I'm currently about 20 meters above the ground.
It's a long way down.
And I am suspended on this portaledge between two trees,
one over there and another way over there.
And the reason that I'm here is because those trees are scheduled to be cut down
But i'm not here in order just to protect those trees
See the reason that they're scheduled to be cut
is because there is a plan to build a pipeline
An oil pipeline, specifically the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline,
right here, right beneath me.
And I'm occupying this canopy in protest of that
And this won't be a video about those trees
it won't even be a video about the trans mountain pipeline,
but a video about all pipelines and a video about our climate,
because we can't be building more pipelines,
and expect to have a habitable future on this planet.
So I'm up here risking my personal safety...
(It is a long way down!)
and I'm up here risking being arrested
because this is the most important issue of our time.
And there is something that we can do about it.
First let me give you a little tour of my very very tiny house.
This is it. This is all of it
There's some bananas... my laptop.
There's not really very much.
Everything I have here needs to be secured down, including myself,
I'm going to be tied into this rope setup the entire time I'm here.
Most of my stuff is in bags dangling beneath me
I'm planning on providing a bit more context about this in future videos while I'm up here
But I want to start this project by acknowledging that I'm on the unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh and Kwikwetlem First Nations.
I just spent my first night out here and I actually slept okay,
despite the relentless traffic and noise and trains.
Um, but I figured that while the camp is waking up,
I would give you a little bit of context about the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline (or TMX for short).
That's the pipeline that I'm protesting against
And it's a pipeline that if it is built,
will span from the Alberta tar sands
all the way, one thousand, one hundred and fifty kilometers,
through here in metro Vancouver, BC, Canada
and off the coast through the Salish Sea onto tankers,
and will it will ship oil that entire distance.
If it's completed the pipeline expansion would nearly triple the existing pipeline's capacity
which would add an additional 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the air every single day.
Which for context is about the emissions of Belgium.
It's like adding another Belgium to the planet in terms of carbon.
Now while these sorts of calculations just aren't perfect,
experts estimate that with every 3700 tons of CO2 that we add to the atmosphere,
it will exacerbate climate change to the degree that an additional human will die from floods or fire or famine.
And that means that by adding this pipeline expansion,
a human will die every 21 minutes by those estimates (and again it's not perfect),
but it gives a sense of the magnitude of this problem,
and a magnitude of this specific pipeline.
We simply cannot be building more pipeline, more oil and gas infrastructure,
and expect to have a liveable, habitable planet in the future.
And that is why I'm up here.
And I'm actually not the first person to be up here on this ledge.
That was Dr. Tim tacaro who is a professor of public health,
and he spent the last 10 days up here before I got up here and swapped out.
When it comes to stopping this pipeline
non-violent civil disobedience is our only remaining option.
When the company originally planning to build the pipeline decided to back out,
the federal government just bought the pipeline.
And then there was a supreme court case against the pipeline
and the supreme court decided to approve it, and it continued.
And now our only remaining options to stop it,
are to either convince the companies that are insuring the pipeline to drop their insurance,
or to convince the liberal government, specifically the prime minister Justin Trudeau,
to halt the construction of the pipeline.
And our only way to achieve that,
is through non-violent civil disobedience or direct action like this,
to physically get in the way of the pipeline.
And I'm not recommending that everybody simply go up into trees and block the pipeline
But there are ways that anyone, anywhere in the world can be involved in this sort of action
in a way that is comfortable for you, in a way that is possible for you,
and in a way that makes a big and real difference for the climate.
Now while I'm up on this portaledge alone,
I am not here at this site alone.
And I wouldn't be up here if I hadn't seen the amount of support on the ground.
There's an entire camp of people here supporting this, supporting me.
And when I saw the amount of support for Tim,
both on the ground and in the news and people on social media supporting it,
I decided that I could do this.
And that brings me to the point about getting arrested,
which is that I'm ready to do that. I'm ready to get arrested.
And I do think that in order to make a real difference to the climate,
in order to take real action on the climate emergency,
people are gonna need to get arrested. That's just how how it is.
But that doesn't mean that that is the only avenue available to people.
And I'm not suggesting that that is something everyone should be trying to do.
If you're not comfortable with this level of risk,
or if you don't have the same privileges that I do to take this level of risk to get arrested,
that's okay, because there are so many other ways that you can help in the climate movement.
So i'm asking you to do three things:
First, you can call or email your local representative in parliament or in congress,
and tell them that you don't support new fossil fuel infrastructure, that your vote hinges on it.
Secondly, you can join the climate action movement, wherever you are in the world.
I'll leave some links in the description to a bunch of organizations,
but some of the ones that I recommend that may be near you are:
Extinction Rebellion 350.org
The Sunrise Movement, and The School Strikes 4 the Future
I'll also leave some links to some local ones here in Vancouver,
if you're hoping to get involved in this pipeline protest.
And thirdly, in order to build a climate movement, we need to talk about climate change.
We need to make it a part of our daily conversations,
and we need to really get the word out.
So I'm asking you to share this video with your friends and with your family on social media wherever you can.
We need you to help get the word out to stop this pipeline,
and all future pipelines and all existing pipelines,
so get the word out.
If you're watching this video as it's coming out, I'm still up here...
Because I'm actually hoping to release videos every day that I'm up here.
I'm planning to stay here for a while
I'm also going to be live tweeting the experience...
#KurtisInATree, I guess...
and I'm hoping to provide more context about this pipeline,
and about the entire climate crisis that we are in, as we go along
And I just want to end by saying a huge thank you to everyone here at camp that's supporting me,
and everyone online and around the world.
Thank you so much, and thanks for watching.