Pipeline Not a Legacy to Leave Behind

Like most other residents of Floyd County, Virginia, I feel a sense of concern and uncertainty over our near future. We face potential political and corporate violation to our home places in the form of a 42-inch interstate natural gas pipeline across the width of the county.

We confront the threatened “taking” of dozens of private farms, forests, pastures, creeks, roadways and wetlands previously unmarred by unnatural straight lines–utility easement scars that are all too familiar across the landscapes of more “developed” counties north and south of us along the proposed pipeline route.

Many other communities have accepted this defacement and threat as the cost of doing business. Floyd I don’t think will or should be so cavalier about such insults whose consequences we do not want to leave for our children’s children living here.

Floyd County has had, until now, a blessed absence of such incisions. Once cut, the next surgery–for the purported greater good–could very well follow the old scars. It has happened this way in other places.

Read the rest at Medium.com

[su_box title=”PUT IT ON YOUR CALENDAR” style=”soft” box_color=”#e8d3a9″ title_color=”#235529″]Plan to attend a public information and update meeting regarding the pipeline next Thursday at 7pm at the Floyd EcoVillage, 718  Franklin Pike Rd, Floyd, VA.[/su_box]

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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