New book ‘Holler' tells the story of Appalachian climate activists
Protesters at an Mountain Valley Pipeline construction site in 2023. (Katie Myers | BPR)
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline transports natural gas through West Virginia and Virginia. But for 10 years, climate activists and worried locals opposed it, even locking themselves to equipment and camping in the pipeline's path. Many were opposed specifically to the transportation of natural gas, which includes methane, a highly flammable fossil fuel with a large carbon footprint. A new graphic novel, Holler, released in May, tells the story.
Denali Sai Nalamalapu, a Southwest Virginia-based climate activist and illustrator, spoke with BPR on what this fight meant for people who were involved and what it means now.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Tell us a little about yourself and why you were drawn to the Mountain Valley Pipeline to begin with?
I joined the pipeline fight to support, with communications and federal and congressional advocacy. As I started traveling more to the region, I got more connected to the community here that was fighting the pipeline and also to the mountains. I wanted to figure out different ways to tell the stories I was hearing, particularly stories of ordinary people who were just living their lives and then became pipeline resistors. And so I sat down with six people across the region that's impacted by the pipeline in Central Appalachia, and the book came to life from there.
What did this pipeline mean, not only to the people in West Virginia that the pipeline directly impacted, but also to the broader Appalachian community? How did it unfold regionally?
When the pipeline was first proposed, it was part of and continues to be part of a centuries-long history of massive extractive fossil fuel projects coming to the region.
Part of what made it unique though, is that it is such a huge project, being three 303 miles long, going through all of West Virginia, through Southwest Virginia, into Southern Virginia, with extensions that threaten communities in Northern North Carolina. And it's methane gas, which is a highly flammable gas that's also contributing to climate change.
It was such an intense, huge fight that came right after and during the fights against coal mining and specifically mountaintop removal in Central Appalachia. It did show up in this lineage of strong resistance in Appalachia that is very well known in this region, but continues to go overlooked outside of the region.
'Holler' is a graphic novel, which is a unique way to tell a character-driven story. Why did you choose the graphic novel format, and to explore the MVP through these six activists?
All of that thinking was part of, how do I tell a story of the Mountain Valley Pipeline Fight with the voices of the resistors uplifted?
One of them is pretty well known. Her name's Becky Crabtree, and she is known as the Grandma who locked herself to her Ford Pinto when her sheep farm was threatened by the pipeline.
And the other is a quieter resistor named Paula Mann, who is a photographer who used her skills to document the way the pipeline threatened the woods that seven generations of her family have lived in.
Part of who ended up being part of the book … were people who both had been part of the struggle and had been covered by the news, and who were the quieter resistors, and who were the younger resistors who were in college when they learned about the pipeline, and who were the people that were well into their 80s learning about it, and also diversity because I think central Appalachia gets thought of as this very white, very poor region that has no diversity. Oftentimes, the Monacan tribe and the other indigenous tribes in the Southeast don't get recognized as tribes and people who are continuing to fight and protect this land.
The MVP ultimately was greenlit in 2024, and is continuing to make its way down through to North Carolina. Protesters may have the opportunity to carry these lessons forward. In 2020, the government approved an extension of the MVP into North Carolina called Southgate.
Where does the pipeline fight go from here and what's happening now?
It felt important to me that we did lose the fight, in a traditional way of deeming did you win or lose the pipeline fight, while also telling engaging and authentic stories of the community that was built through the pipeline fight and the people that were changed by the pipeline fight.
And as we see the federal government in the U.S. and many powerful entities across the world not take climate change as seriously as we believe that they need to, we're going to have to define winning with more nuance than, did you absolutely stop the project or not?
Denali Sai Nalamalapu is the author of the new graphic novel Holler, which is available from Timber Press.
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