This weeks reading “Virginia Way” is an incredible article that stuck out to me. The article was about a 61 year old grandmother that goes by the name of Theresa “Red” Terry. “Red” cofunded governors, CEO’s and the federal government when she was charged for trespassing on her own property. That sounds crazy!! But essentially what happened is that she had a family owned cabin in Bent Mountain, Virginia which was along the Blue Mountain Pipeline. This land was said to have contained natural gas from a gas pipeline and it needed to be used to export to other countries. Furthermore, a 2004 law was put in place by Virginia legislatures stating that property can be entered without permission. So Red decided that she was going to climb a tree and sit in a post her husband had built and said she was not coming down until they get off of her land. They didn’t like that very much and arrest warrants were sent out for trespassing and obstruction of justice. While all of this was going on, Red was being denied access to food and clean water or in other words… her human rights. They would only offer her the food and drink if she were to come down from the tree to get it, where they planned to apprehend her. With that being said, 35 days later she finally came down from the tree and technically “won” the bigger race. This is because the people that were doing this to her, their company received 300 pollution violations and were eventually sued.
The company mentioned in the article is Dominion Energy, which is a government electrical company. Dominion Energy was a powerful asset to the entire state of Virginia as it covered 2/3 of the states power before moving to a different state. While reading the article I discovered that Dominion Energy ran in the form of a monopoly and the things they did to “Red” and other people’s land was unreasonable and uncalled-for.
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