Picture a mountain valley somewhere in the Alleghenies, Appalachians or Blue Ridge. It’s a safe bet what you just imagined didn’t include a metal pipeline more than three feet wide running down a steep ridge or crossing a pristine stream.
People from West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and several Indigenous nations have been fighting for years to keep that image from becoming a reality by opposing the incongruously named, 303-mile-long Mountain Valley Pipeline across their states and ancestral lands. They’ve been so successful, in fact, that some in Congress want to take away their power to oppose a project that’s recorded hundreds of clean water violations alone.
