Tamo Campos visited campus on Tuesday to present “It’s Not Radical to Oppose Stupidity,” with a keynote lecture and presentation of the documentary “Northern Grease.”
Campos is a professional snowboarder and a founder of Beyond Boarding, “a group of snowboarders, surfers, artists, and friends that strive to stand up against environmental and social injustices.”
Beyond Boarding is based out of British Columbia, with a focus on how mineral extraction (notably fracking), tar sands development, and oil pipelines affect the land and the indigenous people who inhabit it.
The presentation included a screening of the documentary Northern Grease. It follows Campos and other members of Beyond Boarding as they travel in a vegetable oil fueled bus throughout British Columbia and Alberta, discovering that indigenous land rights are often violated by large energy companies. Additionally, the accidents and spills that inevitably occur receive little news coverage, leaving the indigenous people and other inhabitants of the land to deal with these issues without external help.
One issue Campos has encountered as an activist is the social effect of mineral extraction, notably in growing instances of substance abuse.
In many towns, a large extraction operation creates an economic boom, similar to mining towns of the past. That boom brings an enormous amount of workers who provide a market for drug dealers. These drug distribution operations grow and eventually spill over into the community.
Growing high school dropout rates are also problematic. Working in extraction pays so well that dropouts can instantly make more money than their teachers. The problem is, once the oil and minerals run out, so do the jobs.
Campos also addressed the problems with modern activism. To him, it’s more than just “light bulbs and water bottles.” And it’s also a problem when “the endgame of civil disobedience is getting publicity and getting arrested rather than succeeding in your goals.”
One group Campos had high praise for was Canada’s First Nations, the indigenous tribes of Canada. They are currently fighting large oil and gas corporations who have received government permits to mine the land. Normally there would be little the indigenous people could do, but in western Canada, especially Alberta and British Columbia, much of the land is unceded, meaning the indigenous people never signed a treaty giving their land over to the Canadian government.
The corporations, however, won’t give up. Campos showed a clip of representatives from one such corporation in a standoff with the Unist’ot’en people. The representatives, with cameras on their chests, kept asking permission to mine the land, and kept getting denied.
Campos explained that this was an attempt to bait the Unist’ot’en into saying something threatening so that the oil company could get a court injunction requiring police to aid in the mining efforts. At the end of the conversation, one representative makes an “offering” of two cases of plastic water bottles and some tobacco to the tribal representatives.
This episode gives some insight into the difficulties indigenous people can have dealing with government authorities.
Campos recounted an event from one blockade he took part in where the indigenous people had been asking for a police dispatch for ten years, but never received one. The oil company they were blockading received one in a matter of days.
Campos also spoke of instances of racism he experienced as an activist. He and a group of protesters were arrested following a protest on Burnaby Mountain. Campos and his friends were released for court the next day.
The indigenous people who were arrested with them were not, and were also denied blankets and medication while in their cells. When he told this story to the press, they left it out of their publications.
Lack of attention and negative attention from the media and the public is not uncommon. While protesting a dinner of oil company executives, activists taped pieces of paper over their mouths with the words “climate justice” written on them. One person confronted them and said, “you should have ISIS or terrorist written on your face.”
Campos stressed two forces that drive his and others’ fight against oil and mineral extraction. First was a love of nature and the outdoors. For him, that appreciation came through snowboarding.
2015 CC graduate Maia Wikler, who organized the event, explained, “When you truly love something and depend on it, you will do anything to protect it.” For the people of the First Nations, that love comes almost naturally. “Their entire sustenance is in their land reservation. That is their economy, their livelihood, their culture. They have ancestral tradition laced in that land. It’s their identity. When these environmental threats come up like the [Keystone] Pipeline and fracking, it’s directly threatening their entire existence, and that is an understatement,” says Wikler.
The other force is the idea of responsibility. The indigenous people of Canada do not agree with the concept of “rights.” There is no word for rights in their language. Instead, they say “responsibilities.” There’s a responsibility to take only what you need and to protect the land. To Campos, “this idea of responsibility empowers us to take direct action.”