Episode Details

Main Interview: Stop The MVP and All Pipelines!

(at ~ 16min, 38sec)

This week, Bursts spoke with Birch and Judy, two folks involved in the Tree Sits on Peter Mountain along the Appalachian Trail on the border of Virginia and West Virginia. The tree sits are operating in order to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline or MVP. Before all of the permits have been ok'd, contractors with the help of local law enforcement have been clearing the path for the pipeline. This preparation would include 3,800 feet blasted through the mountains or if that didn't work the blasting of a trench that length through the mountains. We also talk about the ACP, or Atlantic Coast Pipeline, in this conversation and the connections between the two projects and their resistance.

These constructions (or destruction) and the resultant pipelines threaten the plants, animals (human and non) and all of the water systems along the route as well as continuing to foster an energy system that feeds off of the unsustainable extraction, transport and burning of fossil fuels to the short term benefit of a few government officials and capitalists and to the detriment of the entire world via anthropogenic, or human initiated, climate change.

To get involved, you can contact: petersmountainstand@protonmail.com.

You can donate at their youcaring page.

For more information on the the Peters Mountain tree sit, the campaign against the MVP and how to join in or support where you are, check out the fedbook page Appalachians Against Pipelines. To keep up on resistance to the ACP, you can follow the twitter account, NoACP. And to learn more about anti-pipeline struggles in Virginia, in particular, check out the podcast, "End Of The Line". We interviewed a producer of this project in an earlier episode.

Retraction of a previous Sean Swain segment

To open our announcements section, I'd like to air a brief statement in the spirit of accountability. As per the very reasonable request on the part of the folks doing support for Alvaro and Abraham, we have omitted the Sean Swain segment for the episode in which we interviewed Bruno Rennero-Hanan regarding Keep Loxicha Free, which originally aired on February 18th. The You Are the Resistance topic did not pair well with the main interview content, and the group that was being interviewed did not have any prior knowledge of the segment. We very much regret any confusion or discomfort that this caused, and all versions of the show have since been updated to remove the segment in question.

We would like to take a bit of space here to contextualize these segments for new listeners, which is to say that the Sean Swain segments are presented in the spirit of satire; Swain himself has been a political prisoner for over 25 years at this point, and his humor can get abrasive, but he is a committed believer in the dismantling of all forms of oppression. This is in no way to imply that they should be free of interrogation or troubling, and we are open to feedback on this segment and any other content we present!

Due to separate, technical difficulties, we are unable to air a Sean Swain segment this week. But fear not, Swainiacs, for next week Sean should be back. To brush up on the over 200 segments we've recorded of Sean over the