A blockade protesting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion’s route through a conservation area continues, with a new camper now occupying trees in the path nearly a month into the campaign.
The unnamed climber ascended to the site on the 26th day of the occupation, blocking tree clearing prior to laying the pipeline. That’s roughly half the time allotted for tree clearing, according to a news release on behalf of the coalition of organizations involved in the occupation.
The anonymous climber replaced urban ecologist and BCIT instructor Christine Thuring at the site in the Brunette River conservation area. The area is one of the handful of diversions the new pipeline takes from the original route. It sits approximately at the meeting point of Coquitlam, New Westminster and Burnaby.
Thuring had replaced YouTube personality Kurtis Baute, who in turn replaced public health physician Dr. Tim Takaro.
Takaro originally scaled the trees on Aug. 3, and a rally was held shortly thereafter in support of him, blocking northbound lanes of North Road/East Columbia Street outside Hume Park.
The controversial pipeline project has been given a significant boost this year, receiving assent from the country’s second-highest court over Indigenous consultation obligations. Indigenous groups appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the matter.
While the pipeline had seen diminished protests in the last year or so, organizers of the early-August rally said that is changing. A protest camp has grown below the tree occupation.
“We’re here for the long haul,” said Emma Pham, a UBC student and one of the campers below, in a news release. “If construction continues there will be even more devastation to the land and its people.”
