By the west coast of North America, between Vancouver, Ireland and the mainland, lies
a unique and beautiful sea. The sail-ish sea basin covers an area of 110,000 square
kilometres where 7 million people live. Yet hidden beneath the surface, a living
treasure thrives on the ebb and flow of tides. Discover some of the thousands of
species that make their home here. Complex lifeforms, evolving over eons, live
intricately balanced life cycles in an ecosystem that we are only beginning to
understand. Our ancestral home is the sea. Its life and forces sustain us and its
essence flows through our veins in a legacy shared by all living beings on
our planet. What happens to the sea happens to us all.
Jathimla Mahadevita
Jathimla Mahadevita
Jathimla Mahadevita
I've grown up on this inlet all my life. My mother has grown up on this inlet all her life. My
grandparents. We're not here today to say that we're against industry. Industry's
been here all my life, all my mom's life. We've got the coal, the
shell tanks, Chevron, we've got hydro, we've got the railway, we've got the
refinery, we've got chemical plants here. We're just here to say that enough is
enough. We don't want this twinning to happen in our inlet no more. We've got so
much at stake, so much at risk that we just want to say enough is enough
Kinder Morgan. I don't know if you noticed but Kinder Morgan will be
responsible for 150 million tons of carbon if they build this new pipeline.
Okay so if you add that to Northern Gateway that's another 150. If you add
that to the fact that the Port Metro Vancouver wants to make this the biggest
coal port expansion in North America. That's another hundred million tons of
carbon and then to add it up you've got the British Columbia province which says
we're going to do liquefied natural gas. That's another 200 million tons of
carbon. So we've only got four million people here and if you do the math you
realize that we're sitting on a hundred times more carbon per person all of us
than anywhere else in the world.
My father is Chief Dan George and he said when a mother is very sick and she
wants to feed her baby nurse her baby she will give that sickness to her baby
and it's the same with our mother the earth our mother is getting too sick to
feed us. How's she gonna give us good clean food that's good for our bodies
when she's sick and polluted? How are we going to have water to drink when it's
all polluted? I believe in you I'm saying it to you it's time for you to war your
up and stand for something. What if we lose? What if the people of British
Columbia, the people of Canada, the people of Vancouver what if we lose and
this Houston, Texas, American oil company gets its way and runs tankers
through British Columbia and has an oil spill. You know I can't even imagine that
and I'll tell you why. It's not gonna happen over my dead body and over the
over the people who have declared in Vancouver that the Slewa Tooth people
the Squamish people the people of citizens of Vancouver we're saying no.
