Mapping Vicarious Proximity: Holistic and Dualistic Metaphors in a Mountain Valley Pipeline Public Hearing

ABSTRACT

This article applies Justin Mando’s 2016 coding scheme for vicarious proximity to a corpus of citizen comments at a public hearing about the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile natural gas pipeline that is planned to cut across sections of West Virginia and Virginia. This analysis reveals that vicarious proximity appeals map overwhelmingly onto the public hearing comments, further establishing a theory of vicarious proximity that can be used as a way to understand how people use place-based appeals to speak about contested environmental projects. An additional finding of metaphors, categorized as holistic and dualistic, was revealed in the analysis and extends our understanding of vicarious proximity by elucidating the ideologies, value systems, and cultural influences that inform citizens’ relationship to place. Based on these findings, this article argues for future investigation of vicarious proximity to include an attention to holistic and dualistic metaphors that determine how, or if, they extend our understanding of vicarious proximity as they did in the MVP public hearing.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural gas
• pipeline
• public hearing
• vicarious proximity
• metaphor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, KLS, upon reasonable request.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 As of July 2020, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has updated their public involvement process to encourage more online comments and accelerate the NEPA process, thus decreasing the amount of time for public input. It is yet to be seen how these changes will affect the future of public hearings (Federal Register, 2020).

2 FERC is the government organization who gave the green light for the MVP project and is responsible for ensuring that the pipeline meets environmental and safety standards.

3 I take my understanding of citizen from Phillips, Carvalho, and Doyle, who use the term citizen voices in an “everyday sense to refer to the articulation or representation of the perspectives or viewpoints of citizens” (p. 7). To be clear, I do not use the term citizen as a distinction of legal residency, but rather as a community member affected by a particular environmental project. And while anyone from any geographic location can weigh in on the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) debate, the citizen comments that I examine in this article are presented by members of local communities in Appalachia whose everyday lives are affected more directly by the MVP.

4 There are various ways that citizens can submit comments to FERC and VA DEQ at the MVP; in this article, the comments I refer to are verbal comments that citizens presented in person to VA DEQ at the MVP 401 Water Quality Certification Public Hearing.

5 In April 2020, the EPA published the Navigable Waters Protection Rule under the Clean Water Act that clarifies “navigable waters” and defines them to include “The territorial seas and traditional navigable waters; Perennial and intermittent tributaries to those waters; Certain lakes, ponds, and impoundments; and Wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters” (US EPA, 2020).

6 The MVP is constructed and owned by Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC, a joint venture of EQM Midstream Partners, LP; NextEra US Gas Assets, LLC; Con Edison Transmission, Inc.; WGL Midstream; and RGC Midstream, LLC (Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC).

7 While the Radford public hearing in August 2017 did not directly stop MVP construction at that time, the outcome of the pipeline remains uncertain as of this publication. Should the MVP project be terminated or downsized, public opposition is one of a number of things that would have contributed to that decision.

8 My understanding of variables throughout this essay is informed by Mando’s use of the term in which he does not use variables in the common social scientific or analytical sense but rather in a rhetorical sense to refer to the features of public hearing discourse that “are not critical to the construction” of place-based appeals but rather “commonly co-occur” with the critical features of vicarious proximity (2016, p. 356).

9 Karst terrain, or Karst topography, is a landscape that comprises numerous sinkholes, caves, and underground streams. Many Virginia citizens who spoke at the MVP public hearing cited the fragility and unpredictable nature of the terrain as a major concern of MVP pipeline construction.