Journalist Jonathan Mingle was covering the energy beat in 2018, writing about fracking and plans to build a pipeline from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. At first, it was a business story, and then it morphed into a book.
“The fact that folks from different walks of life, different perspectives were coming together to oppose this project, I started thinking maybe there’s a bigger story here worth a wider hearing,” he recalls.
There were people losing land that had been in their families since the 1700’s and folks who thought investing in more fossil fuel infrastructure was immoral in the age of climate change. Members of the Union Hill Baptist Church in Buckingham County made common cause with residents of a neighboring community called Yogaville. And all of them felt the 600-mile pipeline was unnecessary…