Barnstorming tour aims to Roll Back Pollution

Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and chapters will take to the highways and byways of North Carolina and Virginia for eight days in April on a barnstorming tour of communities threatened by natural gas pipelines.

The Stop The Pipeline—Roll Back Pollution campaign will feature Lois Marie Gibbs, the national leader of the grassroots environmental movement since 1981.  The roadshow will be track the routes of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Lois Marie Gibbs, a homemaker who organized evacuation and cleanup of her community poisoned by toxic waste, will be the featured speaker at daily public events and press conferences from April 4 through April 11.

Stop the Pipeline—Roll Back Pollution will be in a different community each day, holding press conferences, public forums, rallies and other events.  Each press conference will focus on a local issue and an overall message: Unity and respect for local control.

Stop The Pipeline—Roll Back Pollution will start in Fayetteville, NC, and follow the Atlantic Coast Pipeline’s proposed route north against the flow to meet with other community groups fighting pipelines in Johnston, Nash and Halifax counties, and, crossing the state line into Virginia, to Buckingham and Nelson counties.  Next, the tour will trace the mountain Valley Pipeline route through Pittsylvania, Franklin and Roanoke counties.

In the 1970s, Lois Marie Gibbs organized her community of Love Canal and evacuated hundreds of families who had been contaminated by toxic waste.  See her Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Gibbs

The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League was founded in 1984 by people in Virginia and North Carolina concerned about a national nuclear waste dump in the southern Appalachian Mountains.  The public education campaign launched by the League and others helped to create regional resistance, and the US Department of Energy abandoned the plan in 1987.  Stop The Pipeline—Roll Back Pollution is part of the League’s fossil fuel campaign launched in 2014: Safeguard America’s Resources—People, Water, Air and Land.