Onward in the Pipeline Fight!

Communities and organizations across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina have done phenomenal work to challenge the Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast pipelines over the last four years. Though these unnecessary fracked gas infrastructure projects were never outright denied, as they should have been, it’s because of the phenomenal activism and organizing of so many that these pipelines have experience huge setbacks.

But these developers will stop at nothing to push these projects through in any way they can. Though some final permits, approvals and plans are still needed, the pipeline developers have sued landowners to gain immediate access to private land, and have begun felling trees in nearly all the counties the pipelines go through as well as the public lands we all hold so dear.

Our efforts to stop these projects are as crucial as ever. Folks along the lengths of both pipelines are mobilizing at record speed to monitor all pipeline construction activity and call out any misstep as soon as possible. And as critical monitoring happens on the ground, the battle to stop these pipelines also continues in the courts. Appalachian Voices and partner organizations are involved in numerous lawsuits attacking the faulty system, laws and agencies that approved these pipelines in the first place.

People are recommitting to this resistance every day and developing new, powerful ways to resist these pipelines at this unique stage. Though most politicians haven’t realized that fracked gas is the next big fossil fuel extraction industry that will wreck public health, water and the environment, folks all across the country know the state we are in. People are literally getting in the way of pipeline construction all across the continent. Pipelines will be stopped. We won’t.