Journalist Jonathan Mingle on how a rural community defeated a major gas pipeline

“Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail that informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a massive pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they have the legal right to do so, whether you like it or not, because this project is in the 'public interest.'" That’s how journalist Jonathan Mingle describes the letter that people in rural Virginia received in 2014 from Dominion Energy, one of the biggest power companies in the country. Dominion was planning to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry natural gas over some 600 miles. What happened next is not how most David vs. Goliath stories end. People in the rural communities organized, mobilized, and fought back. The battle raged for six years until the pipeline was canceled in 2020. Jonathan Mingle tells this dramatic story of climate change and resistance in his new book, “Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future.”Mingle, who lives in Lincoln, has traveled to distant corners of the world to chronicle the impacts of climate change and those who are fighting to stop it. In 2015, he published "Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World," about his travels to the former Buddhist kingdom of Zanskar in northern India. He wrote about what is happening as Himalayan glaciers dry up and drought spreads.Mingle has also reported on Vermont’s struggle to fund its rural schools and about how the July 2023 floods showed that Vermont is not immune from climate chaos.“This idea that you could somehow escape the impacts of climate change is a delusion,” he said about Vermont’s recent experience with flooding.Mingle said that the people who fought and won against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline demonstrated that “the most overlooked climate solution is solidarity. And we're going to need it to adapt to climate change.”