So this morning the very wonderful support camp sent me some coffee on the pulley system,
and that's how i'm getting everything and sending everything back.
And so I'm getting water and food and coffee. It's great...
But the problem today is that I spilled the coffee everywhere.
I spilled it all all over the tent and uh over the sleeping mat,
over my sleeping bag, over my laptop, over everything
So as you can imagine I was kind of frantically trying to dry everything,
and there's not really room to dry stuff here,
so I do what I always do which is to hang stuff off of the tent, off of the portaledge
Because again, I'm in a tree.
For those of you... that are just watching this series,
I'm 20 meters off the ground in a tree right now.
The thing is, that when I went to hang my sleeping bag,
I didn't realize that my phone was in the sleeping bag,
and it fell. It fell 20 meters to the ground.
And i've done the math and... it probably hit the ground at around 70 kilometers an hour...
which is bad...!
The stream beneath me right now is is quite dry, which is good for my phone,
But it's also one of the key reasons that i'm up here.
Right now is one of the lowest risk times to cut trees in this area,
because the streams are fairly dry and the salmon are not spawning in them.
There's a lot of salmon spawning that happens all around this part of... metro Vancouver
So Trans Mountain Pipeline, the company.
they have an affidavit that allows them to cut these trees before September 15th,
in a short window by the beginning of August to the middle of September.
That's when they're allowed to cut.
And between dr. Tim takaro who is up here before me and myself,
we've already cut about a third of that window away from them
And if we're able to stay up here until September 15th
It's very likely that the company will not be able to come in here to cut the trees
to build the pipeline for at least another year
So that's why we're here specifically.
But back to my phone...
Amazingly, miraculously, someone went down and picked it up,
and I sent the bag down and they brought it up in the pulley,
and it was completely okay!
It still is fine!
It was completely fine. It fell 20 meters.
and there's not a scratch or a fracture in the glass of my phone.
It's perfect, which is a lifesaver because I'm up here,
making these videos and editing them and live tweeting it,
and I'm also uploading the videos through the internet on my phone,
so I'm glad to have a phone still. That's good.
While I've been up here I've...
...honestly just spent a lot of time looking at these trees,
and looking at this region and looking at this stream.
I thought it was going to be loud and obnoxious and
really frustrating to live in a tent the size of a bathtub...
for a while, in the air
But it's been quite majestic. It's been beautiful up here.
This region that i'm quite literally hanging out in up here
is in the territories of the Qayqayt, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Kwikwetlem First Nations,
and this pipeline is planning to cut across well over a hundred other First Nations' territories.
And this area is the Brunette River area
And there is not only salmon that spawn here, but there are otters here
Before I came up here, I saw bear scat next to the tree that I'm in
The tree that I'm in, this massive cottonwood, it's got to be well older than I am
This area is majestic. There's honestly no better word for it.
And the devastation, ecologically, that just building the pipeline would cause is immense!
The proposed pipeline would cut through over a thousand kilometers of regions like this one,
except with their own unique biodiversity.
For this pipeline to be built, all of that, for a thousand kilometers, gets destroyed.
But the real ecological disaster...
is not the cutting of these trees or the construction that it would take to make the pipeline.
The disaster is what's waiting to happen
if and when something goes wrong.
The company building this pipeline, Trans Mountain,
has had a very long and ugly history of oil spills.
In the last 60 years they've reported 84 separate oil spills.
And if the pipeline is completed,
Then it will increase the amount of production that can happen from the Alberta tar sands
because most of the oil coming through the pipeline will be for export.
So that's bad for climate change because that means more oil,
and therefore more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
But it also means that there'll be a lot more tanker traffic on the coast of Vancouver.
More specifically there will be a seven fold increase in the amount of oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea,
which is an incredibly diverse aquatic ecosystem off the coast here
And experts predict that it is extraordinarily likely that,
with all of that additional tanker traffic, there will be a spill.
and that would be truly disastrous.
An amazing environmental activist named Will George just got to camp,
and he is an inspiration to me and he also helped organize this,
and help talk me through what I might expect in being up here,
because a couple years ago
He actually suspended himself from a bridge in Vancouver along with 12 other activists,
in order to stop the then Kinder Morgan pipeline, which has since become Trans Mountain.
They were quite successful...
One sec, gonna give them a call
Will, hello! Thank you so much for coming here.
Will you've been fighting against this pipeline for a long time now,
and you've especially been fighting for the inlet,
to protect the inlet, and you founded or helped co-found the organization ProtectTheInlet.ca
and, I would love to hear a little bit more about how that came to be.
[WILL] Well, I grew up in Tsleil-Waututh nation on the Burrard Inlet,
just south of Dollarton Highway in Deep Cove in North Vancouver.
And I grew up, you know harvesting crab,
You know, going out there and being able to low tide pick up this crab
And I'll share with you that my son was about 10 months old, just about 2010
And it was hard for him, you know, when we started introducing food to his diet
And, he wouldn't eat beef, he wouldn't eat pork or anything
But he'll eat sake. He'll eat crab.
He'll eat those things and he'll eat them up.
And that's what drived me to do this, is...
you know, to protect those lands and waters.
And then, again, where I'm from on Tsleil-Waututh nation,
we still find artifacts on our beach.
You know, we were never relocated.
Far too many nations across Turtle Island were relocated, and to other areas.
Thankfully enough we never were
And then, so, we follow our spiritual laws.
We follow... you know, we honor our ancestors.
We honor our loved ones, we honor our ones that are to come.
To stand up and fight for these lands, fight for these waters,
that's what drives me and that's how ProtectTheInlet came to be.
You know, that's always been kind of my target.
I like to keep things simple and you know,
I engage people, and I engage, you know, it's like,
'Oh, you know, it's for the economy and it's for this and that and you know, people need jobs.'
The thing is, I understand that, we're...
All of us people, we're still hunters and gatherers.
We hunt opportunity, we gather revenue. I understand that.
But, you know, when you want to increase tanker traffic by 700%,
And then not a lot of people are aware of the class or the size of the vessels that are coming through here.
And if people forget why or how BC came to be;
it was the beautiful coastlines, was the salmon.
You know, extraction.
And, do people forget that? How we are all here right now, this beautiful coastline.
And you know, that's what we are, what I'm doing, and what you're doing up there,
is we're here to protect what you love.
And a lot of nations as a whole,
we're all related all the way from here to Idaho and all the way up to northern BC
We're all related through the Sockeye salmon.
And then in Victoria, there's fossil bones that are four million years old.
90% of our diet from us coastal nations people came from the body of water.
And yeah, and so that's what keeps me going, and that's what keeps me thriving,
and that's the message I try to share with with folks.
[KURTIS] Will, thanks so much for coming to the camp. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time,
and I appreciate all the work you do. Thank you.
If you want to support this protest and actions against the Trans Mountain pipeline,
then I can recommend donating to ProtectTheInlet.ca. I'll leave a link in the video description.
They do a lot of great work.
Up here before me was Dr. Tim Takaro who is a professor of environmental health sciences,
and one of the key reasons that he was up here is because
This is a local disaster waiting to happen.
Climate change aside, this pipeline stretches past thousands of people's homes,
and if there was to be a fire or a leak,
it would be truly catastrophic for human health.
And as I've said before, a leak is likely.
To be very clear, I'm not recommending that instead of building this pipeline,
we continue shipping more and more oil by train.
That is not good for the planet or for safety either.
What i'm recommending is that instead of investing in oil infrastructure,
we invest in the renewable energy infrastructure that we very desperately need.
If we want to ensure a healthy future for ourselves on this planet,
then we just need to keep the oil in the ground.
There is no other way around that.
And I'll be making a video about that while i'm up here. So stay tuned for that.
Lastly, this is a good reminder that if you don't already have your phone in a protective case,
you should really do that.
I've been using one made by a company called Pela for over the last year and I have absolutely loved it.
It's 100% compostable and apparently it can survive a 20 meter fall to the ground.
The first thing I did when I got my phone back up here and realized that it was working,
was called them and asked if they would collaborate on this video.
So you can go and use the promotional code "KurtisInATree" and get 20% off,
and by doing that the company is going to give me a cut of those proceeds,
and i'm going to donate all of it 100 of it to ProtectTheInlet.ca,
to help actions like this and to help their organization.
So, everybody wins!
Go get yourself a phone case if you don't already have one, they're excellent.
And I'm gonna be putting out videos every day that i'm up here,
so please stay tuned. This is day two
And thanks for watching