Tag: Alice Clair

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Pipeline voices: Activists look back on a historic victory

In 2018, Dominion began cutting down trees to make way for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which has now been canceled. Photo: Pipeline CSI

On July 5, Dominion Energy abruptly canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, an $8 billion project that would have carried natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina. Environmental activists of all persuasions spent six years fighting the project before finally prevailing over the gigantic power corporation. As the victory set in, C-VILLE caught up with some of central Virginia’s anti-pipeline activists, giving them a chance to reflect—and look ahead. The following interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

 

John Laury

John Laury is the secretary of Friends of Buckingham. He lives in Union Hill, a historically Black community in rural Buckingham County that would have been disrupted by the pipeline.

C-VILLE: Where were you when you heard the news? What was that moment like?

JL: It was amazing to me. I have been praying about this. We have been in the struggle for—working on our sixth year. Really, I was elated. I felt the load was lifted off of me. But at the same time I wasn’t sure that what I heard was true.

Then my mind began to reflect back, to one of the Board of Supervisors meetings two years back, when our pastor Paul Wilson spoke. Dominion was in control at the time. 

He gave the example of David and Goliath. David, a little shepherd boy, with smooth stones and a slingshot, going against Goliath and all of his weaponry. But David was going in the name of God, and Goliath was going on his strength. 

We were always talked to as if this was a done deal. We were even told, “you’re wasting your time. You can’t go against Dominion.” This is what we were against.

Can you describe your home in Union Hill a little bit? What role do you think Union Hill played in the victory against the pipeline?

From where I live now, I was raised across the road. I would be the third generation raised on that 52 acres. We grew greens, and always a garden every year. Fruit trees. That generation believed in raising their food, preparing in summer for the winter.

I enjoyed the four seasons. I enjoyed the people and the natural earth. Spent a long time in the woods. Ate a lot of fruit off the trees the other generation had planted.

We depend on an underground water source, we have wells, that’s the source of water for our home.

As we spoke on panels in different areas of the state—some out of state—we realized that there were other states dealing with similar issues that were detrimental to them as well. The pattern was in the areas of people of color, and the poor, lower income areas…When we raised awareness as to what was happening here in Union Hill, that made a difference.

It’s not just a Union Hill issue. It’s a people issue. And as one of the quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King tells us, if people are hurting anywhere in this world, it should be the concern of all of us.

 

Alice Clair

Alice Clair is a local musician who grew up in Nelson County. Her childhood home is less than a mile from where the pipeline would have run.

C-VILLE: What was your reaction to the news?

AC: I was screaming and crying. No exaggeration, I was screaming and crying. Just, ultimate elation—and also relief. I always said it wasn’t going to happen. But for that to come true is a relief.

You’re a musician. You wrote some songs about the pipeline. What role do you think music played in the effort over the last six years?

Robin and Linda [Williams] are songwriters in Augusta County, and they wrote “We Don’t Want Your Pipeline.” And that has become a classic for us in Virginia, and maybe across the U.S., fighting pipelines.

When I was in high school, Dominion would set up information sessions for the public in our gym. We would go in and be protesting in my high school, people would bring their guitars and play that song. 

I think music, it motivates in every kind of way. If you can get a bunch of people together singing a song, that’s a great way to energize people towards a common good.

Can music help translate this victory into something even bigger?

I had friends travel out to fight against the Keystone and the DAPL pipelines. There’s been so much music that’s come out of that. Not only using old folk songs of protest, but making new ones. 

The fight is not over even though I won at home—I’m so lucky that I was one of the few that could win at home. My land out in Nelson is not going to be affected anymore. Time to turn our eyes to the next one. We’re looking at the Mountain Valley Pipeline now. It is not over, but we’re feeling darn good. 

This is how it should work. If our country may turn to a true democracy one day, that’s what it’s all about. The people using their voice. If the majority don’t want it, it shouldn’t be there. 

 

Ben Cunningham

Ben Cunningham is the field director of the Pipeline Compliance Surveillance Initiative, a group that used technology and community volunteers to document the construction violations Dominion committed as they started building the pipeline. 

C-VILLE: Where were you when you heard the news?

BC: I was about to bite into a really killer sandwich at 3:12pm on Sunday when my intern with my Pipeline CSI program, Virginia Paschal, texted me, all capital letters, CONGRATULATIONS!…Then she sent me a link to an article about it. Then I spent the next half hour just crying in joy and disbelief. 

What was the final straw for Dominion? 

We would never claim that this was all one group or all one strategy’s effort. Death by a thousand cuts—we all believe that’s what it took. It’s gone from Supreme Court hearings and all sorts of different legal battles, to people [protesting] in the trees trying to stop this and other pipelines, to science-and-technology-monitoring programs like ours, as well as strategies like political pressure. Really, community organizing is the bottom line.

…The story of environmental work in this country is the project never dies, people get burnt out, and so on. So I’ve just been plugging away at it, as have hundreds and maybe a thousand other people in various different ways.

Can the win against the ACP set an example for activists fighting other projects?

We’ve got, now, an example that we can win, against the largest political contributor to both parties in our state, arguably the most powerful corporation in our state, and one of the most powerful utilities in the country.

There are countless injustices around the world. I believe in starting where we live—it’s what we’re most familiar with, where we can be most powerful, and where we can effect the most change.

 

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Arts Culture

PICK: Alice Clair

Alice Clair plays her part to Save the Music on Sunday. Eric McKeefer

Tuning in at home: With her mixture of thoughtful lyrics, environmental consciousness, and passionate music, Alice Clair is a singular talent—one you’ll often find jamming with her psych-rock band The BLNDRS. The folk rock singer-songwriter, guitarist, and mandolinist performs for The Front Porch’s ongoing series Save the Music. Donations benefit Georgia’s Healing House.

Sunday, 6/28. 8pm. facebook.com/frontporchcville.

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Arts

Grunge reprise: Local musicians pay tribute to Nirvana’s legendary ‘Unplugged’ gig

Saturday night at The Front Porch, a group of local musicians pay tribute to Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged in New York" record, released 25 years ago this week. Getty Images/News.com

The fuzzy, sage green granny cardigan hasn’t been washed in more than two decades. It’s missing a button, and the knit is stained in spots and cigarette-burned in a few others.

That sweater fetched $334,000 at auction last weekend because, despite its flaws, it’s an iconic piece of rock memorabilia, worn frequently by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in the months before his death in April 1994. Chances are, you’ve seen the sweater—it’s the one Cobain wore for Nirvana’s appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”

Released as an album on November 1, 1994—the band’s first after Cobain’s death—MTV Unplugged in New York has come to be regarded as one of the best live performances ever recorded, a series of songs that, many musicians and critics would argue, is considerably more valuable than the cardigan.

Patrick Coman is one of those fans, and his appreciation for the album led him to put together “Come As You Are: A Tribute to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged,” at The Front Porch this Saturday.

Patrick Coman. Publicity photo

Nirvana was the reason Coman picked up a guitar in the first place, when he was a preteen at the tail end of the grunge era. During his fifth grade talent show, some of his friends played a few of the band’s songs, and Coman soon asked to take guitar lessons. One of the first songs he learned was “About A Girl,” off Nirvana’s 1989 debut, Bleach.

Coman loved grunge—Nirvana, Alice In Chains—and he couldn’t imagine listening to or playing anything else, particularly folk music, which “seemed too cheesy. Like campfire songs, things you’d sing at summer camp.” That changed when he got a copy of the Unplugged album and heard his grunge idols close their set with, of all things, a blues arrangement of a traditional folk song.

Nirvana was at the height of its popularity when the band recorded that segment in November 1993. The previous year, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” from the 1991 release Nevermind, topped music charts all over the world, and was credited with bringing grunge into the mainstream. In January 1992, The New York Times noted that Nevermind was selling more than 300,000 copies a week.

MTV likely would have loved for Nirvana to play an acoustic version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” says Coman. But that wasn’t the band’s vision for the set. “It wasn’t greatest hits with acoustic guitars,” he says.

Instead, Cobain and his bandmates Krist Novoselic (bass) and Dave Grohl (drums), plus a few guests, played new, mostly acoustic, folk-influenced arrangements of 14 songs: one from Bleach, four from Nevermind, three from In Utero (1993), and six cover songs, including three tracks by the Meat Puppets; David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”; The Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam”; and closed with blues musician Lead Belly’s version of a traditional song, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” MTV Unplugged in New York was Coman’s introduction to roots music, and he’s played it ever since.

When Will Marsh of Gold Connections was in middle school, his dad showed him the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video, and not long after that, sometime in the early 2000s, Marsh got a “best-of” Nirvana CD (which, he notes, he still keeps in his car and plays from time to time).

“Nirvana was the first mythological influence on my music, one of those few bands that’s way bigger than a band,” says Marsh. “There was this wholeness to the music that struck me,” the way Cobain brought in sonic structures from the Pixies and song structures from The Beatles, says Marsh, “he brought it all together and gave me a formula for writing songs and performing. He’s been a huge influence.”

Alice Clair wasn’t even born when the album she’s helping to celebrate came out. In fact, she wasn’t really into Nirvana when she signed on to do the show. She’d heard the band on the radio and on the Guitar Hero video game, but says that grunge music gave her “a lot of anxiety” when she was younger.

When Coman approached her to participate in “Come As You Are,” the only song left was “Polly,” an anti-rape song Cobain wrote about the abduction and rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tacoma, Washington, in 1987. Clair learned the song from scratch, and says she’s come to appreciate and respect how many Nirvana songs are “heartfelt, and protest-type” songs,” ones driven by “raw emotion.”

Saturday night, Coman, Clair, Marsh, and a number of other Charlottesville musicians and Nirvana fans will play all 14 tracks from MTV Unplugged in New York, in order, but not exactly as Nirvana would have done it. It’s an homage, not a recreation, says Coman, adding that a friend summed it up for him pretty well: If Kurt Cobain could give you advice about what to do, it would be to be true to yourself and your performance style when you do these songs.

Ultimately, that’s the spirit of the record, says Clair. “I think it’s cool as hell that they went out and didn’t play all the hits. That, in some ways, [Cobain] is being difficult for all the pop audiences,” she says. “It’s great to be paying tribute to this particular performance, because while it wasn’t made to cater to so many, it absolutely did.”