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Valerie Langer: 'People are rising up and changing their view of pipelines'

#475 of 2556 articles from the Special Report: Race Against Climate Change
Valerie Langer at Kinder Morgan protest on Burnaby Mountain in November 2014

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It has been over 20 years since I helped lead the Clayoquot Sound blockades against old growth logging. Should our federal government approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline and the 700 per cent increase in tankers going out to the Salish sea, I will dust off my civil disobedience organizing tools to stop this crime against humanity and the environment from happening.

There are catalytic moments like these in history. They are relatively rare occurrences. They happen when an old way of thinking, backed by entrenched powers, tries desperately to persist, even though society’s thinking on the issue has already changed. Clayoquot in 1993 was one of those moments. I felt it also during the 2014 Burnaby Mountain protests against Kinder Morgan’s pipeline. I know from experience that we cannot manufacture these uprisings, but we can feel them building. The tension over the Kinder Morgan pipeline is palpable in communities who are ready to move away from a fossil fueled climate disaster fast.

The economy is an outcome of our imagination. The earth is not. The options to adjust and develop the economy along better lines is our purview. Adjusting runaway climate change and re-inventing species is not.

I have had the unfortunate experience of trying to clean up an oil spill – the Nestucca Bunker C spill in 1988 washed up along the west coast of Vancouver Island. While the provincial and federal governments dithered, arguing over who’s jurisdiction the clean-up belonged to, 2,000 people from First Nations communities, coastal villages and volunteers worked in cold driving rain. We shoveled tarry oil into garbage bags, hauled it on our backs above the high tide line and found hundreds of dead animals – blobs of oil with a foot or heading protruding. We converted the Friends of Clayqout Sound office into an animal rescue hospital. We fed and billeted volunteers, took time off work in a desperate race against time as the oil broke into smaller bits and was buried in the sand and the driftwood. I wish this experience on no one.

Oiled bird off Vancouver Island during Nestucca spill. Photo from July 2015 report to NEB

Of the 231,000 gallons of Bunker C tarry oil spilled, a fraction (278 tonnes of oily sand and debris) was recovered. Volunteers brought in 13,000 oiled birds. Only 1000 survived. Two months later no-one remembered the Nestucca spill. It was eclipsed by the horror of the Exxon Valdez. An oil spill is destructive. Burning that oil in its intended destination is causing human and ecological disruption writ large.

The 1948 Genocide Convention enjoined the international community to intervene to prevent crimes against humanity. It does does not limit responsibility to not committing this crime – it requires that we intervene to prevent it. The effects of Climate change is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Those entrusted with responsibility in these matters – the Kinder Morgan public hearing panel, corporate and government decision makers - have a higher international obligation than the economic benefit of a region or a company. They must intervene to prevent a crime that is already unfolding – in drowning Pacific Islands and Baton Rouge, in outrageous temperatures that humans can’t survive in India, France and Australia and even in the fires that burned through Fort McMurray.

As a person with experience in organizing civil disobedience I commit to help organize peaceful resistance, as a duty I am obligated under international Convention to do, should a decision be made, against all sense, to approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

I am sure I will not be alone.

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