Graphic Novel Illustrates Fight Against The Mountain Valley Pipeline

This conversation originally aired in the Feb. 9, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline took a decade to build from the time it was first announced, and was fiercely opposed that entire time by people who live on or near its 303-mile route through Virginia and West Virginia.

Now that fight is commemorated in a graphic novel, titled HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. It’s written and drawn by Denali Sai Nalamalapu, an activist who participated in the fight against the natural gas pipeline. 

Inside Appalachia Mason Adams spoke with Nalamalapu.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Adams: Please introduce yourself.

Nalamalapu: I’m a climate organizer and comic artist based out of southwest Virginia. I grew up in southern Maine and southern India, and then came here a couple years ago, and have been working in the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Adams: Which came first for you? Was it the mountains or was it the pipeline fight? 

Nalamalapu: I guess it’s a bit of a mix, because I lived in the Shenandoah Valley first, before the pipeline fight. I would spend every morning living there, walking in the pastures around my partner’s mother’s house, and I fell in love with the light over the mountains, just the way it changed. I fell in love with the way the sun rose and set over the mountains. Then I started working to stop the pipeline through a grassroots organization that’s been leading the fight. That brought me to this specific part of southwestern Virginia.

Adams: As someone who’s covered the pipeline battle, I’m struck by Holler and that it’s drawn in a visual medium, because I think that pipeline fight was largely out of the public eye, and you didn’t necessarily see a whole lot of photos. For a lot of people, it was something they read about in black-and-white text. Your book visualizes it. What made you want to go the comics route for this particular story you’re telling? 

Nalamalapu: That exact point is really important to me as a climate communicator and a comics artist: the reality that climate change is often in black-and-white text. It’s often something we read about or we’re shying away from photos of it. The photos of Hurricane Helene are heartbreaking, and oftentimes the black-and-white text is accessible to only certain people. Oftentimes, in my experience, it’s retired people who have the time to read articles either in the paper on their phone. It’s really important to me that, in order to secure a livable future in the face of climate change, these stories are accessible to young people, to working people and to people with different attention spans or reading abilities or life patterns. This book came out of me sitting down with some friends and thinking about people who have been fighting the MVP for — at that time it was almost eight years. What are the ways we haven’t communicated the fight as effectively as we could have? What came to mind was accessible illustration that could get younger people or school-age people or just busy people’s attention.

Adams: There are so many people who were involved in that opposition, some of whom went by pseudonyms or who were never publicly linked to that fight. How did you choose the activists who are featured in this book?

Nalamalapu: I actually did a series of comic strips that was featured on the Appalachians Against Pipelines Instagram page, and those comic strips were all anonymous. They were all critters from the wild. In one of the comic strips, the main character is a bear. What happens in the comic strip is based off of someone’s real story, but that person is kept anonymous. The part of the fight that was a big part of how powerful the resistance was the direct action, where a lot of people, for their safety, remained anonymous. It’s definitely a part of my work that I’m really interested in, is how do we safely uplift people’s stories when there’s so much surveillance from different entities that can really put them in danger. We’re seeing escalated charges against climate activists, so making sure to keep people as safe as possible. 

For this book, I really wanted [readers] to be able to connect with actual people, because I think that before you can connect with more anonymous versions of these stories, it’s helpful to have people who look like your grandmother or look like your friend who is Indigenous to this land and is a big part in cultivating the land and the future for it. I really wanted people to connect to that. The real ethos of this book is, what does it look like for ordinary people to stand up against a pipeline, and how can you, being the reader, take your skills that you already have to fight for a climate safe future or a livable future. That’s why I ended up going with real people. Also, what sort of identities were most prevalent in the fight? In the MVP fight and in a lot of pipeline fights, women and queer people are at the front line. Of course, there are a few men throughout every pipeline fight, but readers will notice that this book is entirely women-identifying people and one queer person. That decision was organically made. For me, it wasn’t an intentional decision.

Adams: There’ve been a lot of attempts to diminish pipeline fighters, and I think probably even more so now that the pipeline has been completed. So why is this work revisiting? Why does this movement still matter?

Nalamalapu: It’s a strategy of our opposition to minimize the work of pipeline fighters and anti-fossil fuel advocates across the U.S. I think that any time people who believe in climate change believe that narrative, they are believing a narrative that was propagated by the fossil fuel industry. Our natural narrative is to speak to the power of our community and of our stories and influencing people. That’s what we’ve done since the beginning of time, is tell the stories of our elders and tell stories of hope. I think that our natural inclination should be and is to tell these stories like this pipeline fight from a hopeful perspective. I mean, the pipeline wasn’t able to be built for 10 years, and a lot of that was because of their own wrongdoing and their own recklessness, and because the people who first saw the pipeline be proposed knew that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Right before the Mountain Valley Pipeline went into service, part of it exploded on Bent Mountain during water testing. Many of the communities around the pipeline said, “We knew this would happen. We told you, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, that this would happen, and you didn’t listen to us.” So I think that when we fall into narratives around, “Oh, the mountain valley pipeline was built, so that means it’s a loss,” or “The fossil fuel activists are up against too much, they’ll never win,” we’re just mimicking our oppressors. Instead, what I would like to see and what I would like Holler to contribute to is a narrative around how amazing and powerful it is to see people stand up for the love of their community and the love of their planet in the face of arguably the most resourced corporations and industry in the world. 

The other aspect of this book that’s important to me that people pick up on is the power of the Appalachian working class. It’s very well known in Appalachia that people distort realities [and] create stereotypes. Stereotypes are sometimes true, and they’re often not. One of those stereotypes, especially given election realities, is that people are to be blamed for the politicians that they elect. I want people to read this book in the context of this place that many elite liberals and others cast aside, and realize there is a deep history of people fighting for their land and their communities, from indigenous communities to mining communities to pipeline resistance communities. Many of these people also happen to be working class. They happen to be juggling full-time jobs. They happen to be single-handedly raising kids. I want Holler to add a dynamism to some of these characters’ lives, so that people who grew up in the Northeast like I did are more open to the reality that the people in Appalachia are really on the front line of the climate crisis. If we leave certain communities behind in our elitism or our urgency, we will lose. We need to bring everyone along. We need to bring the working class along. We need to make sure Indigenous communities are at the forefront of the movement. Like some of the characters in this book show, we need to think about what direction our movement is being led towards and who’s leading it. For example, Crystal Mello in this book, she has a very diverse family. Some of her family members are Black, and from that experience, she tells the story of how she came to realize the realities of this country and how that shaped her resistance. I’m hopeful that this book can contribute to that broader conversation about adding nuance to those lazy stereotypes about this region.

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Denali Sai Nalamalapu’s upcoming book is HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. It’s available in May from Timber Press.