Something unexpected was in store for the crowd of several hundred that turned up at Mitchell Road High School in South Memphis on Sunday, and then walked down the road a bit to an open field to have a rally against the building of a pipeline across Memphis’ aquifer field — its water supply.
The rally had been called by the ad hoc citizens’ group, Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, as a means of retarding or halting the imminent construction of an oil pipeline under the auspices of the Valero Energy Corporation and Plains All American Pipeline.
Though authorized by the Corps of Engineers, the project has aroused considerable grassroots opposition and faces potential blocking maneuvers in the Shelby County Commission, Memphis City Council, and state legislature.
The sequence of speakers who mounted a makeshift platform, one by one, to denounce the proposed project included affected residents, environmental activists, lawyers, and local politicians, all of whom were by turns reasonable, passionate, and eloquent.
But the highlight of the event was the last speaker on the bill, former Vice President Al Gore, whose political resume includes service as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee and who was the Democratic candidate in the 2000 presidential election, which was the closest in American history and was decided by a still controversial ruling on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court. Gore went on to achieve renown as the author of several important books on the environment, notably An Inconvenient Truth, which, in its various multimedia forms would earn him an Academy Award and a share of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, who preceded Gore on the platform, accurately called him “the father of the modern environmental movement” and described him as “the canary in the coal mine who told us about what was going to be occurring in our world and the threat to our environment that exists.”
All that was a given. The aforementioned surprise that awaited the rally-goers was that Gore, whose speaking efforts as a political figure had sometimes been regarded as being on the stiff side, materialized Sunday as an inspiringly oratorical, even prophet-like presence.
“I feel like I’m in church,” he began, in words that were both a tribute to the speakers who had preceded him and an indication of what was to come in his own remarks.
“We are in a struggle that we must win,” Gore said, evoking as an example the grass-roots resistance of 50 years ago when lawyers Lucius Burch and Charlie Newman earned a legal victory blocking interstate construction in Overton Park.
Attributing the pipeline builders’ route of choice — not only over the Memphis aquifer field but through an area largely populated by low-income African Americans — to a “path-of-least-resistance” strategy, Gore said, “I see a lot of resistance here today. But it’s nothing compared to what they’re going to see if they keep going on this.”
Gore connected what he saw as a threat to Memphis’ drinking water to the “chain of events” of the larger climate crisis. They’re putting 162 million tons of global warming waste into the sky every day,” Gore said. “And it stays there, each molecule, for 100 years on average. And it builds up and generates practically as much heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day, and it’s melting all the snow in the Arctic.”
The fossil fuel companies, he said, are dumping their waste into the sky using it like an open sewer. “They’re required by law to take care of their waste. The fossil fuel companies have decided, ‘well, we don’t want to take any responsibility for it.’ They just want to dump it into the sky as much as they please. Now they want to use the aquifer as much as they please.”
A million people rely on the aquifer, Gore said. “Not only in Memphis but in parts of West Tennessee, in parts of North Mississippi, and parts of Southwest, Arkansas. And the aquifer, he reminded the crowd, was in an area seismically vulnerable to an earthquake.
Gore used the term “the 3 R’s” (for “Reckless, Racist, and Rip-off” to describe the proposed pipeline project.
The recklessness was “in putting our drinking water at risk.” He noted that pipeline leaks have occurred “at least twice a day every day for the last 10 years” and most of the leaks go undetected.
In one of several biblical references, Gore likened the situation to the murder of Abel by Cain on a site “where crops never grew again.” He had previously recalled the saying of Christ: “Insofar as you do it to the least of these my brethren, you do it to me.”
On racism, Gore cited statistics. “65 percent of pipelines are located in black communities. The cancer rate in Southwest Memphis is five times higher than the national average, the rate of asthma five times more, the death rate of Black kids from asthma 10 times the norm.”
As general instances of the prevalence of racism, he mentioned the death of George Floyd, the heroism of John Lewis in leading a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Alabama. Gore excoriated Pettus, a former Confederate general, as having been a Klansman, and denounced the fact of a Nathan Bedford Forrest bust (now slated for removal) in the Tennessee state Capitol.
“It’s all the same thing; it’s racist!” Gore thundered.
As for the rip-off aspects of the pipeline, Gore said it would pump 17.6 gallons every day at a pressure greater than that required for a fire hose to reach the top of a 30-story building. That volume translated into the delivery of $24 million a day, Gore said, scornfully comparing that sum to the million dollars or so the would-be pipeline builders have “sprinkled on the path of least resistance” in payments to property owners for the granting of easements.
Gore pointed out that the Shelby County Commission will, this coming week and next, be considering what to do about properties alongside the projected path that the county acquired through tax defaults. At the moment there is an embargo against sale of the properties, but that could change.
‘Do not weary in well doing,” Gore said, with yet another biblical echo. “Political will is itself a renewable resource. Political will is itself a renewable resource. Thank you. Keep up the fight.”
JB
Cohen and Gore await their turns to speak.
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