Welcome to Dispatches from the Frontlines

Stories directly from the leaders fighting – and winning – the battle for a fossil free future.

We watch big important fights across our Twitter feeds and newspapers, and we cheer on our pipeline fighting comrades heartily wherever they are. At the same time, it can feel so mysterious that our brave and merry rag-tag band, seven years in, draws relatively little attention. Thank you for making us feel seen.

To borrow from the Choctaw prayer that Jason Crazy Bear Campos-Keck opened with:

Because you showed up, you hold my love always

Because you showed up, tomorrow we will win

When I got this note in my inbox, from an activist fighting to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline, I knew I had to find a way to share it with others. I sent it to my friends, my colleagues, and my family, because when I read it, I felt rage at the injustice, but also inspiration from the resilience of those fighting on the frontlines. It captured, for me, everything that those in power have been ignoring about the climate movement – and why we need to shift gears, and fast.

My colleagues at the Equation Campaign and I had just returned from North Carolina, where the Southgate extension of the Mountain Valley Pipeline is underway. All we did was travel for a weekend to join protests and celebrations. When we returned, we felt we had come into contact with a source of the power that we know needs to be harnessed and amplified if we are going win the fight to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Hence the dispatches that you will be able to read, here, in the weeks to come: firsthand accounts from those on the frontlines. These are people fighting to protect what they love — their lands, their families, their homes. We are all on the frontlines of the climate crisis.  We have a lot to learn from the folks who have been confronting these industries for decades — they are showing us all how to fight, and how to win.

Our first dispatch, which you’ll receive next week, is by Justin J. Pearson of Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP). Justin was one of the inspirational leaders of the grassroots movement that stopped the Byhalia pipeline from being laid through the predominantly Black neighborhoods of southwest Memphis.

In Justin’s dispatch, you will read about how the campaign began, for him and so many others: marching down Beale Street last summer protesting George Floyd’s murder, chanting “We Can’t Breathe.” “Now,” Justin writes, “as I engaged for the first time with the data behind that smell of rotten eggs I had grown up with, I realized how much the fight to stop the Byhalia pipeline was against a system denying us the right to breathe.”

Following Justin’s dispatch, we are thrilled to bring you a firsthand account of COP 26 from one of the mothers of the global Parents For Future movement. After that, we’ll have dispatches from the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance” that stopped the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Water Protectors resisting Line 3, and more.

These are the climate leaders we must listen to and follow. We at Equation Campaign can’t wait to share their stories and strategies with you. We hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us.

- Katie Redford & the Equation Campaign team

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Hear directly from the leaders who are fighting – and winning – the battle for a fossil-free future through our monthly publication.