After Kinder Morgan served Burnaby Mountain obstructionists with a $5.6 million dollar lawsuit, a legal defence fund was created to support the legal costs for poet and SFU professor Stephen Collis, Adam Gold, Mia Nissen and Lynne Quarmby, among others, who defended their rights to protest in hearings held last November at the Supreme Court of B.C.

A lawyer for Kinder Morgan read some of Collis' writing into the public record. It was a prose piece called The Last Barrel of Oil on Burnaby Mountain from Collis' blog post.

"He introduced it in court,"; says Collis, "as evidence of my guilt as someone intending to blockade their pipeline, and encouraging others to do so as well.

"He referred to it as a 'poem by Stephen Collis.' I can only assume that the literary structure of the sentences led him to re-brand it as a poem!";

It was subsequenlty discovered Kinder Morgan had given the RCMP incorrect GPS coordinates so that the invisible "line"; that protesters were not supposed to cross was nowhere near where it was meant to be.

The judge threw out all the charges and refused to give Kinder Morgan an extension for their drilling.

The U.S.-based Kinder Morgan cut its losses and hurriedly helicoptered out all its exploratory drilling equipment.
"We are at a point in history,"; says Collis, "when people have to stand up for what they believe, and stand up to defend their local environments, and the global environment, too.";

Stephen Collis' next book will be called Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands, due next year.