On April 5, there will be a march near Greenfield to protest a proposed pipeline that would carry fracked gas from near Albany, New York to near Boston. March organizers say the public is invited to join. Fracked gas is a fossil fuel; it causes climate change. The world's leading scientists say climate change is a serious threat to earth's ability to support human life.

The five mile march will be from Deerfield, Massachusetts to Turner's Falls, Massachusetts. The start time and the exact starting point will be announced soon at www.PipelinePilgrimage.org, organizers say.

The April 5 march is part of a 143 mile march that will follow the proposed pipeline route from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Dracut, Massachusetts. “We need to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure,” Meg Klepack told the Valley Post on March 18. She is one of the march organizers and will be starting medical school at the University of Vermont in August. Klepack said she can be reached via the e-mail address at the above web site or by phone at (607) 592-9328.

More information about the pipeline is at:

www.valleypost.org/node/1021

History shows that marches and rallies are effective, especially when combined with non-violent civil disobedience. Here is some evidence, starting with the most recent.

Marches and rallies preceded the shutdown of Vermont Yankee (in December 2014), Shoreham (in 1989), Yankee Atomic, Millstone I, Rancho Seco, Maine Yankee and at least a dozen other U.S. nuclear power plants. Thousands of peaceful protesters were arrested. A 2007 article in the Journal of American History did not hesitate to give protesters credit for the decline of the nuclear power industry: "The protesters lost their battle [when Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant opened in 1984], but in a sense they won the larger war, for nuclear plant construction ended across the country in 1986." More on this history is at:

www.valleypost.org/2011/03/14/japan-quake-puts-valley-nuke-local-spotlight

In the 1990s, thousands of people attended rallies in favor of saving the ancient Headwaters redwood forest in northern California from logging plans by Maxxam Corporation. Hundreds of people were arrested for non-violent, civil disobedience. In 1996, the federal government bought 7,500 acres to create the Headwaters Forest Preserve.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested for protesting peacefully many times. The victories of the movement for racial justice that he led are told in a book that has sold more than 2 million copies, “A People’s History of the United States” by Boston University professor Howard Zinn. That book tells the stories of hundreds of Americans who were arrested as they advanced the cause of peace and justice. Zinn was himself arrested several times.

The labor movement’s mass strikes of the 1930s built the American middle class and created the weekend, and the 40 hour workweek. (Before the movement, Americans typically worked 80 hours a week). Peaceful strikers were routinely beaten and frequently killed by employer-paid thugs or police.

Between 1917 and the victory in 1920 of the movement for women's right to vote, members of the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, were arrested several times for non-violent civil disobedience at the White House. They held dozens of mass marches.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in 1818 in Maryland. He escaped slavery and became a journalist and anti-slavery activist. Douglass wrote: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”