Neon-pink flags poke up from the black bottomland swamps here along a 210-mile stretch through east Georgia, rising from tangled underbrush and across murky creekbeds.

Each marks a 50-foot-wide path of the proposed Palmetto Pipeline that's sparked one of the most remarkable battles over property rights in Georgia in recent memory.

A powerful trifecta of business forces, environmental groups and political leaders has united to fight the proposal from Kinder Morgan, the Texas company charting the fuel pipeline's three-state course. Some of the landowners have already given up swaths of their property for towering transmission cables and roadways, but they draw the line at a pipeline for an area with no shortage of fuel.

State leaders in Georgia and South Carolina have recently thrown up new legal hurdles that threaten the construction. But for all the pushback, the project remains very much in play.

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U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, is interviewed during a live-to-tape recording of the Politically Georgia podcast at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 6, 2025. (Nathan Posner for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Credit: Nathan Posner for the AJC

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Tracy Woodard from InTown Cares (left) and Lauren Hopper from Mercy Care organization work with residents at the Copperton Street encampment in August 2024. 
(Miguel Martinez / AJC)

Credit: Miguel Martinez