Protest as a Family Affair: the Grady Sisters’ Mix Civil Disobedience and a Warm Welcome
This is a behind-the-scenes look at InsideClimate News reporter Nicholas Kusnetz’s reporting on one of the country’s longest-running environmental protests. Read the original story here.
We woke up early for the protest, before sunrise. After downing a glass of water and a slice of whole wheat toast with peanut butter, Ellen Grady was alert and ready to go. Her sisters Teresa and Clare were waiting outside. Each greeted me with a smile and a hug, chipper at 5:30 am.
Our destination was a natural gas storage facility outside Watkins Glen, N.Y., not far from their home, that’s slated for expansion. The sisters were raised in the Catholic Worker tradition that teaches followers to “live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.” This morning that meant driving to join a group of other activists to stand up to a project they see as an injustice against humanity’s need to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who founded the Catholic Worker movement during the Great Depression, believed “there was this social element to our faith and how we were supposed to live it,” Ellen says. “This was in the early ’30s and everything was thrown up in the air. There was no work, and so there was no food for people. And they just said, ‘come in, you can have a place to sleep, you can have a place to eat.’ And Peter had the idea that every home should have a Christ Room. A room where you welcome the stranger.”
I’d come to Ithaca to write about one of the country’s longest-running campaigns of environmental civil disobedience. For nearly two years, a loosely-knit group of grandmothers, farmers and other regular people had been lining up at the gates of the storage facility, forming a blockade. More than 400 have been arrested so far across 50 actions, though none have protested since July. They’ve come from towns surrounding Seneca Lake and from across the country. Their motives are mixed. But their goal, universally, has been to stop this one fossil fuel project — which would store more fracked gas from across the Pennsylvania border — from being built.
Read the story: When Protest Becomes Sacrament: Grady Sisters Heed a Higher Call
Across the country, climate activists are turning to civil disobedience in an effort to stop such projects, to “keep it the ground.” Without a coherent national energy policy, people have turned to protesting individual projects that, in effect, decide that policy. One by one, they maintain fossil fuels’ foothold in our energy mix.
What makes the movement here, called We Are Seneca Lake, remarkable, has been its ability to draw in a wide and diverse crowd, not just committed environmentalists like Bill McKibben but also farmers and veterans who had never before thought of themselves as activists. There are several possible explanations for the success — the region has been a hotbed of anti-fracking activism; organizers set clear asks of protesters, including guidelines to ensure they avoid anything more than violation-level offenses. Or perhaps it’s the allure of the simple and repetitive action of lining up across a driveway over and over to say “not here.”
So, on a warm May morning, four of us piled into Teresa’s white Volkswagen sedan to drive to the protest. It would be Teresa’s first time at the gates, Clare’s second and Ellen’s fourth. All of them, however, brought a lifetime of experience and calm cheer to the blockade. Their parents were Irish Catholics deeply involved in the radical social justice community of the 1960s and ’70s and worked with the Berrigan brothers, Catholic priests famous for their anti-war activism. The sisters and two other siblings, all of whom live in Ithaca, have been arrested more times than they can remember. They began in the anti-nuclear Plowshares movement of the 1980s and have continued their active pacifism to the present. A fourth sister, Mary Anne, is currently facing prison for her role in protests at a nearby drone base.
The action at the gas facility went smoothly, with police arriving quickly. The arrests lasted longer than the protest, as sheriff’s deputies had to call local police for help transporting them. After everyone had been processed at the sheriff’s office, Ellen was eager to get home to her garden and other chores. The rest of the protesters were gathering at a nearby café, however, and Teresa was able to talk her into a “quick” visit.
Inside, Ellen quickly began talking to the woman behind her in line, a librarian who didn’t know about the gas project or the protests. Clare was talking to others nearby. Teresa was eating a bagel and began telling her tablemates a story from her time in “federal,” where a fellow prisoner liked to hang out with Teresa because, she said, “‘You’re like speed.’” One day in the cafeteria, however, Teresa couldn’t contain her excitement for the hard boiled egg and sliced cucumber that was their meal. The friend couldn’t take it and left the table.
Prison and protests simply come up in conversation with the sisters, whether it’s a summer of protest at the Pentagon in 1980, or the time Ellen and her fellow Catholic Workers honored Jerry Berrigan shortly after his death by using 30 life-sized cutouts printed with his image to block the entrance to the drone base.
Before we knew it, we were among the last to leave the café. Ellen pulled Teresa out of one more conversation and we walked outside, where new conversations began with others. None of the many protests they’ve joined are done in isolation, Ellen would say later. “They’re done from a community and you’re able to do it because there is community.”
That morning, however, Ellen wanted to get home. Even so, she knew rushing her sisters was futile. “The English leave and never say goodbye,” she said. “The Irish say goodbye and never leave.”
Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for InsideClimate News. Visit us at https://insideclimatenews.org/
