Despite the intensity with which Norah Dooley discusses her outrage toward climate change, she manages to slip in hand gestures and punctuate her speech with facial expressions in an extraordinarily subtle manner. She is a storyteller and an activist. Dooleyteaches storytelling at Tufts’ Experimental College and at Lesley University, as well as in K-12th grade classrooms and in Alzheimer’s disease homes, she said. She sees her role as a teacher to empower people by “giving [students] the awareness of their own ability to be creative.”When Dooley was first introduced to storytelling while completing her Master of Education degree at Lesley University, she was struck by how the medium seemed to recognize the art inherent in daily communication. “Everyone uses storytelling because it’s how we organize our experience,” she said. “[Storytelling] was just a wonderful melding of my political activist quest for ways to interact with people around issues of justice and equality.”Recently, the act of engaging others through stories to promote change led Dooley to practice civil disobedience in opposition to the West Roxbury Lateral (WRL) pipeline under construction in West Roxbury, Mass. According to her blog, Dooley was arrested on Aug. 31 while physically blocking construction in the trench of the pipeline.“It was a way to raise the issue with my peers, friends and family,” she said. “You can send an email and say: ‘Hi everybody, it’s really important to pay attention to climate change.’ It has a lot more weight if you say: ‘Hi everybody, yesterday I jumped into a trench where there was a big-a** shovel of a huge earth digger and I stopped construction. I was arrested and I’m going to trial, and I would really like your support.’” Spectra Energy, the Texas-based company heading the pipeline project, states on its website that the Algonquin Incremental Market Project (AIM), of which the WRL pipeline is a component, “will provide the Northeast with a unique opportunity to secure a cost-effective, domestically-produced source of energy to support its current demand, as well as its future growth, for clean burning natural gas.”
A number of elected officials, including Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh, and many residents of West Roxbury, oppose the project. The grassroots campaignResist the Pipeline has raised concerns over the project's safety, including its proximity to an actively blasting quarry. The campaign also opposes the project based on the environmental impacts of natural gas, according to Dooley.In addition, another grassroots group opposing the pipeline, Stop the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, is concerned about the high-pressure gas the pipeline will be carrying, a quantity almost double that carried by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company pipeline that exploded in San Bruno, Calif. in 2010, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes.According to a Wicked Local Dedham article, over 140 individuals have been arrested in West Roxbury for carrying out acts of civil disobedience in an attempt to halt the pipeline project. The bulk occurred during summer 2016 as part of "escalation summer," a strategic, active effort to increase resistance, Dooley said.
She said the tactic of civil disobedience is being used to send a clear message to public officials.
“Your citizens are throwing themselves in the path of these big machines," she said. "What are you going to do about this?” Dooley heard about escalation summer at the end of the spring 2016 semester, and recalled telling her Tufts students about her plans to participate. Her decision to participate and get arrested was largely based on her frustration with the global community's failure to address the growing threat of climate change. In particular, she felt that the agreements reached during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2015, which included the first major global commitments to slow climate change, were being disregarded.
Fighting against the WRL pipeline, and specifically using her own body to stop it, was a way for Dooley to channel her frustration into action. She was outraged by the pipeline’s continuous development despite the community's and elected officials’ attempts to oppose it.“City officials were unable to stop this," Dooley said. "That’s a real problem for human beings and for our democracy.”She added that as a Tufts alum (A'76) and adjunct faculty member, she is also angry about Tufts’ indirect support of the pipeline through its membership in the New England Council, an alliance of New England-based organizations that endorsed the pipeline’s construction in 2014, according to Dooley. She is even more upset by Tufts’ failure to divest its endowment from fossil fuels despite pressure from staff and student groups. Dooley said she now plans to teach a course on the history of civil disobedience at Tufts’ ExCollege. She wants to empower students to confront larger issues such as climate change through activism and storytelling.It was, in fact, a story that Dooley heard as a teenager that drew her to a life of fighting for social justice. After moving to Boston at the age of 13, she attended Brookline High School, where she and her friends got involved with Cesar Chavez's farm workers movement. She convinced her mother to host a farmworker in their home as part of a campaign to “raise consciousness” by hearing the stories of real farmworkers. “This young man came, he was maybe 16, I was 15 at the time, so he was just a little older than me, and he told us what it was like to be a farm worker from his eyes, from his experience,” Dooley said. “The intense cold at night, the unbearable heat, the working conditions during the day, the lack of water, the way they would spray the fields with pesticides while they were still in the fields."
She said she was particularly moved by the story of his older sister, who died of leukemia.
"They were pretty sure it was from the multiple poisoning that they received [from working]," she said. "And as a 15-year old, I was just bowled over. How could this be true? This was the United States of America. How could people be treated in this way in the same country that I lived in? … I literally couldn’t sleep.”A few years later, Dooley was arrested for the first time, during a sit-in for the farm workers' cause protesting non-union produce. Still a young student, she was planning to leave the sit-in when police arrived making threats of arrest.
A number of elected officials, including Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh, and many residents of West Roxbury, oppose the project. The grassroots campaignResist the Pipeline has raised concerns over the project's safety, including its proximity to an actively blasting quarry. The campaign also opposes the project based on the environmental impacts of natural gas, according to Dooley.In addition, another grassroots group opposing the pipeline, Stop the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, is concerned about the high-pressure gas the pipeline will be carrying, a quantity almost double that carried by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company pipeline that exploded in San Bruno, Calif. in 2010, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes.According to a Wicked Local Dedham article, over 140 individuals have been arrested in West Roxbury for carrying out acts of civil disobedience in an attempt to halt the pipeline project. The bulk occurred during summer 2016 as part of "escalation summer," a strategic, active effort to increase resistance, Dooley said.
She said the tactic of civil disobedience is being used to send a clear message to public officials.
“Your citizens are throwing themselves in the path of these big machines," she said. "What are you going to do about this?” Dooley heard about escalation summer at the end of the spring 2016 semester, and recalled telling her Tufts students about her plans to participate. Her decision to participate and get arrested was largely based on her frustration with the global community's failure to address the growing threat of climate change. In particular, she felt that the agreements reached during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2015, which included the first major global commitments to slow climate change, were being disregarded.
Fighting against the WRL pipeline, and specifically using her own body to stop it, was a way for Dooley to channel her frustration into action. She was outraged by the pipeline’s continuous development despite the community's and elected officials’ attempts to oppose it.“City officials were unable to stop this," Dooley said. "That’s a real problem for human beings and for our democracy.”She added that as a Tufts alum (A'76) and adjunct faculty member, she is also angry about Tufts’ indirect support of the pipeline through its membership in the New England Council, an alliance of New England-based organizations that endorsed the pipeline’s construction in 2014, according to Dooley. She is even more upset by Tufts’ failure to divest its endowment from fossil fuels despite pressure from staff and student groups. Dooley said she now plans to teach a course on the history of civil disobedience at Tufts’ ExCollege. She wants to empower students to confront larger issues such as climate change through activism and storytelling.It was, in fact, a story that Dooley heard as a teenager that drew her to a life of fighting for social justice. After moving to Boston at the age of 13, she attended Brookline High School, where she and her friends got involved with Cesar Chavez's farm workers movement. She convinced her mother to host a farmworker in their home as part of a campaign to “raise consciousness” by hearing the stories of real farmworkers. “This young man came, he was maybe 16, I was 15 at the time, so he was just a little older than me, and he told us what it was like to be a farm worker from his eyes, from his experience,” Dooley said. “The intense cold at night, the unbearable heat, the working conditions during the day, the lack of water, the way they would spray the fields with pesticides while they were still in the fields."
She said she was particularly moved by the story of his older sister, who died of leukemia.
"They were pretty sure it was from the multiple poisoning that they received [from working]," she said. "And as a 15-year old, I was just bowled over. How could this be true? This was the United States of America. How could people be treated in this way in the same country that I lived in? … I literally couldn’t sleep.”A few years later, Dooley was arrested for the first time, during a sit-in for the farm workers' cause protesting non-union produce. Still a young student, she was planning to leave the sit-in when police arrived making threats of arrest.
Her decision changed, however, when she saw the police gathered outside and decided to stay in support of the other protesters. She was soon arrested by an officer, resulting in Dooley’s first and only other act of civil disobedience since her recent arrest in West Roxbury.
From the back of the police wagon, Dooley recalls overhearing a “stream of verbally abusive racist crap … about the women who [were] about to be arrested,” from the police officers.
“I was just like, 'OK, guys, that’s just about it. I know whose side I’m on. You aren’t on it, are you?'” she said.
Despite not intending to get arrested at the protest, Dooley knew then that she had made the right choice.
Since then, Dooley has not stopped incorporating activism and social justice into her career as a professional storyteller.
“I’m an activist because I love people,” she said. “I love seeing people succeed and do good things, and until we make the world a better place, I’d like to be with people who are making it a better place.”
