almost OUt of stock

March 19, 2024: Except for a few copies that can be ordered online from our printer (you can purchase one here), we are out of copies of Fractured Sanctuary.

Containing articles written between 2014 and 2022 and published on the Appalachian Chronicle, it is an account of reluctant, citizen activists who rose up organically in grassroots resistance to the natural gas industry as it has attempted to complete two, 42” pipelines carrying natural gas hundreds of miles through the Appalachian Mountains from the fracking fields of northern West Virginia, southwest Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. It is a first draft of a chapter in a history that is old. The fossil fuel industry has siphoned off billions of dollars of wealth – timber, oil, coal, gas – from Appalachia for well over a century, benefiting corporations, but devastating people and the earth.

We donated the vast majority to influencers – community activists, environmentalists, politicians, reporters, professors, public health officials, emergency preparedness officials and others — in hopes that it would play a small role in helping to educate people in time to help stop the MVP. That did not happen. Still, it is a valuable historical record of the abusive, cruel, bullying and deadly tactics of the fossil-fuel industry in West Virginia, Virginia and beyond. People’s health is compromised. Their homesteads ruined if not outright stolen from them. Entire watersheds are ruined, causing people to lack pure water. The environment is destroyed. The air is unbreathable. The pipelines are dangerous. And there is more.

‘From Almost Heaven to Almost Hell’

This is where you can begin your journey of the many stories of people who have learned that the fossil fuel industry is turning Appalachia “From almost heaven to almost hell,” as Myra Bonhage-Hale, a longtime resident of Lewis County, West Virginia, said before moving away to eastern Maryland to escape the MVP. You can read about her in the book.

While the MVP was approved through Congressional legislation upheld by Federal Courts in the summer of 2023, those concerned about public health, governmental overreach, abuse through tactics like eminent domain, and protecting the natural world from pollution will find the accounts instructive.

destruction continues

The MVP, as it finishes construction, is continuing to cause extensive damage to property, people, rivers, roads, wildlife and more. The most recent example we know of happened in Big Isaac, W.Va., where we report that the MVP’s ROW is the culprit for numerous flash floods, accusations the MVP and community authorities dispute. But science, pictures and the testimony of the farmers that have spent their life on the land suggests otherwise.