For the past four years, much of Vermont’s climate justice organizing capacity and resources have been engaged in significant efforts to halt the Vermont Gas pipeline project. This fracked gas pipeline represents the largest build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure in Vermont in fifty years. The campaign has achieved numerous successes, including the cancellation of Phase II, which would have resul
ted in drilling a fracked gas pipeline underneath Lake Champlain from Vermont to New York; significant delays to Phase I, which have exposed the project’s mismanagement and its poor financial footing, with costs ballooning to double the originally-permitted cost estimate; and - perhaps most importantly - the forging of a deep and broadening culture of awareness and resistance and strength among everyday Vermonters. Even still, Vermont Gas – with wheels greased by an allied Governor Shumlin administration – has constructed nearly all of the 41-mile pipeline from Colchester to Middlebury except for one remaining parcel: Geprags Park in Hinesburg. Geprags Park had been protected by a decades-old legal covenant that assured the Geprags Family their donation of land to the Town of Hinesburg in 1991 would forever be used solely for a school or as a public park for educational and recreational purposes. A group of current Hinesburg residents have waged an exhaustive legal battle to protect Geprags Park from the Vermont Gas pipeline, but the State of Vermont has helped Vermont Gas to seize an easement through Geprags Park using the power of eminent domain. With a recent decision by the Vermont Supreme Court to allow construction to commence, Vermont Gas’ machines and pipe have arrived and initial stages of pipeline construction have begun in Geprags Park. This Week of Action's first goal is to prevent completion of Vermont’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure build-out in half a century. Just two thousand feet of public land lies between both ends of the buried - but empty - pipeline. Geprags Park is the Phase I pipeline construction battle’s last stand. This Week of Action's second goal needs to be presented in a larger context: the climate clock continues to count downward with no meaningful policy changes expected; the historic, indigenous-led struggle for climate and racial justice at Standing Rock; the current U.S. presidential administration and its top tier of decision-makers are career-long exploiters of the poor and the marginalized. Our struggles for a livable planet, for safe communities, for a healthy economy have begun to get in step. To engage in coordinated direct action together is to deepen our collective understanding; it is to practice our working relationships; it is to share skills and to learn and to empower every one of us to take action. This is this project’s second goal - to build the movement - and to accomplish this, we need you.
