Protesting Dirty Energy: An Interview with Emily Satterwhite

Understanding the Threat of the Mountain Valley Pipeline

By Joanna Patzig

A photo of an excavator on an easement in Elliston Virginia.

As the year and decade comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on a project that has been changing the landscape since it was approved in 2014: The Mountain Valley Pipeline (abbreviated as MVP.) This project is one of two pipelines planned to carry natural gas through Virginia, but since its inception it has been fraught with mismanagement and disregard for local citizens and the environment.

The community has widely rejected and protested the pipeline, making amazing efforts to protect an area that I’m proud to have grown up in. There have been protests, tree sitters, and inspiring legal action that give me hope that Virginia will turn towards clean energy despite the corrupt forces that be.  

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be unaware of the harm caused by these projects, and equally of our power as citizens to fight them. Dr. Emily Satterwhite is a professor of Appalachian Studies at Virginia Tech who has been involved with protesting the pipeline since 2017. She graciously agreed to speak to me about the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and to shed light on the issues surrounding it for fellow concerned citizens. You can read the interview below:
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To start with something broad, what threats do pipelines pose to Virginia and specifically to Appalachia?

One of the reasons for opposing pipelines is because we oppose the process of fracking that releases the gas from the shale, especially in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The threat from fracking is a threat to the global water supply, a threat to human and animal health, a threat to the climate, and it harms ecosystems. 

That's starting back in the process. Additional threats from the pipeline to Appalachia include an expansion of fossil fuel industry control over the region, and control of labor conditions, wages, and controlling divisiveness in the community between those who are employed or supported by the project and those who aren’t. [There is] corruption of democracy that happens when fossil fuel companies run the show, which we’ve seen in West Virginia and Kentucky, and in terms of Dominion Powers and Appalachian Electric Powers influence in Virginia.

In terms of explosions, the data shows that the more recently the pipeline is constructed, the more likely it is to fail. So while a year and a half ago, when I started this fight, I thought that talking about explosions was alarmist, I now have seen enough to be concerned. For a 42-inch frack gas pipeline with the kind of pressure that it's under, if it fails, there’s a 50-80% chance that it would explode if there is a rupture. Those numbers are from a hydrologist named Jacob Hileman. Increased sedimentation is a concern to people's well water, spring water, and municipal drinking water. The city of Roanoke has to pay $36 million a year at minimum to get the sediment back out of the water that Mountain Valley Pipeline is putting in. By one report, MVP will cause  a permanent 2% increased sediment load in the Roanoke River. And to me, that means that the investors of the Mountain Valley Pipeline are profiting on the backs of the people of Roanoke, who are one-third people of color, and one in five living below the poverty line. Those are the people who are going to have to bear the cost of $36 million or more a year.

Another danger that some pipeline opponents are documenting is a concern about the toxins in the coating of the pipeline and what that would do to the water. And I guess the biggest concern for a lot of people, increasingly, is methane. MVP alone would double to triple the fixed source greenhouse gas emissions of the entire state of Virginia. 

Would you like to talk about any notable victories in the fight against the pipeline so far?

I count as one of my favorite victories the fact that MVP lost their permit to cross the Jefferson National Forest in the summer of 2018, and if people hadn’t been living in trees on top of the Appalachian Trail and in Jefferson National Forest for 95 days that court ruling could have come too late to make a difference. But because people put their bodies in the way of construction, and delayed it for three months, by the time the court finally ruled that the permit was invalid the Appalachian Trail had not been touched, and the Jefferson National Forest had trees cut, but had not had trenching or construction. 

Another victory is the stop work order that was issued recently for the entire route while the issue of the Endangered Species Act is considered by the fourth circuit court...Another victory is that at this moment neither the MVP or ACP (Atlantic Coast Pipeline) cross the Appalachian Trail, that will be taken up by the Virginia supreme court so we won’t hear until June what their ruling is. In the meantime, construction on MVP is delayed by two years and two billion dollars. Those are all victories.

Speaking of the direct action, I know that you’ve been really active in the protests. You locked down to an excavator, right?

I did, June 28th, 2018.

That’s awesome. Can you tell me about that experience?

Yes, so I was helping support the aerial blockades in Jefferson National Forest in March, April, and May of 2018, when those were all forced down by the forest service. I kept joking that it sometime it would be my turn, and my comrades kept saying, ‘Well, you know the semester is almost over, you said you can’t get arrested during the semester but the semester ends in May.’ So what started out in half joking got to be really serious. And I guess I thought I talked a big game my whole career, like the reason I got a doctorate in Appalachian Studies was because I wanted to defend the region, and because I admired people who had been blocking mountaintop removal mining all this time, but I’d always been a little too preoccupied with school and family to get really involved in that direct action. So I talked to my husband and said what I felt I needed to do and he was supportive. That day I climbed up on the excavator and wrapped chains around my wrist, clipped into a steel lock box, and stayed there for fourteen hours until the police cut me out. 

Wow, fourteen hours is a long time! 

It was very long! No one expected it to last that long. 

How have law enforcement handled these situations?

Law enforcement in the Jefferson National Forest was hostile to forest protectors, and it was really sad to watch the forest service starve a woman who was trying to protect the forest and the Appalachian Trail.  

For me, when I was put in the police car, I was allowed to have a granola bar and never experienced the kind of rough handling and other kinds of treatment that other people who have been arrested on sites faced. There have been 56 people at least, by my count, that have been arrested since the start of construction, and more before it started. A lot of those have been very rough arrests and that was not the case for me. I think for me and Becky Crabtree, who locked down on her own farm in West Virginia, we’ve gotten preferential treatment because we are white women with local status. 

I’m glad you're safe, and thank you for doing that work. How do you imagine the state of energy in Virginia going forwards? Either in an ideal world, or realistically, what are your hopes for the outcome of this action?

So in an ideal world, [Delegate] Sam Rasoul and Delegate [Lashresce] Aird would have won leadership within the House of Delegates and when the session convened in 2020 and they would have immediately passed the Green New Deal, and shifted to no new fossil fuel projects in Virginia ever again, prohibiting the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. That’s not what happened, but the pipelines are still losing in every realm. They’ve lost in the realm of popular opinion, in the courts, they’re losing investors, and their stock is down. I’ve been saying this for a few years, but the fracking bubble could burst any day. 

Ideally, if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren won the presidency in 2020 and banned fracking there would be no reason to have that pipeline. ACP has announced that they don’t plan to go into service until 2022, so a national fracking ban would definitely affect the viability of that project. Whether we can hold MVP off long enough for that to be true for MVP remains to be seen.

Last question. So, how can people best support resistance efforts or get involved?

I think an easy thing for people to do is to write letters to the editor or op-eds. I think the fact that people don’t remember (or don’t know) that we have tree sitters is really too bad. Because the people who know about Yellow Finch [tree sits] have this additional confidence that we’re holding the line, and that even if the stop work order gets changed by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission tomorrow we’re still protecting the last trees on the route. It gives inspiration that if something is wrong, we can do something. 

So if people want to do more they can help by donating money to Appalachians Against Pipelines or by donating wool socks and warm winter clothes, and gas cards, because people have to go back and forth to court since so many are being prosecuted. Donating to the legal fights is a big help. Or, you know, if anyone can put together a couple billion dollars to buy out a defunct pipeline, I think it’s ready to sell!