The Sunday Read: 'The Valve Turners'

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most Americans treat climate change seriously but not literally — they accept the science, worry about forecasts but tell themselves that someone else will get serious about fixing the problem very soon. The Valve Turners, on the other hand, take climate change both very seriously and very literally. In the fall of 2016, the group of five environmental activists — all in their 50s and 60s, most with children and one with grandchildren — closed off five cross-border crude oil pipelines, including the Keystone. On today’s Sunday Read, who are the Valve Turners and what are their motivations? This story was written by Michelle Nijhuis and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a paid advertisement from BetterHelp Therapy Online.
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0:19.0	variety of expertise.
0:21.0	Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash daily pod.
0:25.6	I'm Michelle Nyhouse and in February 2018, I wrote a story for The New York Times magazine
0:35.6	about a group of five climate activists who called themselves the Valve Turner's.
0:41.4	They're a group of climate activists who, in late 2016, really pushed the boundaries
0:46.8	of what we think of as civil disobedience.
0:51.3	They got up very early in the morning. They traveled to different small towns on the
0:56.8	US-Canadian border and in a coordinated action, shut off major pipelines that carry crude
1:04.6	oil from Canada to the United States.
1:10.1	And these people, they come from a long line of activists who have handcuffed themselves
1:15.9	to bulldozers who have laid down in the road in front of logging trucks who have spent
1:22.3	months living in the tops of redwood trees to protect them from destruction.
1:28.3	But while most of these actions were defensive, the Valve Turner's see their actions as distinctly
1:35.1	offensive.
1:36.4	They're actively interrupting what some people would call business as usual, but what they
1:42.0	see as ongoing environmental destruction.
1:46.8	But there's something else that's always struck me.
	...

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