A group walking from Sidney to Jefferson stopped in Oneonta Thursday, Sept. 25, as part of an effort to raise awareness of and oppose the proposed Constitution Pipeline.
The participants of the Women’s Water Walk oppose the construction of the Constitution Pipeline, a proposal by Williams Companies to build a natural gas pipeline from Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, to Schoharie County.
The proposal stalled around 2016 after the state Department of Environmental Conservation declined to issue a water quality permit. The Trump administration has pushed for the project, and the proposal is moving through regulatory process once again. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is reviewing the project and has an open comment period on its docket.
On Thursday, the walkers stopped at the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society’s sanctuary in Oneonta.
An organizer for the walk, Bethany Yarrow of West Fulton in Schoharie County, said about 25 people registered for the full length of the walk, and that additional participants have joined for portions of the walk along the way.
“It’s not a protest; it’s a prayer,” Yarrow said.
Walkers said they opposed the project for a variety of reasons: its immediate environmental impacts through construction; potential environmental impacts should there be leaks or other damage; how fossil fuels worsen the climate crisis; and other arguments.
“It’s really important that when things come to you,” Yarrow said, “for people to find whatever their gift is and try and use it to make that thing not be a danger to their community, to their children, to the land, to the water.”
Andrew Mason, co-president of the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society, said “our main concern is the fragmentation of the forests along the ridge tops that will happen if the pipeline goes through.”
“They cut a very wide right of way through the woods,,” he said, “and the birds that use that habitat need unbroken forests, large tracts of unbroken forests to nest successfully, and they’re already at risk.”
The walk comes at a time when energy costs have risen nationwide, and when many solar and wind projects in New York have faced opposition.
Yarrow attributed much of that opposition to an Upstate social media influencer named Alexandra Fasulo, who recently founded the nonprofit American Land Rescue Fund. ALRF describes itself on its website as “using the power of law to defend America’s farmland, wildlife, and open spaces from industrial exploitation disguised as ‘green energy.’”
Fasulo’s profile has grown significantly during the past year; she has appeared with Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman and been covered by national media outlets.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t believe in climate (change),” Yarrow said, “but I think that people do recognize that the weather is changing.”
Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, an indigenous Mohawk elder, joined the walk and was at the sanctuary. She said that the effort to oppose the pipeline was an extension of her ancestral ties to the land, land which her ancestors were violently removed from.
The planet is “not a non-living thing,” she said. “It’s a living thing; it lives and breathes, breathes air and drinks water. It is just like you and me sitting here right now.”
“There was a 3-year-old boy that walked with us the first day,” she said, crying.
“He’s walking, and he keeps looking up at me, and asking me stuff, and he’s telling me things, and he’s so proud, and he’s so happy,” she said, adding that she held his hand and went to the front of the walk.
“I’m praying that he doesn’t have to carry it in this kind of way, where there’s something to come up against,” she said. “That is my job.”