I was arrested for protesting fossil fuels. But I'm not a radical.

Note: An edited version of this essay was just published in The Boston Globe. Link at the bottom.

This past May, I was arrested.

I had allegedly locked myself to a machine on an exceedingly steep mountainside in southwest Virginia. That same mountain had been the site of the historic Yellow Finch tree-sits just a few years earlier, which spanned three winters and delayed construction of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, which now transports fracked gas 300 miles of Appalachia.

I can’t say too much more about the day that I was detained. Just that the sky was a hypnotic shade of blue, the birds sang an ancient tune, and no gas flowed through the pipeline. It was a good day.

***

I had spent years absorbing the overwhelming and ever-expanding evidence that the primary cause of climate change is humans: our burning of gas, coal, and oil. This evidence was even acknowledged by fossil fuel companies themselves. I made minor tweaks to my life. I recycled and biked to work. I joined solidarity rallies and voted based on environmental issues.

But even as I saw ever more things that shocked me — destructive storms, record droughts, rising sea levels, species lost, tipping points breached, epidemics — I still convinced myself that my actions were enough.

But in 2020, the Slater Fire ripped through the California town I’d once worked as a wildland firefighter. It destroyed 150 homes, many of which belonged to people who had been there for generations, like members of the Karuk Tribe.

Then, flash floods tore through the streets of Flagstaff, Ariz., the mountain town I’d called home after I left California — the heavy rains deluging land only recently scorched by a wildfire. The floodwaters carried mud, trees, and at least one Toyota Prius downstream. Sandbags became permanent fixtures in several neighborhoods where they had never been needed before.

Drought dropped the Mississippi River, that big, familiar creek [CM1] I’d grown up alongside, to levels I’d never seen. These warmer, shallower waters caused fish to die en masse. In some areas, the river ceased to be navigable by barges, causing delays that rippled through global supply chains.

These were not isolated incidents. The residents of Paradise, Calif., and Boulder County, Colo. who lived through, or lost loved ones to, the Camp and Marshall wildfires know this. So do the residents of Western Kentucky and Asheville, N.C., whose homes became driftwood in recent floods. So do the Hopi and Zuni and so many other tribes living through the worst Southwestern drought in their long history. And so do the people of Los Angeles still battling ongoing fires in the heart of the city.

Scientists know all of this as climate breakdown. Residents know it as hell.

***

I watched all of this unfold like a child struggling to wake from a bad dream. I waited for someone to tell me it was going to be all right; that I could forget what I’d seen and go back to sleep.

But nobody did.

To be clear, I did not want to get arrested; I simply wanted to stop the machine, by which I mean the larger machine that was causing the destruction of so much that I had known and loved.

As a white guy with an advanced degree and no criminal record, I had every advantage when I got arrested.

I was driven away by a police officer who seemed anxious to form a bond with me. I was released on bail for demonstrating to the magistrate that I was an upstanding citizen who would return for the arraignment. I was represented by a court-appointed attorney, supported by people who were familiar with my situation, and able to continue my life as I waited six months for my court date to arrive.

All of this worked in my favor, but still I felt the intense loneliness that comes with being under the control of this system.

***

My day in court is now behind me. Like an overwhelming majority of all defendants in criminal cases, I took a plea deal. It was offered to me 15 minutes before I entered the courtroom. The prosecution had seven months to review the evidence of my case. They gave me scarcely more time to review their offer than it takes to fry an egg.

They win by controlling time.

I’m not sure that it was right to take the deal. Smart, because I avoided jail time, but not necessarily right.

I’m now on a year’s probation, which prohibits me from organizing anywhere near the pipeline. But the more disturbing condition—which has become a standard punishment for protesters like me—is that I have was banned from entering three counties in Virginia. Some argue these sorts of bans may be unconstitutional. That did not stop the judge from allowing it in my case.

They win by controlling space.

I did not have a residential address in the Virginia county where I was arrested, a fact commonly seized upon by pipeline supporters to discredit those who protest against the pipeline — a peculiar stance for a project that spans multiple states.

After all, most of the pipeline owners and workers are not locals.

And residents of affected counties never got the chance to vote on whether to permit the pipeline to pass through their backyards.

Paradoxically, by allowing the for-profit Mountain Valley Pipeline to seize property owners’ land by eminent domain, federal courts seemed to insist that the pipeline was a matter of broad public interest, not only private company prerogative. And like other instances of eminent domain use, the adjacent landowners were forced to accept small settlements as payment.

Corporations find ways of getting the result they want.

***

There are many messages that seek to persuade would-be environmental protectors that they don’t have the right to get involved. I know because I’ve been held captive by these thoughts myself.

We are told that we should let locals decide, which sounds nice, except that this is frequently voiced by powerful non-local actors who want to make the decisions instead. And of course, this sentiment ignores all those who don’t typically get a vote: children, trees, and recent immigrants, for starters.

We are told that it’s hypocritical to object to new fossil fuel infrastructure when we use fossil fuels now. But this ignores the lengths to which we must go in order to walk or bike instead of drive, to bus or train instead of fly, to eat, dress, talk, play, move, gather, invest, and otherwise live in a way that minimizes our dependence on climate-changing fossil fuels. There is nothing hypocritical about objecting to the fact that this is by design—that human society’s utter reliance on these fuels occurs because it is extremely profitable for a small group of people.

So often when there is a sit-in, lock-down, or strategic blockade, we are told that there are more effective ways to shut down pipelines than getting arrested.

I’m open to ideas. I think everyone who cares about the future of the environment and the future of the human race is open to ideas.

But I tried so many things before I got arrested.

I’ve thrown all my energy behind political candidates who promised to change things. I’ve poured my time into repairing old clothes and eating a vegetarian diet. I’ve escaped to the sanctity of the forest. But the candidates changed little. My small efforts proved inadequate. And the jaunts into nature proved lonely for a dreamer. Truth be told, nothing I’d done before last spring — the marches, the donations, the myriad individual actions — had substantially slowed our relentless march toward climate breakdown.

I had to do something else. And in my desperation, in the woods of Appalachia, I found a group of outcasts who had successfully fought the installation of a major pipeline for more than six years.

For six years, they’d sat in courtrooms, sat in trees, and locked themselves to machines. They’d done this with humor and bombast, in stealth and in plain view, despite being told that they would lose. Perhaps because they were told that they would lose. Because they were Black, Lakota, Appalachian, queer, disabled, and poor. Used to being told who they were and what they believed, what they were capable of and what they weren’t. And used to defying everyone’s expectations.

I learned something from these people. I think we all could.

For this, we are called radical. Labeled criminal. Characterized as simply trying to burn it all down.

And these descriptions are sometimes tempting to accept.

After all, what other option have they left us? Stricken by a potent cocktail of anger and sorrow and fear for the world we’re living in, wouldn’t we be better off starting fresh? To burn it all down in the most grandiose and metaphorical of senses and create a new world?

But this is impossible. New worlds are the stuff of fiction.

There’s nothing radical about defending our home.

And there’s something criminal about a system that values profit over people.

And there’s no more fire needed in a world already on fire.

It’s time we put the fire out.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/06/opinion/mountain-valley-pipeline-environmental-protest/