We — a whole community ultimately — were “in their way,” so they did the various things they could to get us out of the way of their climate-change-fuelling, unceded-territory-invading tar sands bitumen pipeline: police enforced injunction orders, lawsuits, political influence peddling, etc.

Beneath the poetry, the barricade

I sat for three and a half days in a courtroom built for the Air India terrorism trial, listening to the oil company lawyers, sitting behind bulletproof glass, drone on about how we were impacting their client’s bottom line. I got tired of hearing myself quoted repeatedly, as they tried to paint me as some kind of bandit ringleader. But they did give me one remarkable line: “underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.”

Once in Blockadia picks up from there. There was a lot “underneath the poetry.” I wanted to think about these conflicting desires at work in the world: the desire for energy, development, and growth at all cost, and the counter desire for a healthy and sustaining natural environment, a connection to the land, and justice for those who have so long lived in contact with their land. I wanted the feel of being on the mountain, in the path of this monstrous project, camped out near Gnomes Home Trail, where thirteen trees had been cut down so a helicopter could drop a drill platform onto the mountain, pondering why we were doing this, and why it was so difficult to change a system built — to build.

We kept thinking about the future — about what might come to be, and about how new fossil fuel infrastructure “locked in” certain future outcomes. “Kinder Morgan,” someone told me, might, in badly translated German, be taken to mean “tomorrow’s children.” We were faced, it seemed, with a choice of being “all tomorrow’s parties” (thanks Lou Reed), and continuing on with business as usual, until there was no more business to conduct—or making room for “tomorrow’s children,” and a different sort of future.

This is an excerpt from the beginning of Once in Blockadia. Poetry does not stop pipelines. But it can accompany the people who can and do stop pipelines, and the dream we are dreaming as we struggle together towards other, yet to be determined futures.

From Once in Blockadia

BC Supreme Court Transcripts, Nov. 5, 2014. Submissions for the plaintiff:

And so then exhibit T is a website called “Beating the Bounds,” which is actually a website maintained by Mr. Collis, and so the first page is the “About” page where it references occasional notes, and then one of the notes posted is a note that on the website talks about the last barrel of oil on Burnaby Mountain.

Sometimes the world narrows to a very fine point, a certain slant of light, the head of a needle you need to pass through. I don’t care right now about the National Energy Board of Canada, merely a corporate tool for shoehorning global energy projects into other people’s territories, a funnel for money from the public to the private sector. I don’t care about this or that court of law, appeals and constitutional challenges. I don’t care about the drones, unmarked cars or CSIS agents. I don’t even care that much about the rain.

And then flip over the page:

I care about the people who have come together to stand in the forest on a mountain in the path of a pipeline.

And he describes why he cares about them. And the next paragraph:

As has been our intention all along, we will occupy public land, a city park, and prevent Kinder Morgan from carrying out its destructive work, work opposed by local First Nations, opposed by the City of Burnaby and opposed by the majority of Burnaby residents. While the case goes back and forth in the courts, our intention is to keep Kinder Morgan wrapped up dealing with us, either until a court somewhere sides with the people against this mega-corporation or until the NEB’s December 1 deadline for KM’s complete application.

He describes his views about protecting the local environment, and then on the bottom:

As barricades were assembled from garbage dumped down a hillside from a parking lot in Burnaby Mountain … an old rusted oil barrel was uncovered and rolled up the hill. It’s a talisman, a symbol of the old world we are trying to resist and change. It is, we hope, the last oil barrel that will have anything to do with this mountain forest.

So underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.