If you know where to look, you can spot them along the roadsides as you drive through the hilly farmland of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Short wooden stakes stand exactly 50 feet apart, topped with orange tape. The markers seem benign, but for many Lancaster residents, the threat they represent is anything but: These poles mark the proposed path of the Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline.

The Atlantic Sunrise project is a $3 billion expansion of natural gas giant Williams’s Transco pipeline network. Building it will require burying a 42-inch pipe under miles of Amish country, below farms and rivers, in the face of opposition from many Lancaster residents.

Many of the pipeline’s opponents are already in open rebellion. A group of nuns who own land on the proposed pipeline’s path refused to grant Williams an easement on their property. Williams threatened to use eminent domain, and now the nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ have sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in U.S. District Court. They argue the pipeline’s construction contradicts their deeply held religious beliefs and that using eminent domain to take their land is a violation of their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.

Sister Bernice Klostermann reads a prayer during a service at the small chapel built in the path of the proposed Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline by The Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a group of Catholic nuns that support environmental justice, in Columbia, Pennsylvania, July 30, 2017.
A post demarcating the proposed 50-foot-wide easement for the planned Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline near Buck, Pennsylvania, July 17, 2017.

Top: Sister Bernice Klostermann reads a prayer during a service at the small chapel built in the path of the proposed Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline by the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a group of Catholic nuns that supports environmental justice, in Columbia, Pa., July 30, 2017. Bottom: A post demarcating the proposed 50-foot-wide easement for the planned Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline near Buck, Pa., on July 17, 2017.

Photo: Charles Mostoller for The Intercept

The Adorers, a small order of Catholic sisters with a commitment to social and environmental justice, first established themselves in the small farming community of Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1925. There they founded St. Anne’s, a home for the elderly. More recently, they purchased a small forest preserve near their original ministry in Illinois. Beyond the immediate disruption to their land that the pipeline would inflict, the sisters argue that it also promotes fracking, which they consider harmful to the environment.

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The Intercept – Charles Mostoller – 08.20.2017