In the canopy of Yellow Finch Forest in Southwest Virginia, activists have lived in trees for more than two years, blocking the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline—a fracked gas project that would carve through sacred land and working forests. They sleep in wooden platforms suspended above the ground, cook on camp stoves, endure cold that tries to drive them down. They block access roads with their bodies. For over two years, they have simply said: we're here to stay.
In October 2020, artist Høly River released "Spirit Riot," a four-minute song that captures the spirit of this resistance. The track doesn't shout. It doesn't need to. The voice is clear, the lyrics cut through the corporate language with the precision of an axe, and underneath it all runs a sound that feels almost sacred—the sound of people who have chosen to stand their ground.
What makes "Spirit Riot" remarkable is not just the song itself, but what surrounds it. The video contains footage collected over two years by multiple filmmakers: Laney Sullivan, Christopher Risch, and Mara Eve Robbins. This is not a quick documentary rushed to capitalize on a moment of protest. This is an artistic response that grew from sustained presence in the struggle.
The Long Campaign at Yellow Finch
The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a 300-mile natural gas infrastructure project designed to move fracked gas extracted in West Virginia through Virginia and into wider distribution networks. On a map, it's a line. On the ground, it means construction crews cutting through forests, crossing waterways, boring under indigenous sacred sites, and threatening the water supplies of rural communities.
Environmental organizations and local activists began organizing resistance years before construction commenced. Some chose to occupy the forest itself—a tactic known as tree-sitting. This practice has deep roots in environmental resistance, dating back to the 1980s, when activists in California would climb into redwoods to prevent logging. It's a tactic that combines the symbolic and the practical: your body becomes an obstacle to the machinery of destruction.
By the time Høly River created "Spirit Riot," the tree sitters at Yellow Finch had been in the forest for over two years. That's not a dramatic occupation that catches news cycles. That's a practice. Two years means enduring summer storms and winter cold. Two years means watching the same group of activists day after day, maintaining food systems and first aid stations, supporting the psychological demands of long-term resistance. Two years means your local community becomes the legal observers, the cooks, the medics, the people who show up.
The song's description carries an instruction: "Gratitude to all those unseens heroes who have spent years of their lives protecting the environment." The word unseens is precise. These activists were not seeking national recognition. Most people outside Southwest Virginia had never heard of Yellow Finch. Most people did not know their names.
From the City to the Tops of Trees
"Spirit Riot" opens with personal testimony:
"I come from the mountain the valley and the river field, / I walked my way from the city and the bright lights to the tops of trees."
This is a geography of transformation. The speaker has moved from urban disembodiment to embodied presence. This narrative—the journey from city to nature, the search for authenticity and aliveness that draws people to walk away from the built world—has deep roots in American culture. But Høly River is not narrating this as romance or escape. The movement from "city and bright lights" to "tops of trees" is presented as a necessity, not an option. Something called the speaker toward commitment.
What follows is a declaration:
"Yes, I know my nature / It's deep inside of me / and we're here to stay."
Notice how the word "nature" operates on multiple levels. It means the natural world—the forest, the river, the mountain. It means one's own inner nature, the part of a person that recognizes itself as part of the living world. And it means the nature of this moment: the moment when a person decides that some things cannot be sacrificed.
"We're here to stay" is not a prediction of victory. It's a commitment to presence. It's what every person in a tree platform says to themselves at 3 a.m. when it's twenty degrees and they're thinking about their families and their warm beds. We're here to stay means: this is the decision I've made.
The Machinery of Lies
The song then shifts from personal testimony into visionary language. "See it coming down," Høly River sings. The phrase repeats, incantatory, and with each repetition, the speaker catalogs what's falling:
"Your iron cranes / Your concrete walls / Your email suits / Your permit cards / Your busy eyes / Your high rise thrones / Your shadow lines / Your god of lies."
Listen to the precision of this language. "Iron cranes" and "concrete walls" are the physical machinery of extraction. But "email suits" and "permit cards"—these name the bureaucratic and administrative structures that make extraction possible. These are the people who work in climate-controlled offices, who shuffle paperwork that permits the destruction. Permit cards is particularly sharp: the bureaucratic instrument that authorizes harm, that says, on official letterhead, this destruction is legal.
"Busy eyes" and "high rise thrones" capture the mindset of corporate power: distraction, distance, elevation. The people making decisions about pipelines rarely see the forests they're destroying. They're elevated, looking down from towers, their eyes moving between spreadsheets and quarterly reports.
And then: "Your god of lies"—the false god of profit that justifies everything.
The song doesn't say the pipeline is wrong because it will leak, or because the climate crisis demands we stop burning gas. Those arguments exist, in environmental organizations' white papers and scientific journals. What the song does is name something deeper: the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of a system that would destroy a forest, poison a watershed, displace a community—all for distant quarterly returns.
"See it coming down / See it coming down." The repetition builds. It's not a prediction. It's a spiritual affirmation—a way of saying that systems built on lies eventually collapse of their own weight. History shows it. Unjust power structures fall. Forests grow back. Water remembers itself.
Two Years of Witness
What distinguishes "Spirit Riot" is the video. This is not just a song; it's a visual artifact. The footage collected by Sullivan, Risch, and Robbins over two years creates a document of sustained resistance.
This collaborative process mirrors the nature of activism itself. The blockade at Yellow Finch was never the work of a single person. It required the people in the trees, yes, but also the people bringing food, the legal observers, the medics, the teachers who showed up to bear witness, and the artists who translated this resistance into language and image that could travel.
By filming over the full duration of the blockade's critical phase, these three documentarians did something essential: they created a visual archive of persistence. Their footage became inseparable from the song's power. When you watch "Spirit Riot," you're not just hearing testimony; you're seeing it—the actual forest, the actual trees, the actual faces of people who chose to live in wood platforms for their beliefs.
The Tradition of Activist Song
There's a long lineage of activist music in the United States: the spirituals of enslaved people, the folk songs of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war anthems of the 1960s, the hip-hop that documents police violence and systemic oppression. Each era has produced artists who felt that the moment demanded song—that music could carry witness and vision where words alone could not.
"Spirit Riot" belongs to this tradition, but it also extends it. This is not stadium rock or mass protest music designed to move thousands in a single moment. This is intimate testimony—the voice of someone who has spent time in the forest, who has been shaped by the presence of people willing to risk comfort for their beliefs.
The song also reflects a contemporary understanding that activism cannot be separated from spirituality. The blockade at Yellow Finch was sustained by people who understood the forest as sacred, who believed that some things have intrinsic worth beyond their market value. The song honors this understanding. In choosing to live in trees, in choosing to refuse permission, these activists were making a spiritual claim: the Earth is not for sale.
Høly River's "Spirit Riot" amplifies this claim. It takes the experience of the blockade—the cold nights, the bureaucratic battles, the quiet acts of resistance—and transforms it into something that can travel, that can reach people who will never sleep in a tree platform. This is what songs do. They carry witness from the specific place to the wider world.
Where to Go From Here
The full video for "Spirit Riot" is available on the Høly River YouTube channel. If you're interested in the Yellow Finch blockade and ongoing pipeline resistance in Appalachia, organizations working to protect forests and water resources continue the effort. Consider supporting environmental organizations that focus on indigenous sovereignty, water protection, and climate justice in affected regions.
For musicians and artists: this is what it looks like when art takes a genuine stand, when a creator uses their skill not for acclaim but for witness. For activists: this is what it looks like when your work is honored, when your sacrifice is seen and amplified by those with platforms. For anyone seeking to understand how cultures change—it happens through people willing to say no, and through artists brave enough to sing their names into existence.
