Stopping Environmental Injustice
Channel: Frank Melli
Date: 2021-03-05

Environmental Injustice Fought and Won in Virginia
This Enviro Close-up focuses on how community activism in Virginia stopped an interstate pipeline being pushed by the powerful Dominion Energy company. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline would have carried fracked gas from West Virginia—with it and its associated compressor stations heavily impacting on African-American communities in Virginia—and ending up in a Native American community in North Carolina. Guests are Lakshmi Fjord, Ph.D., a visiting scholar with the Anthropology Department at the University of Virginia and an expert on environmental justice issues; John W. Laury, deacon of the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Buckingham County, Virginia and a farmer-turned-researcher who documented how environmental racism was deeply involved in the routing of the pipeline; and Stephanie Willett, program coordinator of the AMMD Pine Grove Project. It has been fighting a proposed landfill in the historically African-American Black Pine community of neighboring Cumberland County, Virginia. They discuss strategies—among them “citizen science” and litigation—that provide a national model in the battle against environmental racism.   Enviro Closeup #652