1.)
What brought you to this area?
I was in graduate school at UVa. When
I met someone who lived in a nearby intentional community in rural Nelson
County. I had never heard of intentional communities before, and they come in
many flavors, but this one is a land trust — acreage shared by about 70 adult
members and their children. I fell in love with the person I met, and also with
the land, which is graced with woods, meadows and streams. I admired the
cooperative goals of the community — and I wanted to be a part of it.
2.)
How is the threat of the pipeline affecting you,
your family & life?
Since I learned that the
developers of a completely unnecessary fracked gas pipeline could condemn
peoples’ property for private shareholder gain, rather than obvious public need,
I have been doing what I can, with neighbors in all the affected counties, to
stop the pipeline. The proposed ACP would have a terrible impact on National
Forest lands that I and my family use and treasure. We hike, camp, birdwatch,
and otherwise enjoy some of the last remaining unbroken tracts of forest in the
east. These are public lands. It is a crime that so many trees could be cut and
fragile ecosystems ruined for private corporate gain.
Methane (natural gas), which leaks
from all such pipelines, is 25% more potent than carbon dioxide, so pipelines
like this one pose a substantial threat to the global climate – and so
threaten the future of my children and future generations. The pipeline, if
built, would involve blasting, ridge-top removal, and a huge clear‑cut in the
view‑shed of the iconic Appalachian Trail. I have had my well tested to have
baseline readings, because our waterways and groundwater could be affected by
horizontal drilling, chemical leakage, erosion, and silting. Dominion has (to borrow
from Judith Viorst) a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” track record for
environmental violations; the fines they occasionally have to pay when caught
are, to them, just a part of doing business.
It saddens me that our regulatory
system protects corporations, is designed to allow them to ravage, pollute and
despoil up to certain “legal” limits, (as in “it’s OK to ruin these 5 rivers as
long as you pay some money for a water restoration project in some other place.”)
Our system of legal precedents does not favor citizens who organize to say no
to corporate rape of our common resources of land, water, and air. It tells
landowners they do not have the right to quiet enjoyment of their property if a
corporation with deep pockets can hire lawyers to make presentations before the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an un-elected panel of industry
insiders. It is incredibly stressful to realize how badly the system is stacked
against common sense, against democratic principles of self‑determination,
against the health and safety of communities, against our waterways, woods and
fields. And how it is stacked even worse for communities of color, indigenous,
and rural communities.
3) What will you /do you do about stopping the pipeline
& the politicians who have promoted it!
One of the things I have been doing is creating protest art
in the form of land art: works of
assemblage placed outdoors on directly-threatened properties. I work
with landowners to create something meaningful to them and I include a poem in
each piece. Then I register the copyright with the US Copyright Office. This
tactic helps us spread the word about the potential devastation; I work with
local no-pipeline groups like Wild Virginia and Friends of Nelson to host tours
of the works, I give public poetry readings, and give talks and workshops to
help landowners replicate this tactic. I recently attended a social justice
poetry festival called” Split This Rock: Poems of Provocation and Witness,” and
in a special issue for the festival, Origins Journal published sections of my
#NoACP poem “Into
the Tangle,” from art installed in Bath County. I will keep on doing what I
can: helping spread the word about the wholly negative impacts of the proposed
pipeline; trying to communicate what it is to have a deep connection with the
land — a lived connection that persists in rural communities and should be valued
over corporate profit and profiteering.