 I am really excited about this morning's presentation. I first heard about this through a friend of mine, Jean McGregor, who, and I have to admit, I didn't even know that this had happened, but I think it's really exciting. And I wanted our students to be aware that political activism is alive and well, and people are willing to take risks for things that really matter, not just to themselves, but to humanity as a whole. And what I'm talking about here is direct action to do something about climate change, because it's here and it's only going to get worse. I wrote a brief article in The Thunder Word back in fall quarter. T.M., you remember that one? Yeah, we're all going to die. I was feeling particularly optimistic. I think I wrote it in the week after the election, and then had to go back and do some editing. That one, yeah. But the point remains the same, and I am so thankful that there are folks who are willing to put themselves on the line to make a difference, because that, unfortunately, I think is what we need to affect change. So, y'all are the Valve Turners, and who are the Valve Turners? They sent me this thing I can read to y'all. The Valve Turners, five environmental activists currently facing serious felony charges in four different states are here to talk to us about the importance of direct action in mitigating the climate catastrophe. On October 11th, 2016, the five Valve Turners Ken Ward, Annette Clapstein, Emily Johnston, Leonard Higgins, and Michael Foster shut off emergency valves on five pipelines, stopping the flow of all tar sands oil into the United States. The message being, we are in a climate emergency now, not in the future now. The protest responded to a call from the Standing Rock Sioux for international prayer and action. Side note, I always feel the best prayers correspond with action. So if you're going to pray, that's great. Move your feet. On the growing climate emergency, the coordinated safe shut off of five pipelines was an unprecedented act of civil disobedience and the most expansive takeover of fossil fuel infrastructure ever attempted in the U.S., stopping 15% of U.S. crude oil imports for nearly a day. That's impressive. We've got a brief video here that I will play if I can get this thing to work. Good. To introduce you guys to what happened and the work that the valve turners did and then we'll turn it over to Leonard. And since some other folks are coming, Michael and Sam will be here too. Awesome. All right. Here we go. Basically, this is Leonard. He's going to be past these two legs here, kind of down this corner. There's a gate there and a gate there. That's what they're going to cut open. I'm going to move that at 8.30. The group which calls themselves Climate Direct Action includes five activists and four other supporters. Between 7.25 and 7.30, Ken will call Kinder Morgan at 7.30. He will close the valves. That's why we win. What did you guys say? This is the only way we get their attention. This is the only way we can put a stop to it is by putting our own bodies on the line. All other avenues have been exhausted at this point. So for the sake of the children and the earth that we love, I'm ready to do this. Sumber and worry, but also, I mean, you know, at this point, we have to do something. I think this has a very good chance of being making an important impact. So we've got to try it. Climate activists were arrested Tuesday for attempting to shut down all tar sands oil coming into the United States from Canada by manually turning off pipelines in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington State. We're Emily Johnson and Annette Clafstein. We're calling from Leonard, Minnesota. We're currently at the block valve sites for lines 4 and 67. There's 10 miles southeast from the Clearbook pumping station. For the sake of climate justice and to ensure a future for human civilization, we must immediately halt the extraction and burning of Canadian tar sands. For safety, I'm calling to inform you that when I hang up this phone, we are closing the valves. Please shut down these two pipelines now for safety and for our future. And I'm calling to report that there are activists at a block valve site. Climate activists are preparing to shut the block valve that you shut down the express pipeline, the Keystone pipeline in approximately 10 minutes. The plan is for them to shut down that valve in approximately 14, 13 minutes. We want to make sure that you are aware of the situation so that the pipeline can be shut down in a safe manner. Approximately 9 miles south of the Canadian border. Keystone pipeline, North Dakota, a Michael Foster. In order to preserve life as we know it in civilization, give us a fair chance and our kids a fair chance. I'm taking action as a citizen. I am duty bound. It is so blissful to actually see a place where I can apply that calling, where I can take action that has a chance of making a difference. Urged by the prosecuting attorney for Skagit County, Washington with four crimes. Burglary, criminal trespass, sabotage, and assemblage of saboteurs. For my action last Tuesday, closing a safety valve on the trans mountain pipeline and blocking the flow of Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta to the Anacortes refineries. There is no question about what I did. I livestreamed it. And you can see the video at www.shutitdowntoday. The only question is whether what I did was an appropriate and practical response to what President Obama recently described as the terrifying climate conditions. As a young person on this planet, I'm going to be living through this century and any children I might have will also be living through these consequences. If people are not acting as though there's an emergency, people don't believe that there's an emergency. And so for me, this is all about acting consistent with the threat that I'm seeing. Awesome. We got awesome. Great. Awesome. So we have a couple of the valve turners right here. Three. Great. Awesome. I want to take at least three of these. And we can put like a little NBC over here and CBS right here. Next question. Good morning, everyone. Wonderful. Well, maybe we could start if you could just introduce yourselves to the audience. And a little bit about yourselves. Okay. I'm Leonard Higgins. I was born in Eugene. I've lived in Oregon all my life. I'm 65 years old, retired. I have five kids, two grandkids. I go to the UU fellowship in Corvallis. And this is, this action that you just saw is the responsibility that I have to my kids, my grandkids. And frankly, all of you, this is what it looks like to be a good citizen in this country today. Yeah. Okay. I'm Michael Foster. And I shut the pipeline down. The Keystone One pipeline, not the Keystone XL, which hasn't been built yet. And my maximum charges have been reduced. The judge threw out a couple of the felonies because according to the judge, my action was not like pulling out a gun and shooting at it, somebody and missing. It didn't show extreme disregard for human life. So I'm facing misdemeanors and stuff that add up to a maximum of 23 years. But actual time served on these things will be a tiny fraction of that. And I work with kids and families who are planting trees around the world. And here in this area, 1,000 billion trees to be exact. That's enough to hopefully reverse some of the devastating impacts of climate change that we have already baked into our system and that my kids will be suffering through if we don't plant these trees. So there's that. Co-founder of 350 Seattle. I'm an Al Gore speaker, so I've spoken to groups like this. Over 12,000, 13,000 students and people in this area giving the Al Gore slide show. And I'm really thrilled that I was able to take part in this action because it balances stopping the poison, which we have to do. We actually have to stop burning and extracting this stuff now. And storytelling, which is about waking people up so that we can take action together before it's not possible to restabilize our climate. That was a long introduction. Hi, I'm Sam. I was a support person for Michael in North Dakota. I have the maximum possible sentence of 12 years, but again, very likely, much less than that. I'm very new to this kind of activism I started like a year ago that happened when I turned 30, the age that my parents were when they had me and I started thinking about how I was going to be able to raise kids in the world that we're handing to them. We're certainly going to need a lot of courage to stand up to these, the kind of inhumanity that we see already manifesting in the sort of indifference to crises like we have in Flint, the Flint River water crisis, the kind of xenophobic politics that gain so much currency when people are, you know, living in a world of uncertainty and scarcity. So for me it was a question of how to find that courage in myself being a rule follower for most of my life and also as a white person in a culture of white supremacy living behind a racist police state. I felt like it was the least I could do to step out from behind that and put some skin in the game. And, yeah. Yeah, you notice none of us were shot at when the sheriffs arrived because we're old white people. Well, thank you guys. Thank you for being here today. It really means a lot to us. I was wondering if you could possibly talk a little bit more about how this idea came about, how you conceived of this action in the first place. So the strategy had a number of different legs to it and we'll all probably talk about different pieces of it. One of the legs was that it wasn't just the action that we were planning. We were committing to probably about a year and that looks like that's playing out that way of time after the action. And speaking like this, working towards our jury trials to present what's called the necessity defense. And that basically is just a lesser harms that I had to break the law in order to prevent a greater harm. A common example is you're walking by your neighbor's house and you see a fire inside and his children there. You break and enter and you're not charged with breaking and entering into that house because you prevented a greater harm. And so that was part of it. Another piece was an escalation in the Pacific Northwest. We've been fighting an ongoing battle against proposed new infrastructure projects at one time over two dozen of them. We were very successful in stopping those new projects but the truth is even if we completely kept any new infrastructure projects from being done any new extraction we're still going to have catastrophic climate change. And so this project was to do what needs to be done and that's to look at existing infrastructure, existing flow of fossil fuels and begin ramping that down. And so for a day we did stop 15% of the dirtiest oil coming in that releases the most carbon into the United States. It was 15% of the U.S. oil supply. And five little old white people stopped it with a couple of bolt cutters cutting chains that wouldn't keep your bicycle safe on campus. Think about that for a minute. The next day in the White House press briefing there was a question about the vulnerability of our nation's oil supply. There's 2.2 million miles of oil pipelines in this country and they've got stop valves all along them. How about that? Food for thought. So as you were planning this, how much confidence did you have that it would go as smoothly as safely as it did? Was there a lot of anxiety? So it was several months of planning and one of the huge anxieties was the possibility that there might be a spill or some kind of incident connected to shutting off the pipeline or even a leak that so often happens during normal operations of these pipelines that coincided with our action. And so we worked very diligently studying the safety protocols and followed them that included calling the pipelines not once but pipeline companies, not once but twice before we shut off each of the safety valves. The timing was pretty tight. We had it timed so that over the course of an hour and 15-minute increments we closed off all four pipelines, all five pipelines starting with the two in Minnesota and then the one in North Dakota, then Minnesota and Washington. And getting past the actual planning to the day of action, my main anxiety was just to make sure that I got my valve shut off before the deputy sheriffs arrived. And as it turned out, they didn't get there as soon as you thought they were going to. How long did it take for them to come? It was almost an hour. It was really anti-climatic. I got the valve shut off and then I just sat inside the closure for almost an hour. In fact, I got kind of cold in the snow. We did wait and that's an important part of this action. We couldn't sit here right now and tell this story if we weren't willing to face the punishment. Martin Luther King wrote from Birmingham jail just one of 30 times that he was arrested. He wrote, when a person challenges an unjust law and is willing to face the punishment, it arouses the conscience of the community and shows respect for the law. So we could have cut these valves and disappeared. I mean, we waited maybe a half hour in North Dakota and we were 10 miles from Canada. So we could have disappeared. We could have turned off more pipelines, which would have been awesome because if stopping oil for a day is good, stopping it day after day is even better. But that would have told a different story. And the truth is we have to challenge ourselves. We have to hold ourselves accountable because we're the customers who are buying and addicted to the product. So we have to challenge ourselves and we have to challenge the entire system, including the governors and leaders, the city councils, the people who are passing the laws that keep us stuck on this system. So I'm trying to work on all of those things and so waiting to be arrested was really important. And I'm going to ask a jury of my peers to judge me and say, what does justice look like for this guy who clearly cut the chain, crossed into this no trespassing area, and turned off this pipeline? What does justice look like for this guy? He says he was doing it to prevent the end of the world. How many years should he spend in jail? Would you like to be on my jury? I mean, it's going to be an interesting conversation in the jury room, I hope. I love the story you tell about your anxiety. Yeah, I was convinced that we're not spies and like Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible stuff, we had not been totally secure with our emails and our messages back and forth. So I was convinced that the sheriffs were going to be waiting for us when we got there. And I was just like, what are we going to do? We're going to drive past and try and not let them see who we are and just keep going to Canada or something. But then I had this moment the evening before and I pictured myself getting out of the car, getting the bolt cutters out, walking over to the sheriff's truck and saying, hi, I'm Michael Foster. I came a long way to turn off this pipeline, so I need to get in there. And all of the anxiety melted away. From that moment on, I feel like I'm on the right side of history. And it's like, what can they do to me? I came here to get this message out and get arrested and probably go do some time. What can they do to me? Now in other countries, they'd probably assassinate me. Last year, 164 environmental activists were assassinated around the world. And these are not white privileged people who made a choice to go somewhere and stop a pipeline. These are usually villagers whose home, their only home, is being destroyed by an oil company or a dam. And they are just fighting to stay alive and they get eliminated. So, yeah, I feel really fortunate that I am in this moment, in this place, and that I can take action, like Leonard says in the video, that I can do something that might have a chance to make a difference and help wake people up. Add anything to that? Oh, something that Emily, another one of our, one of the valve turners says, I think is really on point. She says that the danger of these pipelines is letting them operate, not only from the climate change perspective, but just from the perspective of these companies will do anything they can to cut costs. There's very expensive fuel for them and so they need to make it as cheap as possible to get it to market. And the way they cut costs is they, you know, they don't build their pipelines the way they say they're going to build them. And that's why they're constantly spills on these pipelines. And those spills are happening because they're operating. We're operating the shut off valves the way that they're intended to be operated. So I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind when we talk about the safety of these pipelines. Leonard, you earlier mentioned your involvement with a church. And Michael, it sounds like you have, if not a spiritual, at least a very strong philosophical understanding of what you're doing and your actions. Could you talk maybe a little bit about your personal journey to what brought you to this point and maybe what's going to help you move forward through this process that you'll be experiencing? So I don't know. It's always difficult to decide how much detail to go into. Just your life story. I've lived a pretty conventional life. I bought in after my teens into the American dream. I got married. I worked on a career, bought a house, looked at all the things that our culture tends to think of as a successful life. And for me, a lot of that was very good. I loved my family. I loved my kids. And yet there was this part of me that knew something was terribly wrong with the way our system was working. I had some dissonant facts like knowing that the only reason we have the standard of living in America that we do is because of the way that our nation has exploited people throughout its history. Whether it was genocide of the First Nations people, whether it was slavery, whether it was women, whether it was a plan to militarily dominate the whole world so that we could continue to feed the pipeline of resources into America to maintain a very unfair lifestyle. If we were to live at the standard of living that was fair to the rest of humanity on the globe, it would be so very much different than what we're consuming now. And so I, like so many Americans, was not facing those truths. They were nagging feelings that contributed to a need to anesthetize, to watch TV, to stay really absorbed in my work, to not look at those horrible truths. I went to a Joanna Macy conference. She does the work that reconnects. She's an eco-philosopher. A wonderful woman was already in her late 70s at the time I went to that workshop. And in that workshop, the process she uses to help people face those horrible truths was what helped me to get there. I mean, part of it is that it's very despairing to look at that and also know that in this country we've gotten to a place where as citizens we don't have very much power anymore. And it's even less now in the last few months. There is research that's done and it's very unlikely even when there's a majority of us that feel differently than the policies that benefit corporations and moneyed interest in the world are going to be upheld by our lawmakers. We all see that. At any rate, the work that reconnects is a spiral. It starts with gratitude. It's just looking at everything we love in this world. And then it's going into facing the truths about what is wrong and getting through that despair. Most of us are afraid of really looking at that. It's about grieving. It really is we don't grieve in this country what's been lost. But so much has been lost. And can I share just a factoid? Let me hand off to you. At any rate, you could tell I was ready to go on for most of the morning here. And so what the workshop helped me to do is take that despair through grieving and turn that into an energy for action. And so after that and retirement, I co-founded 350 Corvallis and started this journey toward direct action. So it's a beautiful spring morning. It's Earth Week. We're celebrating Earth Day this weekend. Life is coming up and out of the ground all around us. It's awesome to be alive. You kind of feel it in the air. And there are half as many vertebrates living on the planet today as there were at Earth Day 1970 when the environmental movement was born in this country. So there's a joy in being alive and a gratitude and there's a grieving that needs to happen for all that's been lost. How do we talk about this with each other? We could argue for days about why we don't talk about this with each other. But the point is we have to learn to talk about this with each other now so that we can move to action. When you hit the end of the rope, you hit the wall, you can't believe that the coral reefs are dying like 30 years before they were predicted to die. You know, I'm Google Great Barrier Reef if you don't know what I'm talking about. And then talk about it. And then you wake up the next day and you say, okay, I'm still alive. What am I going to do about this? How am I going to remain human? How am I going to hold on to my humanity and be a part of this living world that's still here, that's still struggling to catch its breath while we keep choking the air with our waste? How am I going to do that? Because if there's going to be people here a thousand years from now, it's going to be because of what you and I do in the next few months and years. We shut off this pipeline October 11th, pipelines. If the oil companies had agreed to leave them locked shut with flowers on them the way we left them, you know, in memoriam for the deceased keystone pipeline that used to flow here, that would have been my responsibility to my kids' basic human right to survive for 2016 and part of 2017. And then you and I would have to find five pipelines worth of oil to stop using again. We need to cut our emissions 10% every year until we're done. If we wait, say until the next big election and hope that somebody's going to force us to stop poisoning ourselves, it ain't going to happen. It wasn't happening under Barack Obama who rejected the keystone XL pipeline and laid more pipe than any president in U.S. history. Nobody can force us to stop doing this. So if we wait a few years, that number jumps up to like 15% every year until we're done. Plus we got to plant those one trillion trees that the kids are working on. So grab a shovel, get some bolt cutters, whatever inspires you do the thing that needs to be done while there's still time. No politician is talking about cutting emissions 10% a year. They're not talking about that at the United Nations. Nobody on earth is going to do this for us. And quite frankly, they don't think it's possible anymore. It's only possible if people demand it, if people refuse to participate in the system, refuse to buy the product, refuse to allow the banks to finance these projects and just say we demand a change now. So 350, you've heard the group 350 mentioned a couple of times. Google 350.org, there are multiple campaigns going on in this area and a bunch of them happening in the next two weeks that you can be a part of. There's marches and rallies and lectures and things happening that need you besides just the online petition signing and stuff you can do. So you make a difference. Every body that shows up makes a difference, whether it's for social justice, for science, for the tribal rights stopping the pipelines and the coal terminals and the things that are being proposed for this region. Every person that shows up makes a huge difference. So get involved now. It's weird, I don't really think I'm an environmentalist. I'm not sure why I'm up here. No, I'm just kidding. I know why I'm up here, I think. I'm figuring it out. But I think discussions around climate change have ruined a lot of my family dinner conversations over the years because everyone realizes what's going on and what we're facing and no one at those table conversations has ever felt like we could actually do anything about it so we get into these big pointless arguments and we despair for life that's going to go extinct anyways. If you go out far enough, the sun is going to incinerate the earth and what even is the point? Life will go on, right? No matter what we do, life is going to go on for as long as it's going to go on and then whatever is going to happen is going to happen. I'm kind of nihilistic about that, I guess. But I love nature. I love being out in nature. But for me what has moved me to action is the sense that as a society we're moving in a really bad direction and this is one example of that, of how that's working. When we have an industry, the fossil fuel industry that has been lying to the public and lying to policy makers for half a century almost about the way that they are poisoning our environment and the impacts that they are going to have on people not only in this country but around the world. Rex Tillerson is now the Secretary of State. He's the one who oversaw that campaign of lies. So we're heading in a really bad direction and to me it's not about how are we going to save the coral reef. The reef is dead. We're not going to save the coral reef. We're probably not going to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, to be honest. That's how I feel about it. But if we go 20, 30 years into the future when there's not as much fresh water as there is today and it's harder to grow your food and there are billions of people displaced because cities all over the world have been flooded. What kind of world are we going to live in and how are we going to be able to pull together and stand up to the people who are now making decisions. So I feel like it's important to start doing that work now and start building bridges and connecting these things and figuring out how we can start laying the groundwork for that. Wonderful. Thank you so much. So we only have about five minutes left here. Students got to get to the next classes, et cetera. Actually, could I make a pitch for something? Yeah. There's an ALGOR training coming to town. It'll be in Bellevue, end of June and the former vice president will be leading a three-day event. It's free and you can go and you can watch him do his like two-hour version of like 300 slides. I don't know how many of you saw an Inconvenient Truth? A few. So an Inconvenient Sequel is coming out this summer and he's training folks in Bellevue June 27, 28, 29. So if you're really inspired to do something and you'd like to learn and connect, that's one place to do it. You can go online and apply for that. And then the other pitch I want to make is about the kids who are suing the government for a climate plan. I help organize those kids. And you have a right to... You have a right to Washington's essential resources, air and water, which these children will require to grow to adulthood safely. That's quoting from the ruling of the judge in King County Court. This is the first time in U.S. history that a government was ordered to fix climate by the courts. And it happened here because of these kids a couple years ago. We are still fighting this case to find out what it really means. They've introduced legislation that died in committee. And so I'm inviting you to ask to amend any carbon pricing bill that comes out of Olympia this year. And there may be a carbon pricing plan, but whatever their planning is going to aim to cook the planet at like 450 parts per million, not 350 parts per million. So we're at 410 right now. And they want to cool off the planet by increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 450. So demand that any carbon pricing plan aim for 350. And you can do that yourself with your legislators, find out who your legislators are, make sure they know who you are just by calling and asking questions and being kind of persistent, and let them know that you expect them to honor your constitutional, under the Washington state constitution, your constitutional legal right to a stable climate. Because that's in the court ruling right now. So demand it, because they don't even know about it. They don't know that this happened. You educate your legislators. In addition to the power of direct action, right now the other place where there's significant leverage is like Michael's describing at state legislatures and city councils. And folks in your generation have a particular power, especially when you show up in mass before those legislative bodies to affect policy. Just a few minutes left here. Just out of curiosity, Earth Day is this weekend, April 22nd. Wondering how you all will be spending Earth Day. So we're visiting universities this week. We did last week as well. And I'll be one of the presenters at a direct action workshop in Eugene at the end of the month. I'm going to be torn between a march for science that's being put on by scientists just like saying, hey, we still think math is real. And then Duwamish Alive. Duwamish Alive is cleaning up planting trees, pulling out invasive species, and trying to take care of the waterway that runs really close to here. So you can take part in it. It's a super fun clean-up site. The river is so polluted. So being out there and getting your hands dirty and trying to get rid of some of these species that pioneers and settlers brought here a hundred years ago and they are literally choking our forests. If you drive along the freeways, you'll see it. There's vines and berry bushes and everything. A tree gets choked by that or dies among that stuff. It's very difficult for a new tree to come up through those bushes. They shade and cover the ground. So if we don't do anything, the Seattle area, Puget Sound area forests will be gone. They will be... Just imagine like berry bushes as far as the eye can see. That's what we'll have 200 years from now if we don't take care of these things and get them out of the ground right now. So, anyway. And we're doing an invasive species poll right down here, right? Oh, yeah. Number 05, right in front of the Student Union. Awesome. Awesome. It's the 22nd? Birthday, Saturday. Oh. I will be visiting my family in Oregon. There you go. Very excited about it. That's wonderful. Great. I just wanted to... I pulled up here, 350.org website. It should come up here in a second. Yes. 350 is totally grassroots, non-paid. I mean, this is like organizing at the community level. If you've got an idea, if you see a problem, if you think somebody should be working on this, chances are somebody at 350 is, and if they're not, you can start a group and get people to work on that with you. This is how the networking happens. Well, it's there. Okay. Yeah. It's here. 350.org. And 350 Seattle for around here. There are two different websites. 350seattle.org and 350.org. Thanks. It just had to warm up a little bit. Okay. That's enough for you all to check it out. Thank you guys so much. It really means a lot. Thank you.