CAROLYN REILLY: In the fall of 2014 is when we first were kind of flagged for “we’d like to put a pipeline through your land.” And that began the process of us doing our own homework and researching to understand what is a natural gas pipeline because we really did not know. And upon hearing the size of it, 42 inches, so to think of that kind of excavation and destruction that would happen to the soil and the life of that soil just from the beginning was appalling. And I, at some point, I was hired and I was an organizer, a community organizer for a nonprofit starting in 2015 because of how engaged our family became an spreading the word and alerting neighbors and landowners that this is not just some small pipe, you know, this is something that we do not need for this community.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Carolyn Reilly, what happened when someone blocked the path of the pipeline by sitting in a tree on your property?
CAROLYN REILLY: Because of that happening, of building and putting that in trees and our verbal supportive, “Hey, that’s great … thanks for being in the way right now” – because of our ability to use our First Amendment rights to speak up and as we have been for almost four years now, we’re involved with several lawsuits against the pipeline company, against FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and because the pipeline company has sued us and is seeking eminent domain, the first process that they had to go through was getting an injunction to have immediate possession of the land. Meaning that before the eminent domain procedures can happen – which is when just compensation would be decided by a judge or jury, which is what we are pushing for – the company was granted by this federal judge that they can go ahead and have possession of the right of way before any money, any sort of arguments or discussion or hearing about just compensation had been had. So they were granted that right to access the properties, start felling trees, doing whatever the hell they really want to do on this strip of land, quarter mile through our bottom land and two of our beautiful creeks.
CAROLYN REILLY: So federal judge Elizabeth Dylan, an Obama appointee, fined you and your husband each a $1000 one-time fine, which I understand has been raised by an outside group that supports your stand. Do you think you’ll appeal?
We are working on an appeal because of the First Amendment right. I mean the order, her opinion just tore up freedom of speech. Yeah, we are, we’re consulting as far as next legal step. But, we have time still to file an appeal.
BETWEEN THE LINES: You have said you were very moved by what happened at Standing Rock when indigenous people came from all over to defend the water and the land of the Standing Rock Sioux and that it raised some thorny questions in your mind.
CAROLYN REILLY: I had to ask myself as a white woman in watching just the terror that was used by the state, by the sheriff, by marshalls, by – I mean the uniformed forces – against peaceful, indigenous people whose land originally belongs to them. It is theirs. We stole it as white people, and I had to kind of come to this uncomfortable moment of I can rail about property rights as loud as I can, but I need to honor and know that this land that I am fighting for is stolen land here in Virginia, but it’s hard to look back and know this is the history of colonization and it’s continuing through corporate colonization and it’s going to keep going if people don’t stop and wake up and that the system that is in place in this country is for the industry folks, for the big wigs, the fat cats. You know all those names, there’s been a lot of those names thrown around.
I think that is something that it’s good to wrestle with and to feel uncomfortable with and that I believe needs to be communicated in broader ways in this fight against corporate colonization known as the Mountain Valley Pipeline right now in this region.
