Change for the better

Last week when I was up on Burnaby Mountain, the mud was deep enough to nearly go over the tops of my boots. This week things look much different up there.

Nearly all of the protectors/protesters have gone home. Why? Because Kinder Morgan has left.

Thankfully, they’re not all that’s gone. So are the charges against nearly all of those brave souls who were arrested. It seems that KM didn’t set their boundaries correctly, or had some problems reading their GPS devices, so their injunction was completely compromised. If their engineers can't read a GSP, it doesn't exactly bode well for the thought of their running more pipeline, or boring through the mountain. 

But the difference this week isn't just because hardly any people are left in the camp up there. The weather has also played a huge role in the change.

That ankle-deep mud has now frozen into solid earth and been covered with a thin layer of snow. Even with footprints in the snow, the ground appears to be healing from all that human traffic.

The frozen mud makes me think of Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant book, Cat’s Cradle, in which an experiment to rid battlefields of mud goes terribly wrong.

It’s the book that's raised my hackles over fears about the kind of grand-scale water-poisoning that might occur if the frackers have it wrong when they say their actions won’t see oil or gas leaking into the water table.

At first glance, water and oil and pipelines may not seem to be related. But, just as all of us are related, so are all of those concerns.