The following is a Day 2 update by Greg Yost, who’s on the trail of the Walk for Our Grandchildren, July 19th-July 27th.
“I say, ‘Shut up, legs!'”—German cycling hard man Jens Voigt on his secret to his success.
Toes, feet, calves, knees. We received quite an education today in the lower anatomy and its surprising potential for creating human misery. But the 2013 Walk For Our Grandchildren is never intimidated. We say, “Shut up, legs!” and on we go!
Our first stop today was Myersville, MD, the site of a proposed gas compressor station on the edge of town.
This is an interesting story. What happens when a corporation runs headlong into a town with an activated citizenry that just doesn’t roll over for them? Dominion Transmission, Inc.(DTI), a subsidiary of Dominion Resources, wants to site a key piece of fracking infrastructure in Myersville as one link in a chain allowing them to move fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale to an eventual export terminal at Cove Point, MD. And this is a pretty good idea, too. Or at least it is if you’re DTI.

Myersville, on the other hand, would much prefer to simply remain Myersville sans a poisonous, explosion-prone industrial complex. As citizens soon learned when they began looking into DTI’s plans, these compressor stations can and do vent hazardous levels of gas. Even worse, accidents happen in which case the stations blow up in a giant fireball. This isn’t the sort of thing most sane people want less than a mile from their downtown.

Myersville decided not to play ball and declined to zone the parcel to permit the station. That brought down the lawyerly wrath of DTI upon the mayor and the city council, which are now named in a civil suit to compel their cooperation. But the town of Myersville isn’t fighting alone. As citizens organized, they discovered their community was only one of many up and down the East Coast fighting similar battles. Check out mcrcmd.org for more info. This fight isn’t over yet.
Fascinating, isn’t it? We’re walking to DC in part to challenge a mega-corporation (TransCanada) using disinformation, fear, and intimidation to run a dangerous pipeline wherever the hell they want. We just didn’t expect to see exactly the same drama being played out literally right along our route. Only the names have been changed. Whether the innocent will be protected remains an open question.

Today’s experience proves the point: the struggle against the carbon extraction economy is all one fight. Fossil fuels cause damage when they’re taken from the ground, when they’re moved, and when they’re burned. Whether it’s tar sands, fracked gas, offshore drilling, or coal ripped from the ground, there’s somebody, somewhere paying a high cost for all this “cheap energy.”
And when the CO2 rises into the atmosphere trapping an ever higher percentage of the sun’s heat, all of us on the planet and all those yet to be born will stagger under a debt of climate chaos and ecological disaster. Some costs are just too high. Time renegotiate this century old contract with our friends in the fossil fuel industries. It’s time to get out of it completely and on to something better.
Onward to Harpers Ferry. Tomorrow we meet the rest of the team. Stay tuned!
-Greg Yost for the 2013 Walk For Our Grandchildren
Click here to read Greg’s update from Day 1 of the Walk For Our Grandchildren.
Follow walkers @_Grandchildren and #Walk4Grandkids on Twitter and on here on Facebook.