Standing on High Ground

That’s the title of a book coming out October 29th that has my name on the cover. The subtitle is “Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain”. It’s an anthology; I’m both an author and co-editor. The other authors are people who, like me, were arrested resisting the awful “TMX” Trans Mountain pipeline project.

Pulling together a book with 25 contributing authors is a lot of work! One of the contributions started out as a 45-minute phone conversation, transcribed by me. The others manifested in a remarkable melange of styles, structures, and formats.

Which is what makes it fun. Five of our authors are Indigenous people. Another is Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green party. There is a sprinkling of university professors and faith leaders. There are two young Tyrannosauri Rex (no, really). And then there’s me, the Internet geek.

As I wrote then, my brush with the law was very soft; arrested on the very first day of a protest sequence, I got off with a fine. Since fines weren’t stopping the protest, eventually the arrestees started getting jail time. Some of the best writing in the book is the prison narratives, all from people previously unacquainted with the pointy end of our justice system.

Quoting from my own contribution:

Let me break the fourth wall here and speak as a co-editor of the book you are now reading. As I work on the jail-time narratives from other arrestees, alternately graceful, funny, and terrifying, I am consumed with rage at the judicial system. It is apparently content to allow itself to be used as a hammer to beat down resistance to stupid and toxic rent-seeking behaviour, oblivious to issues of the greater good. At no point has anyone in the judiciary looked in the mirror as they jailed yet another group of self-sacrificing people trying to throw themselves between TMX’s engine of destruction and the earth that sustains us, and asked themselves, Are we on the right side here?

Of necessity, the law is constructed of formalisms. But life is constructed on a basis of the oceans and the atmosphere and the mesh of interdependent ecosystems they sustain. At some point, the formalisms need to find the flexibility to favour life, not death. It seems little to ask.

We asked each contributor for a brief bio, a narrative of their experience, and the statement they made to the judge at the time of their sentencing. Our contributors being what they are, sometimes we instead got poems and music-theory disquisitions and discourse on Allodial title. Cartoons too!

Which, once again, is what makes it fun. Well, when it’s not rage-inducing. After all, we lost; they built the pipeline and it’s now doing its bit to worsen the onrushing climate catastrophe, meanwhile endangering Vancouver’s civic waters and shipping economy.

The effort was worthwhile, though. There is reason to hope that our work helped raise the political and public-image cost of this kind of bone-stupid anti-survival project to the point that few or no more will ever be built.

Along with transcribing and editing, my contribution to the book included a couple of photos and three maps. Making the maps was massively fun, so I’m going to share them here just because I can. (Warning: These are large images.);

The first appears as a two-page spread, occupying all of the left page and the top third or so of the right.

Then there’s a map of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, highlighting the locations where much of the book’s action took place.

Finally, here’s a close-up of Burnaby Mountain, where TMX meets the sea, and where most of the arrests happened.

I suspect that if you’re the kind of person who finds yourself reading this blog from time to time, you’d probably enjoy reading Standing on High Ground. The buy-this-book link is here. If you end up buying a copy — please do — the money will go in part to our publisher Between The Lines, who seem a decent lot and were extremely supportive and competent in getting this job done. The rest gets distributed equally among all the contributors. Each contributor is given the option of declining their share, which makes sense, since some of us are highly privileged and the money wouldn’t make any difference; others can really use the dough.

What’s next? · We’re going to have a launch event sometime this autumn. I’ll announce it here and everywhere else I have a presence. There will be music and food and drink; please come!

What’s really next is the next big harebrained scheme to pad oil companies’ shareholders’ pockets by building destructive infrastructure through irreplaceable wilderness, unceded Indigenous land, and along fragile waterways. Then we’ll have to go out and get arrested again and make it more trouble than it’s worth. It wouldn’t take that many people, and it’d be nice if you were one of them.

I put in years of effort to stop the pipeline. Based on existing laws, I concluded that the pipeline was illegal and presented those arguments to the National Energy Board review panel. When we got to the moment on Burnaby Mountain when the RCMP advanced to read out the injunction to us, I was still acting in the public interest. The true lawbreakers were elsewhere.

[From Elizabeth May’s contribution.]

Thanks! · Chiefly, to our contributors, generous with their words and time, tolerant of our nit-picky editing. From me personally, to my co-editors Rosemary Cornell and Adrienne Drobnies; we didn’t always agree on everything but the considerable work of getting this thing done left nobody with hard feelings. And, as the book’s dedication says, to all those who went out and got arrested to try to convince the powers that be to do the right thing.

I’m going to close with a picture which appears in the book. It shows Kwekwecnewtxw (“Kwe-kwek-new-tukh”), the Watch House built by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation to oversee the enemy’s work, that work also visible in the background. If you want to know what a Watch House is, you’ll need to read the very first contribution in the book, which begins “Jim Leyden is my adopted name—my spirit name is Stehm Mekoch Kanim, which means Blackbear Warrior.”

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Contributions

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