nuclear infrastructure. The long term goal might
be destroy the state and capitalism and living in egalitarian,
free society. Time after time, we lose our short term goals.

(33:19):
When people throw their queer shoulders to the wheel trying
to stop a pipeline like the Mountain Valley, they often fail.
The state just keeps raising the stakes, and raising the stakes,
and raising the stakes, pulling out all the stops to
crush the movement. In this case, they caused a constitutional crisis.
There's no particular reason Congress should have been able to

(33:40):
overrule the courts and change jurisdiction and ignore all the
permitting procedures to make this happen. They will do anything
to win. The state absolutely refuses to lose face. But
both of the movements that Graber discussed did win their
medium term goals. Nuclear Power when out of vote after
fierce opposition, even if the specific instruction of the specific

(34:04):
plants that were opposed went through, and the Global Movement
for Economic Justice did not stop the individual free trade
agreements that it opposed, but it did end the consensus
that the neoliberal agenda was the best one. It ended
the proliferation of comparable deals. So we don't win our
long term goals yet, and we often lose our short

(34:26):
term goals though. I have been to forests that still
exist because of comparable campaigns. But just by fighting like
fucking hell, we make the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure
all the harder. I'm not so sure that the fight
against MVP lost. I suspect, in fact, it was part
of a larger winning strategy. At the opening of that

(34:49):
essay by Graver, he says, quote odd though it may
seem the ruling classes live in fear of us, they
appear to still be haunted by the possible ability that
if average Americans really got wind of what they were
up to, they might all end up hanging from trees.
I know it seems implausible, but it's hard to come

(35:11):
up with any other explanation for the way that they
go into panic mode the moment there is any sign
of mass mobilization and especially mass direct action end quote.
I think this helps explain that after the last criminal
trial in February, the people I talked to didn't sound
or seem defeated. They were full of life. I am

(35:36):
sure that many of them were burned out, exhausted. The
pipeline they'd all risked so much to fight was in operation,
but I didn't see anyone in despair. I didn't see
a movement that was acting like it had lost, but
one that was proud, that had learned a lot, that
was ready to inspire the next movement. That's particularly interesting

(35:56):
to note right now, because almost everyone I know is
struggled against despair in the face of the rise of
fascism and the rising temperatures. Maybe acting with agency, in
acting in line with our values is the thing that
can keep us tethered in the storm. We are feeling
the first winds of today, and maybe the way we
get ourselves tethered like that is to build community together

(36:19):
wherever we are, to stop fighting about bullshit, to de
escalate our conflicts, and seek mediation for the valid critiques
that we have of one another. Because, as Jamie Hale
told me the other day, divide and conquer as a
tactic as old as time. We can be accepting and loving.
And that's the end of the episode about this thing.

(36:41):
But there's still ongoing civil litigation basically, like all of
the money that the company lost it's trying to recoup
by suing the shit out of everyone, and so all
of that is still going on. If you want to
support activists and help them defend themselves against this litigation,
you can join me in donating into the Appalachian Legal
Defense Fund, which you can find at bit dot l Y.

(37:03):
That's b I T period l Y slash a p
P Legal Defense. That's a P P l E G
A L D E F E N s E. All right,
and that's the end of this episode. And yeah, I
have a Kickstarter. I already told you that we'll be

(37:25):
back soon with more cool people who did cool stuff.
Thanks everyone for being you. Let's outlive the Bastards.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Get your podcasts.