Written by University of Mary Washington Student, Abbie Rogers.

I stand in solidarity with students at Michigan State University because I believe there is no room for corporate-induced environmental determinism in on college campuses.

Hailing from a quaint but growing apple-producing town nestled into the Shenandoah Valley, I was treated to the childhood we all deserve: finding deer tracks in the snow each winter and crushing up wild berries for makeshift ink in the spring. I had clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and countless natural havens like those Muir once wrote about: “places to play in, and places to pray in.” Without even having to earn it, I was given a clean and untainted slate with which to map my future.

Peaks away, my brothers and sisters in Appalachia had a very different upbringing. Insatiable corporate greed and its obsession with cheap energy quite literally bombed their mountain homes to claw at the coal underneath. Rivers ran red, from cadmium, arsenic and mercury leaching while entire species disappeared, including (but not limited to) the humans who lived there--for if the blasting, poisoned water and legal debt didn’t kill them, the doubled risk of cancer sure would. The environment for my neighbors was nothing short of inhibiting, a Jacob Marley-like chain they didn’t even begin to deserve.