S 1 Ep. 1: The Pipeline

Imagine one day you get a letter in the mail. This letter, from a huge corporation, demands your land -- land that's been in your family for generations. This is what happened to Marvin Winstead, Blair Campbell, John and Ruby Laury and many others, starting back in 2013. Behind it all? Duke Energy and Dominion Resources, two giant energy companies looking to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The pipeline would pumped fracked gas through the heart of the Southeast, threatening a river of deep cultural significance to the Lumbee Tribe, a historic African American neighborhood in Virginia, and family farms from West Virginia to North Carolina. But from the mountains of West Virginia to Robeson County, North Carolina, people in communities are uniting to fight back, in a defining struggle for environmental justice. This is the first full-length episode of The Land I Trust, a brand new audio storytelling project brought to you by the Sierra Club. In this series, we travel through the American South to talk with folks about the dirty energy projects that threaten their homes and the work they’re doing to build a clean energy economy that allows all of our communities to thrive. To hear more from the people in this episode, and to hear other stories about moving from coal to clean energy, go to sc.org/stories. To take action, you can go to ​ ​sc.org/divest and join the fight against dirty fuel pipelines, or check out the latest ways to make a difference at addup.org. The series is narrated by Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Beyond Coal Campaign at Sierra Club.