Camp White Pine: The Pipeline Fight Among Pennsylvania’s Woods
“This was my favorite tree to climb as a kid,” Elise Gerhart tells me as the sun pours through a canopy of leaves as we walk across her family’s forested land in South Central Pennsylvania one morning.
She grew up in these woods and when it came time to protect them she took to the trees.
In March 2016, Sunoco seized a portion of the Gerhart’s land by eminent domain and began clearing cutting trees to make way for the Mariner East 2 pipeline.
When the company arrived with chainsaws, Elise and few other supporters started tree sits that continue to this day, stopping pipeline construction on the Gerhart family land.
Her mother, Ellen, was arrested on her own property for warning the company that they were about to cut down one of the anchor trees connected to the tree her daughter was in. She never crossed into the pipeline right-of-way.
But the local sheriffs department wasn’t there to server the citizens of their community. They were there to protect the pipeline company.
The Standing Rock Connection
At the end of April of this year, Sunoco merged with Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the notorious company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Many of the same tactics of oppression that were seen in North Dakota at Standing Rock have now come to Pennsylvania. As the Intercept reports Sunoco is using the same private security firm, Tiger Swan, for the Mariner East 2 pipeline.
Just as ETP and Tiger Swan tried to smear the peaceful Water Protectors attempting to protect their land against the Dakota Access Pipeline, they are now creating a propaganda campaign against Elise and her family, painting them as “eco-terrorists”.
Their misinformation campaign was exposed recently when the same actor claiming to be a local pro-pipeline resident appeared in two different online videos. In one video he was “Brent Williamson” and he attacked the credibility of pipeline resisters in Louisiana trying to stop the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. In another video, he was “Josh Baker” calling the resistance at Camp White Pine on the Gerhart family land a “cult.”
And it’s not just ETP’s alarming propaganda tactics that have come to the Keystone State. Their horrible safety record has come along too.
As StateImpact reports, there have already been over 90 drilling fluid spills across 40 sites along the construction route of the Mariner East 2 pipeline and drilling has impacted the private water wells for at least a dozen homes.
The fears of the Water Protectors out at Standing Rock are already coming true here because the model is the same in Pennsylvania’s woods as it was in the prairie of North Dakota. Local people shoulder all the risk while the big oil and gas companies make all the profit.
Doubling Down On A Fracked Gas Future in Pennsylvania
The Marnier East 2 pipeline is part of a mass buildout of fracked gas infrastructure being proposed across the state of Pennsylvania. In addition to thousands more fracked gas wells, the plan is to build some 30,000 more miles of fracked gas pipelines and dozens of compressors stations and fracked gas power plants.
Despite acknowledging that climate change is real, Governor Tom Wolf, like many top Democrats, has ignored the overwhelming science saying fracked is just as bad, if not worse for the climate than coal, and doubled down on the fossil fuel industry line that we need fracked gas as a ‘bridge’ fuel.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has already approved 42 new fracked gas power plants since January 2014. And in Beaver County, PA, Shell is proposing to build a massive $6 billion cracker plant that will break down oil and gas into ethane for plastic materials.
Instead of investing in the renewable energy future Pennsylvania deserves, the government here is chaining itself to a fracked gas future that will continue to poison communities and the planet.
It’s one of the many reasons the Gerharts continue their stand despite the odds against them.
“We want to be a part of deciding what is good for Pennsylvania, what is healthy for Pennsylvania, and what serves the greater good,” Elise says. “How could anyone think that’s the right way to do things?”
The Gerharts are now apart of a coalition fighting to stop ETP projects all over the country. They are calling for a national day of action on September 9.
Find or start and action near you: www.StopETP.org
Follow Camp White Pine: www.facebook.com/CampWhitePinePA
