September 26, 2018, 5:30-8:30m at Dominion Energy’s Charlottesville headquarterson Hydraulic Rd, sponsored by Charlottesville’s Democratic  Socialists of America.

We stand in solidarity with Red, Minor, Nutty, Lauren, Nettle, and all those who oppose the pipeline projects in West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina, specifically the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines.

Fracked gas pipeline projects are one of the purest forms of capitalist exploitation. For short-term financial gains, energy companies will poison streams, mar the land, and decimate our local communities, particularly communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. Dominion Energy and Duke Energy – and the politicians, courts, and police who enable them – have no interest in the well-being of our communities. They will use every tool available to push the pipelines through, and to break those who dare oppose.

We recognize, too, that this struggle is a component of a larger effort to protect life-giving water from industrial pollution. We see in these pipelines echoes of the Dakota Access Pipeline and America’s long history of environmental racism, and recognize the Native American water protectors on the front lines of that struggle. We stand in solidarity with the people of Union Hill against Dominion’s racist decision to build a hazardous compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in the historic Black community of Union Hill in Buckingham County. The need for clean water touches all of us from Standing Rock to Flint, and it is a right we must defend.

We demand that Governor Ralph Northam immediately direct Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality to conduct a full stream-by-stream analysis of the environmental impact of the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines as a first step towards using Governor Northam’s existing authority under the Clean Water Act to immediately stop all pipeline construction.

The resistance now offered against the pipelines is but the continuance of the unending struggle against the hateful domination of corporate greed. We demand environmental justice in every sense: justice for the land on which we live, and justice for the communities in the path of destruction. Therefore we stand in solidarity with all pipeline resisters, and call on all people who know the weight of capitalism to join their voices to the cause. We can achieve a better world than the one Dominion and Duke present to us. We will reach it, with or without them.