Category: Nuclear

In the past sev­er­al months, three efforts that Earth First! (EF!) has con­tributed action and ener­gy to in Vir­ginia have gained sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ries. In each of these cas­es, our involve­ment has been rel­a­tive­ly small com­pared to the efforts of oth­er groups, and all cred­it is due to them for doing the un-sexy, demand­ing work of drag­ging these indus­tries through the courts and reg­u­la­to­ry process­es where these vic­to­ries were ulti­mate­ly won. While we envi­sion and work to cre­ate a world where destruc­tive projects are stopped by sheer force of grass­roots direct action, we do indeed believe in using every tool in the tool­box.

Here’s a brief syn­op­sis of some of those tools being put to work over the past two years:

The first action tak­en by the cur­rent incar­na­tion of Blue Ridge Earth First! (BREF!) was a demon­stra­tion at the home of a devel­op­er dri­ving efforts to build a Wal-Mart in Blacks­burg, Vir­ginia. There was nev­er a long-term direct action strat­e­gy hashed out to defeat this project. While an emerg­ing com­mu­ni­ty group devel­oped sup­port and momen­tum towards leg­is­lat­ing and lat­er lit­i­gat­ing their oppo­si­tion into law, our action served chiefly as a reminder that civ­il dis­course with those who would des­e­crate our com­mu­ni­ties for a buck is no virtue. The demon­stra­tion was also the com­ing-out par­ty for a new EF! chap­ter ready to give some teeth to the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment in the hills of Vir­ginia.

As BREF! shift­ed our focus to oth­er projects, efforts to stop the Wal-Mart through any well-man­nered, gov­ern­ment-sanc­tioned and tru­ly bor­ing means nec­es­sary, per­sist­ed and ulti­mate­ly reigned tri­umphant by way of appeal­ing a local zon­ing ordi­nance all the way to the Supreme Court of Vir­ginia. While the parade of Earth First!ers mak­ing mer­ry in devel­op­er Jean­nie Stosser’s front yard played a small part in the whole turn of events, it is nonethe­less a grat­i­fy­ing vic­to­ry for our more well-behaved allies and a pleas­ant reminder that, when pres­sure builds, it even­tu­al­ly breaks.
On the moun­tain­top removal (MTR) front, a bit­ter­sweet vic­to­ry was won on May 7, when the Army Corps of Engi­neers, respond­ing to a prompt by the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA), rescind­ed a per­mit for A&G coal’s Ison Rock mine. Over the past sev­er­al years, the South­ern Appalachi­an Moun­tain Stew­ards, a local com­mu­ni­ty group has clogged reg­u­la­to­ry process­es and spo­ken out loud­ly against this mine. In 2004, A&G’s fail­ure to con­form to the laws for exact­ly how a moun­tain is sup­posed to be destroyed result­ed in a boul­der rolling off of a MTR mine and killing a three-year old boy asleep in his bed, prompt­ing Kat­u­ah Earth First! to chain, lock and glue the gates to that mine closed. In 2007, this same cor­po­ra­tion was the tar­get of sab­o­tage at one of it’s Wise Coun­ty moun­tain-top removal sites by a group call­ing itself the “Com­mit­tee to Defend the Land and Peo­ple.”

The Ison Rock mine would have totaled 1,300 acres in scope and would have buried three miles of streams. This is the first time that a MTR per­mit has ever been rescind­ed due to inter­ven­tion by a fed­er­al reg­u­la­to­ry body—evidence that the mount­ing and increas­ing­ly mil­i­tant oppo­si­tion to MTR of the past sev­er­al years is hav­ing an effect on pol­i­cy deci­sions. The EPA and Army Corps rea­soned that the sprawl­ing mine would vio­late the Clean Water Act if it dumped min­ing waste into streams, a prac­tice that always accom­pa­nies MTR oper­a­tions known as “val­ley fills.” The bit­ter­ness of this win comes with the fact that, short­ly after Obama’s EPA rescind­ed this and five oth­er per­mits, the coal indus­try applied pres­sure for the admin­is­tra­tion to give word on 42 oth­er pend­ing MTR per­mits, which result­ed in the EPA declar­ing that they’re all fine to pro­ceed. Why are six MTR/valley fill mines in vio­la­tion of the clean water act and 42 aren’t? Pol­i­tics. They’re throw­ing us a bone here. We’ll take that bone, and then we’ll beat them sense­less with it. All MTR buries streams! Until all MTR per­mits are revoked, we won’t stop!

In anoth­er case of the Clean Water Act final­ly being enforced, Domin­ion Power’s plans to add a third reac­tor to its Lake Anna nuclear plant were thwart­ed by a law­suit brought forth by the Blue Ridge Envi­ron­men­tal Defense League (BREDL) in Feb­ru­ary. Lawyers for BREDL, an orga­ni­za­tion sup­port­ing envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice strug­gles through­out the south­east, proved in court that oper­a­tions at the plant are rais­ing tem­per­a­tures in Lake Anna to over 100 degrees in the sum­mer­time. This is the same pow­er plant where EF!, Ris­ing Tide and oth­ers staged a sit-in dur­ing last summer’s South­east Con­ver­gence for Cli­mate Action.

In the near­ly two years that our small EF! col­lec­tive has exist­ed, we’ve made a delib­er­ate effort to exe­cute direct actions with a tim­ing and sen­si­bil­i­ty that work con­cur­rent­ly with the cam­paigns of our friends, neigh­bors and allies who have the stom­ach to tan­gle up the state with­in the para­me­ters of its own pro­ce­dures. We do not have the time, taste, exper­tise or resources to spear­head these efforts our­selves but we see how they can be uti­lized effec­tive­ly. The prob­lem with any vic­to­ry won by virtue of state approval is that the state retains the pow­er to reverse that judg­ment. By bypass­ing the “des­ig­nat­ed chan­nels” to express our dis­sent and employ­ing actions that direct­ly dis­rupt the oper­a­tions we oppose, we demon­strate a readi­ness among the gen­er­al pub­lic to reject the rules of our oppres­sors and defend our­selves as is our nat­ur­al right. This pres­ence rein­forces the truth that favor­able gov­ern­ment actions are forced by the will of the peo­ple rather than being hand­ed down by the benev­o­lence of the rul­ing class. If we treat these wins as the end of a sto­ry and allow the hard-earned and slow­ly-built grass­roots pow­er that pro­duced these vic­to­ries to whith­er, then this is as close to jus­tice as we will ever get. If, instead, we under­stand them as mark­ers in the move­ment towards achiev­ing all pow­er to all peo­ple, then onward. It is the prop­a­ga­tion of this sen­ti­ment as well as the spe­cif­ic points of impact result­ing from our actions that we con­tribute to the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment in the moun­tains of Appalachia.