The Tree House and the Oil Pipeline
The tree house I lived in that summer was decidedly unspectacular. It was more of a tree hovel, really. The floor was a large sheet of graffitied plywood, and the roof was covered with a pair of heavy plastic tarps. Under those tarps was a small camping tent, in theory to keep out mosquitoes and mice, although at some point mice chewed a hole through it, allowing mosquitoes to sneak through as well. Outside the tent were a few Tupperware tubs containing dried and canned food, a small library (Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, Plato), and a collection of goofy wigs and disguises. The branches of the tree were festooned with protest banners, wooden crates, and homemade art. Underneath the tree house was a large cargo net suspended from the tree’s four main branches. On hot afternoons, I would lie on my back on that net, some forty feet off the ground, feeling the warm wind move beneath me, and muse about how to save the world. It didn’t seem quite so far-fetched up there. Lofty thoughts naturally sprouted to fill the empty space.
The tree house was situated in an unlovely strip of forest a few hundred yards wide, squeezed between a six-lane highway and a freight rail line, on the drab gray edge of Vancouver. Cars flowed by at all hours, creating a wash of noise broken now and then by the metallic din of passing trains. It was hideous, really, this forgotten little corner of the modern world. At times, the smell of car exhaust wafted so thickly into the tree house that I would resort to sleeping with an N95 mask clamped over my face, for fear of all those particulates. I would awaken to find that, in the cold night air, a slime of dew had formed on the inside of it, as on a cave wall.
But then the tree house was not designed for beauty, or enjoyment, or whimsy. It was a tool. Its purpose was to block the construction of an oil pipeline slated to run along that narrow tract of land. This tool functioned only so long as a person was inside it; otherwise, pipeline workers would swoop in and quickly demolish it. However, no single person could stay up in the tree indefinitely. So, once every few days, a new “tree-sitter” would arrive to swap in for the previous one, in a rotating roster. I was one such tree-sitter.
In the summer and fall of 2021, I put in seven shifts in the tree house, totalling about a month—though, up there, it felt much longer. Meals were sometimes brought to me by volunteers, who would deliver them to the base of the tree and clip them to the end of a haul rope. Some days, I had to fend for myself, heating up cans of lentil soup or packets of vegetable curry over a camping stove. I peed into an old milk jug, which I later emptied into a nearby stream; solid waste went into a garbage bag filled with sawdust, which I lugged away at the end of each stint.
At first, I struggled to fill the voluminous hours; then I learned to luxuriate in them. I finally read “Middlemarch,” one of those classics I’d always intended to get around to once I found the time. I also started meditating. There was a small balcony on one side of the tree house, and two or three times a day I would sit there cross-legged for the better part of an hour, with my gaze loosely focussed on the young maple leaves at my eye line. At times, the leaves would melt together, and I would feel myself on the cusp of an Emersonian dissolution into the wild green multiplicity—and then a train horn would blast or a motorcycle engine would roar, shattering my concentration, and I would be, once again, just a weird guy hanging out in a tree.
Imoved from Manhattan to British Columbia in 2013. Not long after, I began reading stories about a plan to build an oil pipeline that would carry diluted bitumen from the nation’s interior to a port just outside Vancouver, where it would be shipped across the Salish Sea, a body of water I and countless other creatures swam in each morning. I had to look up what “bitumen” was; it turns out to be an especially heavy, sticky type of petroleum that requires immense amounts of energy to extract. (Imagine a cup of road tar poured into a child’s sandbox and stirred around for a couple million years; now imagine trying to get that tar back out.) The new pipeline, the government said, would enable Canada to sell more bitumen overseas (mainly to China), rather than selling nearly all of it to the U.S., as we had previously done. This would allow us to fetch higher prices for the oil and give us greater independence from our smaller, wealthier, and far more militarized southern neighbor. In retrospect, the plan was both surprisingly prescient and suicidally myopic, depending on whether one is thinking on the timescale of a decade or a century, and whether one believes climate scientists when they say, with a note of rising panic, that burning huge amounts of oil to extract and transport even huger amounts of oil around the world is not a wise thing to do, planetarily speaking.
The saga of this pipeline project, which was known as the Trans Mountain Expansion, or TMX, is now familiar to most Canadians as a fiasco of epic proportions. Technically, TMX was not a new pipeline but, rather, a six-hundred-mile stretch of pipe that would be “twinned” along the length of an older one; when completed, it would nearly triple the old pipeline’s capacity. In 2018, faced with fierce opposition from environmentalists and First Nations groups, Kinder Morgan, the company that had been trying to build this pipeline, decided that it would be too difficult and expensive to finish. Rather than allow the project to die a natural death, Justin Trudeau, then the nation’s Liberal Prime Minister, announced that he would use taxpayer money to purchase it so that the government could force it through, cost be damned. This announcement occurred less than twenty-four hours after his government had declared that the nation was facing a “climate emergency.”
In March of 2021, I read a story about a handful of blockaders who had built a tree house along the pipeline’s proposed route, hoping to halt its advance. The tree house had been an elaborate affair, with six giant glass windows made from scavenged shower doors. (“It was so extra,” one of the blockaders later told me.) One day, the protesters briefly left it unoccupied, and the pipeline workers tore it down. The blockaders then built another, more minimalist structure in a nearby tree. By the time I learned about them, they had been occupying this rude hut in the sky for three months, vowing to remain in it until the pipeline was cancelled. I reached out to the blockaders through Signal, hoping to interview them for a book I was writing. After some initial hesitancy—they were, understandably, paranoid about government spies infiltrating their tight-knit cohort—they agreed to let me talk with them.
One April day, I made the three-hour drive from my home, in Halfmoon Bay, to the tree house, crossing the sea on a ferry and then weaving through the gleaming cyan towers of Vancouver. By early afternoon, I had reached the city of Burnaby. I parked outside a massive Korean grocery store, grabbed a backpack filled with climbing equipment, and walked along the shoulder of the highway. I could feel the eyes of each passing motorist scrutinizing me, skeptical of this strange human figure amid the machinescape.
After a few minutes, I spotted a small trail leading through a stand of cottonwood trees. It was blocked off with a yellow rope and a sign warning that I was now entering “a Trans Mountain project/operations site.” Ignoring the sign, I passed two portly, aging security guards wearing reflective yellow safety vests. I was worried that they would try to stop me, but they merely filmed me with their phones. Once I reached the tree house, a rope was lowered to me. I climbed up, using a harness and a pair of mechanical ascenders.
The tree was inhabited by a bearded, bespectacled man in his sixties named Tim Takaro, who often acted as a spokesman for the blockade. It was a mild, pleasant spring afternoon; sunlight slivered through branches hung with green catkins, like tiny chandeliers. Takaro opened a can of beer and sipped it while we talked. His manner of speech was genial and punctiliously intellectual—which should not have surprised me, given that he was a Yale graduate, a medical doctor, and a tenured professor of environmental health. But it nevertheless struck me as incongruous, given that he was, currently, an unwashed, barefoot eco-radical living in a tree.
One of Takaro’s chief tasks was to recruit and train new tree-sitters. The movement had about a hundred volunteers, although people continually drifted in and out; a core of about twenty individuals did most of the work. Finding dedicated tree-sitters, ones who would come back, even once the novelty had worn off and the legal risk began mounting, was a challenge. “We always need new people,” he said.
While talking with Takaro, I realized that, in some ways, I was ideally suited to the odd task of sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day. As a freelance writer, I did not need to show up to work at an office; I had no kids to tend to; my husband was accustomed to my being away on reporting trips; and, while researching my latest book, I had already learned the arcane art of climbing trees with ropes.
A decade earlier, when I was reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement, amid the panoply of signs that people held, one in particular had pierced me. It read, simply, “Stop Gawking. Join!” Why, I wondered, had I been content to stand on the sidelines and watch while others fought for the things I believed in? Why wasn’t I sitting where Takaro was sitting?
The most obvious reason was professional—and, somewhat ironically, ethical—in nature. Traditionally, there is a bright line between journalism and activism; choosing to cross that line felt unseemly. More worrying still was the fact that I wasn’t yet a Canadian citizen; I had only a “permanent residency” card, which had to be renewed every five years. This meant that, if I were arrested, I risked being kicked out of the country. Takaro assured me that there were ways of minimizing my exposure. If arrests were imminent, he said, the police were obligated to read aloud a legal document known as an “injunction” and then give me about ten minutes to vacate the tree. So I could always run away, if need be. Ideally, of course, I wouldn’t run; I would chain myself to the tree and slow the loggers down for as long as I could. But Takaro explained that my very presence in the tree would suggest that I was a person willing to chain myself to it, which would force the police to assemble a special tactical unit to extract me. That would take time. And time—taking time from them, buying time for ourselves and the planet—was what this protest was all about.
After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to take the leap.
A few days into my first tree-sit, two young people arrived in the forest, wearing face masks and dark clothing. They began constructing a tree house in a nearby cottonwood. I watched as they lashed four long wooden beams to the tree, crosswise, like a tic-tac-toe board, then installed a plywood floor. They worked tirelessly for about six hours, sixty or so feet off the ground, with the ease of riveters atop a skyscraper.
A couple of security guards were stationed below. At one point, I heard the male climber tell them that they should be wearing helmets, in case anything accidentally fell down. In bemusement, one security guard said, “He’s telling me to be careful?”
A long rope connected the top of their tree to the top of mine—not a climbing rope but the cheap, braided-plastic kind used by crab fishermen. Around dusk, the two climbers attached mechanical ascenders to it and, hanging upside down like tree sloths, made the long, slow traverse to my platform. It gave me the willies to watch. Under that amount of strain, the teeth of their ascenders could have sawed through the rope. But they made it safely across, seemingly unfazed by the ordeal.
These two lithe, blithe creatures introduced themselves. Her name was Amanda Hehner, though here at the blockade she went by the code name Cauliflower. He, for reasons both legal and personal, asked me to refer to him in writing only as Emerald. Amanda was feline and fair-haired; Emerald had the large eyes, thick black eyebrows, and neotenous features of an anime hero. I was immediately smitten by their air of outlaw pluck. In an interview with a local reporter, Emerald once summarized the philosophy behind the blockade with perfect succinctness. “Treehouses are an analogy for humanity’s interdependence with nature,” he’d said. “Tree falls, human falls.”
When I wasn’t living in the tree house, Emerald enlisted me to act as his sidekick on various “missions.” First, I helped him complete the construction of the second tree house. Then we hung a rickety, Indiana Jones-style rope bridge between the two so that, if need be, a tree-sitter could walk from one tree house to the other to evade the police. We also tied ropes to the tops of nearby trees so that a climber could, theoretically, move from treetop to treetop, like a spider. The notion of actually doing this—climbing from tree to tree, forty or fifty feet off the ground, on a length of plastic fishing rope—was so terrifying that I never even for a moment considered it. But Emerald was made of sterner stuff. He would routinely rappel down from the new tree house on a rope that was about ten feet too short to reach the ground; when the rope ran out, he would grab the tree trunk like a fireman’s pole and slide the rest of the way down, all in one unbroken motion. “The guy is a maniac,” Takaro told me. “But in a good way.”
In May, once the trees leafed out, our tree houses became invisible to passing cars. To attract their attention, I proposed that we hang a long banner reading “TMX PIPELINE STOPS HERE” from a giant Douglas fir beside the highway. The rest of the blockaders agreed. So, one evening, beneath the kind of pale, weirdly illumined sky one finds only on a cloudy night in a very big city—an aurora urbana, as it were—Emerald and I set out for the Doug fir. Ducking down so that passing motorists would not spot us, we crept along the roadside until we reached the tree. We used a large slingshot to fire a beanbag attached to a thin cord over the lowest branch, about eighty feet off the ground, and then, after untying the beanbag, secured a climbing rope to that end of the cord and hauled it back over the branch. We both tugged on the rope to test the branch’s strength.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’d prefer the rope be on a higher branch, so that if one branch fails, the next branch will catch you.”
“I think it’ll be fine,” Emerald said.
I watched from the shadows as he climbed the rope. When he was partway up, it began to rain lightly. Off in the distance, a white vein of lightning appeared in the lilac sky. Emerald, laughing, called down, “What a time for lightning!”
Undeterred, he kept climbing. When he reached the lowest branch, he secured himself to the trunk, then hauled up the banner. All this took the better part of an hour; I was amazed that the police didn’t show up.
Back on the ground, Emerald was wild-eyed with adrenaline. It turned out, he said, that the lowest branch had been completely dead. While he was climbing up, it could have snapped at any moment, sending him hurtling to the ground.
We paused briefly to take some photos of the banner, billowing triumphantly in the predawn breeze. Then, whooping, we dashed off into the forest.
That summer, I began using my connections in the journalism world to try to publicize our crusade. To my dismay, writers and editors didn’t seem as interested in the story as I’d assumed they would be. Aside from a steady trickle of articles on local news sites, the media’s initial interest in the blockade had largely dried up. During our strategy meetings, we were forced to continually ask ourselves: How could we make sure that our protest—which appeared to be a lost cause in an unglamorous corner of the province—garnered the attention it needed to succeed?
In a curious twist of fate, around a hundred miles from our tree houses, another protest movement had been growing, providing an enlightening counterpoint to our own. Over on Vancouver Island, a group of land defenders were fighting to stop the felling of old-growth trees in a grove called Fairy Creek, on the land of the Pacheedaht First Nation. The blockaders, led by a charismatic Pacheedaht elder named Bill Jones, had built little utopian encampments throughout the forest, drawing people from all over Canada. Tree houses were erected and roads blocked off. An eruption of violent police crackdowns followed: many protesters were brutally manhandled and pepper-sprayed, and tree-sitters were dramatically arrested by officers who dropped down from helicopters. These arrests were highly publicized, which led to more blockaders showing up and more arrests, which in turn led to more crackdowns—the kind of news-generating feedback loop that every direct-action protest movement seeks to achieve. By the end of the summer, it would become the largest act of civil unrest in Canadian history.
The logic of what attracts the news media’s interest can be quite grim. “The power of this kind of civil disobedience is directly indexed to the body’s physical vulnerability,” notes the author Olivia Laing, who participated in treetop protests in the nineteen-nineties in England. “The more dangerous or precarious a position the protester took, the more powerful its effect.” As the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis recently showed, local demonstrations often become national news only once protesters’ lives have been imperilled or, worse, extinguished. As the ugly old saying goes: If it bleeds, it leads. But aside from the grisly spectacle of police violence, why, I wondered, do some protest movements continually gain energy, grab attention, and achieve their aims, where others remain small, local, and doomed? Wanting to answer this riddle, I decided to research the history of tree-sits. I hoped to figure out what was hampering our cause—not just the pipeline protest but the climate movement more broadly.
I got in touch with tree-sitters from all over the world. I learned that the technique was being used to stop many kinds of environmental devastation. I spoke with people who had used their tree-sits to prevent the desecration of a culturally significant Native site in Northern California, the widening of a road in Los Angeles, the expansion of a parking lot in upstate New York, and the construction of a natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia. Some of these efforts succeeded; most failed. What the protesters repeatedly impressed on me was the fact that the tree-sit was not just about saving trees. “I’m not some tree-hugging fucking hippie,” an activist named Erik Hayward, who had campaigned to save native forests in Tasmania, told me. “It’s not necessarily about the individual trees. It’s about a culture change.”
The world’s most famous treetop protest began in 1997, when a young woman named Julia Butterfly Hill climbed to the top of a thousand-year-old redwood, evocatively named Luna, and remained there for an astonishing seven hundred and thirty-eight days. She was visited in the tree by the likes of Joan Baez and Woody Harrelson, and her sylphlike image appeared on televisions around the country (including my own, in suburban Illinois, when I was still an impressionable teen-ager). Ultimately, Luna was spared, along with other redwoods within a two-hundred-foot buffer zone. But the world’s most consequential tree-sit, by my estimation, is one that most Americans have never heard of. It took place in Germany’s Hambach Forest, where, starting in 2012, activists built an aerial village of tree houses in order to halt the expansion of a coal mine. Their blockade lasted eight years. The government finally relented, declaring that the remaining forest would be preserved. More importantly, the romance of the blockade seems to have darkened the German public’s opinion of the coal industry, hastening the nation’s green transition. “The tree house is symbolic,” one Hambach protester told me. “It stands for more than this world.”
My life in the tree house was for the most part uneventful, at times eerily so. Just after my first stint as a tree-sitter, in April, logging in the area was halted until August. Members of our group had successfully argued to regulators that it would affect the nesting season of the Anna’s hummingbird, an otherworldly creature with an iridescent-pink head. We celebrated by festooning the tree house with paintings of hummingbirds. I found it inspiring that a tiny bird could temporarily subdue the hydra of heavy industry. (Others were less thrilled. A writer for the conservative-leaning Calgary Herald criticized the decision in an op-ed titled “A $100-million hummingbird nest and other Trans Mountain absurdities.”) One of the strange side effects of this hiatus was that we were now protecting a forest that, at least for the next four months, wasn’t under direct threat. We kept the tree house occupied at all hours, just in case.
My time in the treetops passed in discrete chunks, broken up by trips back home, where I would swim in the sea and go for long trail runs through the forest, relishing my new freedom. When it was time to go back, I tried to appreciate the forest for its beauty, corrupted as it was. On my hikes in, I stopped to admire bumblebees drunkenly lolling in the purple blooms of invasive Himalayan balsam. From my treetop platform, I watched as nearby maple leaves unfurled, grew to dinosaurian proportions, and then desiccated. Over that long, unusually hot summer, the moss that covered the branches came to resemble the rough side of a kitchen sponge.
Halfway through the season, a cloud of wildfire smoke settled over Vancouver. I happened to be occupying the tree house that week, a piece of bad luck. The temperature exceeded a hundred degrees, and the smoke was so thick that the little cartoon icon on the air-quality app on my phone—which normally wore a cloth mask when the air was bad—now bore a gas mask. After putting on two N95s, I lay on my back most of the day, sweating and shooing flies. Kind volunteers brought me ice packs and thermoses of chilled mint tea. The public seemed to intuitively understand that the current unbearable combination of smoke and heat was a foretaste of exactly the kind of future we were fighting to prevent.
One day in August, a CBC crew arrived to mark the first anniversary of the tree-house occupation. They shot photos of me from the ground. I stood on the branches of the tree, wearing a black medical mask to hide my face. My photo later appeared on the CBC website, where I was referred to as “an unnamed protester.” I scrutinized the image. I wondered whether I would ever inspire anyone to climb a tree, the way Julia Butterfly Hill had inspired me as a kid. She was sometimes photographed clinging barefoot to the tree’s trunk, dressed all in black, like some strange hybrid of arboreal mammal and dendrite monk; I was wearing khakis.
It seems to me this is one reason that both the blockade at Fairy Creek and Hill’s efforts to save Luna spoke to the public in a way that ours did not. Put simply, what we lacked was beauty. In an old-growth forest, the beauty of old trees intertwines with the bodies of those trying to save them, creating something numinous. Land defenders will invariably be outspent and outgunned by their opponents. But this poetic aspect of environmental protest—the image of a frail human risking her life for that of a mammoth tree—is something the forces of industry will always lack.
For months, an uncanny sense of calm suffused the forest. Even after the pipeline company was legally allowed to begin cutting trees again, it held off. We could tell that the tree house was being surveilled. It was clear that a plan was being formulated, but, whatever it was, it was slow to materialize.
Finally, one day in September when I was back home, I caught word that a siege had begun. I raced to Burnaby to help organize a response. The pipeline crew had started by erecting a tall metal fence around all the areas in the forest where they planned to cut. Then they rolled in a massive white “bucket truck” with a long mechanical arm—picture the offspring of an army tank and a fire truck—which they used to lift men with chainsaws high above the ground so that they could fell trees from the top down. We called this machine the Tank.
Once the Tank had cleared a path to within a few hundred feet of our tree houses, we mobilized supporters to show up the following morning. While the police’s attention was focussed elsewhere, we strung two hammocks high in the trees, where we stationed blockaders, attaching their safety lines to fallen logs. It took the police more than a week to carefully extricate them.
What was baffling (and, indeed, perversely frustrating) was how gently the police were handling any arrests. At Fairy Creek, the police had been notoriously brutal, often pepper-spraying blockaders directly in their eyes and mouths. Those abuses caused outrage, which incited more protesters to show up. But here the police had adopted the calm, slightly imperious demeanor of Nurse Ratched dealing with a mental patient. As Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., both argued, part of the logic behind nonviolent protest is to reveal the violent nature of one’s enemy. Our opponents, apparently, knew this all too well. There was something deeply creepy about the feeling of the State slowly and gently squeezing the life out of us, so slowly and so gently that almost no one outside the movement realized it was happening.
Nevertheless, by the fifteenth day of the siege, we had managed to assemble perhaps two dozen marchers on the far side of the fence to chant, sing, beat drums, and taunt the tree-fellers. The tone was heated but surprisingly civil. “Oil is war!” a protester shouted. “This is unceded Indigenous land,” another said. An older man showed up and began blaring out a tune on a bagpipe. “This is a song from my seventh grandson, who will have to live with your shit!” he yelled. The pipeline workers, visibly agitated by our taunts, occasionally yelled back. One of them told us to get jobs, or, at the very least, to let them do theirs. “You’re all a bunch of hypocrites,” another said. “How did you get here today? Did you drive?”
They made some fair points. The oil would go to market on a train if not in a pipeline, they said, and if it didn’t come from us it would come from Russia. These arguments tended to combine frugality with futility; it was a familiar zero-sum logic. Our rhetoric, by contrast, hinged on hope and outrage, in terms that sometimes felt a bit nebulous or simplistic to me. It was impossible to explain the totalizing nature of carbon capitalism while shouting through a fence, so we simply shouted, “No new pipelines!”
At one point, I watched as a First Nations woman made an impassioned speech to a pipeline worker about the ways that the oil industry hurt Indigenous women in particular—the rapes and murders that result from man camps, the miscarriages and cancer that result from poisoned water, the ongoing loss of cultural heritage. It seemed to move him more than any of our bumper-sticker micro-diatribes about destroying the earth.
“What do you think I should do?” the worker asked her.
“Hop the fence!” she replied. “Quit your job!”
It was clear from his expression that this was not an option.
By then, I was feeling cautiously hopeful. We were recruiting more volunteers, a few of whom were willing to get arrested. A young man pretended to lock himself to a concrete block buried in the ground, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman slipped through a gap in the fence and sat down in front of the Tank. (As she was being taken away on a stretcher by police, I overheard a pipeline worker snark, “Are we calling the cops or the bus to the old folks’ home?”)
On the morning of September 23rd, the Tank advanced to within a few yards of the tree house where Emerald was stationed. Before the Tank reached the tree’s base, Emerald clipped himself to a plastic rope attached to another tree and pulled himself across to it. The Tank could not fell that tree as long as Emerald was in it, but the police knew that if they attempted to arrest him, he could simply traverse back to the tree house, playing a game of cat-and-mouse sixty feet in the air. The Tank eventually retreated, and a cheer went up among our supporters.
The next day, the turnout on our side was even higher; it seemed that a final showdown was imminent. Around noon, the Tank once again attempted to advance to the base of Emerald’s tree house, and once again he valiantly traversed into a neighboring tree. Only this time, by a stroke of terrible luck, his movements jostled loose a dead branch (what loggers call a widow-maker), and it fell, landing directly on the head of a pipeline worker below. The worker, who was fortunately wearing a helmet, was knocked to the ground. Within an hour, a police officer was announcing through a bullhorn that Emerald was under arrest for assault, and that if he didn’t come down willingly he could face additional charges. Emerald, with few options left, rappelled down to earth. The police cuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him off to jail.
In the aftermath, the energy left our movement, like a sail that begins to luff and then goes slack. Most of our supporters drifted home. A core group of us gathered in a home in Vancouver for a strategy meeting. We had run out of volunteers willing to be arrested, and we had no other way of stopping the Tank from felling the rest of the trees. Our only hope was to station someone in both tree houses, on the off chance that it would give us time to regroup. Takaro offered to occupy the newer tree house. I hesitantly volunteered to occupy the older one.
The arrangement was less than ideal. Takaro didn’t want to be arrested, because he hoped to perform another tree-sit farther along the pipeline’s proposed route. I didn’t want to be arrested, for fear of getting kicked out of the country. We agreed that we would hold off the police as long as we could, and then, at the last possible moment, we would flee. It was not the most courageous plan, but it was the only one we had.
The following morning, Takaro and I took our places in the tree houses and readied ourselves to summon volunteers. But the police didn’t make a move. The same thing happened on the second day. It was a clever tactic: since we didn’t know when they would show up, we couldn’t organize a rally, which meant that we couldn’t inspire the kind of feedback loop of repression and outrage that would get media attention and swell our ranks. They were killing us with kindness.
The next day was a Monday. We figured that the police would show up, since most of our supporters were back at work, but again they didn’t appear. It rained hard, the kind of cold, steady rain that squeezes your temples and makes your teeth ache. I hid in the tree house, in my sleeping bag, lost in a gray funk. Around five, the sun broke through the clouds, a beery yellow light that made the leaves glint like glass. Takaro called me and invited me to cross the rope bridge for a drink. I reluctantly agreed.
Harness and helmet on, I swung out onto the rope bridge. The rungs were slippery with rain, and the bridge wobbled sickeningly with each step. As I made my way awkwardly across, some fifty feet in the air, a pair of security guards down below pointed high-powered flashlights at me and filmed me with their phones, hoping, I assumed, that I would get tangled up and require a humiliating rescue operation.
Eventually, I made it to the other side, slick with a mix of rain and sweat.
“Welcome!” Takaro said, giving me a hug.
I sat on a plastic bucket he had set out for me, sipping bourbon from a blue tin cup as the adrenaline in my veins dissipated. To the west of the tree house, I could now look out over the progress the pipeline workers had made so far. A corridor of felled trees had been cleared from here all the way to the nearest highway overpass. I could see the Tank parked in the distance. It now had a straight route to us.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “Will tomorrow be the end?”
“Who knows,” he said. “I’ve thought it was the end so many times now, and I’ve been wrong.”
The sun sank back into the clouds, like a white stone falling through silt. I wanted to stay longer, but I was afraid of crossing the bridge in the dark, so I roped up and carefully made my way back. I collapsed onto my sleeping bag as the rain began to fall again, and slipped into a caliginous, dreamless sleep.
I awoke at 7:30 A.M. to the insistent vibration of my cellphone. In a state of instantaneous, almost clairvoyant alertness, I opened Signal to find a cascade of recent messages.
“A big black cube van . . . just went in gate . . .”
“I think that is the tactical team. . . .”
“Green men are here.”
I called Takaro.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What we planned. I’m going to bail out,” he said. “I suggest you do the same.”
I hung up and started frantically packing. Once I finished, I poked my head out of the tree house and watched as Takaro rappelled to the ground and walked quickly away. No police officers chased him. I looked down to find three men in camouflage vests and helmets gathered under my tree. They were soon joined by two more officers, who set up a loudspeaker to play a prerecorded recitation of the injunction. I hastily prepared to rappel down outside a metal fence that they had erected around my tree. With the police watching, I tugged my mask higher on my face, clipped into a rope, and lowered myself over the edge of the balcony. I heard one of the police call out, “The safest way might be to come down inside the fence. We’ll let you go freely!” Unfooled by this ploy (if that’s what it was), I landed outside the fence, unclipped myself, crossed a small creek, and then sprinted off into the woods. No one followed me.
My first impulse was to keep running until I reached the nearest train station, go home, and sleep for a week, but I realized that someone needed to record the destruction of the tree houses so that footage could be shared with the media. I changed into new clothes, put on a baseball cap, buried my backpack under some brush, crept out to the highway, and then reëntered the injunction zone from the far side. On my way in, I ran into a first-time protester who was wearing a thick camel-hair coat. I asked whether I could borrow it. He graciously handed it over. Mere minutes after running away as a masked crusader, I returned, in new garb, to perform my old job as a journalist. I felt like Spider-Man transforming back into Peter Parker.
By this point, the Tank had reached the base of my tree. I watched as a long mechanical arm with a man-size bucket at the end lifted up three officers, who cut down the rope bridge, sliced away the connecting ropes, and tore through the tent. They began tossing our possessions down to earth. Books, food, ropes, the collection of silly wigs: it all came raining down, landing in a giant heap. The very last thing they dropped was the jug of my urine, which landed on top of the pile, soaking it through.
Ifound Takaro nearby, sitting on the ground, his face flushed with anger. As workers dismantled the platform itself—the sliver of wood where he had lived, sweated, and shat for so many days in the course of the past year—he shouted up at them through a megaphone.
“Hundreds died this summer in the heat waves,” he said. “If this pipeline is built, millions more will die! You are killing Canadians!”
An older protester in a puffy orange jacket chided him for being too anthropocentric. “I would have liked to hear you advocate on behalf of the millions of other species who will go extinct from climate change,” he said.
Takaro smiled apologetically. “I’m a doctor,” he replied. “I have to talk about what I know.”
I asked Takaro how he was feeling.
“Rough,” he said. “But we’re both here. We lived to fight another day.”
Later, Takaro would end up in jail for about a month after staging his other tree-sit, which would prove to be our movement’s last stand. The pipeline itself was eventually completed, at a total cost of roughly thirty-four billion Canadian dollars, arguably the single largest subsidy for the oil industry in the nation’s history.
That day, as the light faded and our few remaining supporters dispersed, I balmed myself with the thought that even though most blockades fail, their effect can reverberate for decades. And indeed, in the wake of the battle against TMX—which had included not just our tree houses but numerous other blockades, most often organized by First Nations communities, all throughout B.C.—the desire to build pipelines in Canada appeared to wane. This was true in the United States as well. In 2021, the Financial Post warned that North America was becoming a “graveyard of mega pipeline projects.”
From the earth’s perspective, that pronouncement now seems almost tragically optimistic. In Canada, as elsewhere, the climate movement, after years of raucous visibility, has largely fallen into a state of uneasy quietude. The reëlection of Donald Trump and the ensuing wave of Canadian nationalism seem to have simultaneously smothered the will to pursue aggressive climate action and resuscitated the desire to build pipelines. In 2025, our new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, signed a memorandum vowing that he is “focused” on building a new pipeline to carry “at least one million barrels” of bitumen per day from Alberta to British Columbia. The press began referring to this plan as “Northern Gateway 2.0”—a nod to a previous, failed attempt to build a pipeline to B.C.’s northern coast. He has also floated the notion of renewing construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which had been cancelled in 2021. Environmentalists refer to these projects, aptly, as “zombie pipelines”: dead—and deadly—revenants rising from their graves.
If these pipeline projects are revivified, Takaro assures me, a new resistance movement, led primarily by Indigenous organizers, is almost certain to spring up once again to combat them. The blockades of the past are merely a prelude to those to come. After all, you never forget how to climb a tree. ♦