Just over a year ago, fifty-one-year-old Greg Yost decided to quit his job. It wasn’t because he didn’t like it—he loved teaching math to ninth graders in Madison County, just outside Asheville. But he had other concerns: namely, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a multibillion dollar, six hundred-mile project that would carry fracked gas through Virginia, West Virginia, and eight counties in eastern North Carolina.

Yost was worried about the project’s environmental consequences and the precedent it would set for the state. He saw the proposal as a make-or-break moment.

“If this infrastructure gets built, it’s there for the next thirty or forty years, and it yokes us to this price-volatile, very dangerous fuel,” he says. “If we build this stuff, we can’t build the clean energy solutions that the state really needs.”

That’s what compelled Yost one day, while walking along the Appalachian Trail, to decide to give up his job and dedicate his life full-time to stopping the pipeline from being built.

He’s been keeping busy. For the past nine days, Yost and other pipeline opponents have been taking part in a water-only fast in front of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality office. The agency has a deadline to approve or deny a water quality permit necessary for the pipeline’s construction by September 19. If approved, the pipeline, which is being built by Duke Energy, Dominion, and Southern Gas Company, would traverse Northampton, Halifax, Nash, Wilson, Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, and Robeson counties.

Yost was joined by several environmental activists and clergy members, including Reverend Mac Legerton of the N.C. Alliance To Protect Our People & The Places We Live, and

Susannah Tuttle, director of



here’s no reason why we would need to become dependent on the most dangerous and destructive form of fossil fuel that we now know exists,” says Legerton, a minister in Robeson County. “But we’re up against a major company who sees now that the only future that they have to make maximum profit is in methane gas. As coal and oil diminish as forms of energy, they are rapidly trying to get states to become dependent on fracked methane unnatural gas so that we move as rapidly toward renewable energy as we can.”

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We all understand the tremendous weight that Duke carries in this state, and how traditionally if Duke wants it, Duke gets it,” says Yost. “It will be a courageous political decision when the Cooper administration decides to weigh in and deny this permit.”