The devil’s in the details

Jon and Leif Nelson’s “A hole in the landscape” [Spring 2006, page 30] describes a trip into Devil’s Crater. The article tells of the authors using a chainsaw to make a portage into Devil’s Crater and of camping for two nights.

A review of the trip map posted in the article confirms the authors we re in Pantagruel Creek Provincial Nature Reserve, though this was not clearly evident in the article. Nature Reserve parks are established to represent and protect distinctive natural habitats and landforms of the province. These areas are protected for educational and research purposes. Arbitrary trail development and use of a chainsaw are not acceptable activities in a Nature Reserve park. Camping is not allowed in a Nature Reserve park.

It is important that park visitors are fully aware of the park rules and activities allowed in provincial parks they plan to visit. The Ontario Parks website (www.ontarioparks.com) has information about all provincial parks including the telephone number and mailing address for the park superintendents. Anyone planning to visit any non-operating park may wish to contact the park superintendent to obtain information.

Al Ccomeau,
Park Superintendent
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park Node

 

Jon and Leif Nelson reply:

The rules and regulations pertaining to acceptable activities in a nature reserve are far more ambiguous than Park Superintendent Al Comeau implies. At the time of our trip, the Ontario Parks website that he refers to had no mention of a camping ban in any of the information about Pantagruel Creek Nature Preserve. Within the park planning section of the website is a section on nature reserves that contains a table indicating that no campground facilities are in Pantagruel. The absence of established campgrounds did not indicate to us that camping is not allowed.

We had read that a forest fire occurred in the 1980s and that there had been a growth of small jack pine trees in much of the area around Devil’s Crater. As mentioned in the article, we took a chainsaw in case it was necessary to cut a few jack pines to get a canoe to the bottom of the canyon. In retrospect, we agree that we should not have cut any vegetation.

Devil’s Crater, and other geological evidence of the dramatic overflow of Lake Agassiz thousands of years ago, deserves to be protected. We wrote this article to increase public awareness of this relatively inaccessible area and to highlight the excellent research by Dr.Teller and other geologists whose work resulted in the understanding of the forces that shaped these areas.

 

Excuses, excuses

I think James Miller got a few things wrong in his letter in the Summer 2006 issue [“Southern comfort,” page 7].

Riki Burkhardt’s whole point was that more of the same old, forestry-based economic models for northern Ontario communities is simply not a good solution. I’m also certain she wasn’t advocating a “silent landscape. “On the contrary, time and again, regular old tourism, ecotourism and other non-industrial land uses have been shown to be good, vibrant economic solutions.

I get tired of the “north versus south” debate. No one can seriously believe that if northern Ontario had the same population and money as southern Ontario they wouldn’t go just as head over heels in terms of their materialistic desires. This is what groups like Ontario Nature are fighting, because it is so contrary to the well-being of nature.

One thing I’ve learned is that there is never an end to all the economic excuses for harming nature – whether by individuals or companies. For the sake of nature, however, we eventually have to draw a line in the sand and say no more, no matter what the excuse or reason is. I do this in my own area and I expect other nature advocates – whether in southern or northern Ontario – to do the same.

Kenneth Lapointe,
Windsor

Good food gone bad

Pretty on the outside, sure, but inside the nutritional content of what we eat is way down

If there is any truth to the saying you are what you eat, then a great many of us may be in serious trouble. According to Thomas Pawlick, a science journalist and organic farmer, much of the food we eat contains less nutrition and more noxious contaminants today that at any other time in history. Pawlick lays the blame for this state of affairs squarely on the corporation-based, industrial farming system, with its emphasis on yield and crop size (as opposed to taste and nutritional content) and the very long distance so much of our food travels between farm and table.

In his recent published book The End of Food, Pawlick urges readers to boycott foods “produced for the highest profit rather than for nutritional content.”

Listed here are some disturbing statistics, gleaned from Pawlick’s book, on what we ingest. (All stats have been derived by comparing the nutritional content of foods today with their nutritional content 40 years ago.)

Tomatoes, once among the best sources of vitamins A and C, have lost 30.7% of their vitamin A content and 16.9% of their vitamin C content. Moreover, they contain 61.5% less calcium, 11.1% less phosphorous, 9% less potassium, 7.97% less niacin, 10% less iron and 1% less thiamine. At that same time, tomatoes have 65% more fat and 200% more sodium than the leaner, more nutritious tomato of 1963.

Potatoes have lost 100% of their vitamin A and 57% of their vitamin C and iron content. Spuds have also lost 28% of their calcium, 50% of their riboflavin and 18% of their thiamine.

The vitamin C content of broccoli is down 45%.

Creamed cottage cheese has lost 36.1% of its calcium, 13.1% of its phosphorus and 53.3% of its iron. It is up 7.3% in fat and 76.85% in sodium content.

A report from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency released in 2002 revealed that dioxins – a toxic, cancer-causing chemical that is illegal in any food sold in Canada – were found in eight of 10 samples of pork, beef and cheese imported from the United States.

Banned pesticides

A 2002 study put out by the U.S. Environmental Working Group found legally banned pesticides in a wide-ranging sample of non-organic fruits and vegetables. The 10 most contaminated foods were strawberries, bell peppers, spinach, cherries, peaches, cantaloupe, celery, apples, blackberries and green peas.

In a single batch of eggs imported from the United States, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found dioxin levels of more than 90 parts per trillion, or 18 times higher than the World Health Organization limit. It also found dioxin levels of 20 parts per trillion in a sample of eggs produced in Canada.

In 2003, Michael Khoo of the union of concerned scientists reported that chickens, pigs and cows are fed about 5.9 million kilograms of antibiotics annually. This figure is roughly four times the amount of antibiotics prescribed annually to treat people who are ill.

Skinless, roasted white chicken meat contains 51.6% less vitamin A and 39.9% less potassium. Dark meat has lost 52% of its vitamin A and 25.2% of its potassium. Light meat is not so light anymore: its fat content is up by 32.6% and its sodium content by 20.3%. Dark meat tips the scale with a 54.4% rise in fat content and an 8.1% rise in sodium.

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Compiled by Sharon Oosthoek from The End of Food, Copyright © 2006 by Thomas F. Pawlick. Published by Greystone Books, a division of Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

 

The good earth

By Victoria Foote

“Our house is a very, very, very small house …” And our backyard is even tinier. I, along with my husband, two sons and one beloved rabbit, inhabit a semi-detached home in midtown Toronto. The neighbour with whom we share the wall gives us cucumbers that he grows along the side of his house, and another passes tomatoes to the boys over a shared fence.

This summer we decided to grow our own edibles. In the spring, our sons, Jacob and Sam, planted cucumbers, parsley, basil, green onions, sage, carrots and thyme. My husband built a plant bed and there was much discussion about the best soil to shovel into it. The boys chose what they wanted to plant and waited expectantly.

They were not disappointed. Everything flourished – except the carrots. Jacob and Sam were thrilled. They fussed over their plants, patting the soil and fluffing the leaves. At dinnertime, one or the other would ask eagerly if we needed his parsley or basil for cooking with, and the answer was often yes.

What is it about growing your own food? As Allan Britnell points out in “Backyard harvest” (page 24), it tastes better, it contains no chemical additives, the price is right and, in a small way, it reduces your ecological footprint by conserving soil, water and air. Amazing fact: in the U.S., a typical morsel of food travels 2,250 kilometres before reaching a mouth, changing hands at least six times along the way. And, yes, there is more to it than all that. Says Sam, “I like to eat what I grow.”

Feeding the multitudes (“The new farm,” page 18), however, is a different story. While city farming is an outdoor activity, rural farming in southern Ontario is moving indoors on a large scale. Their produce safeguarded against the elements and seasons, greenhouse growers, compared with their outdoor counterparts, are seeing a significantly better return on their investment. But greenhouse farming still comes with an environmental price tag, largely in the form of enormous energy and water consumption.

Congratulations to the author of “The new farm,” Ray Ford, who was shortlisted this year for a National Magazine Award for his article “How to protect paradise,” which appeared in the Winter 2005/06 issue of ON Nature. Two issues of the magazine (Winter 2004/05 and Summer 2005) were also shortlisted for a Best Canadian Newsstand Award.

ON Nature continues to strive toward reducing its ecological footprint. This issue is printed on a paper stock called Chorus Art produced by Unisource. Chorus Art is FSC certified and contains 50 percent recycled fibre and 25 percent post-consumer waste. The production process is elemental chlorine free and acid free.

Next year: tomatoes.

The last of the caribou

By Julee Boan

Pushed to the brink of extirpation as a result of ongoing logging in the boreal forest, Ontario’s threatened woodland caribou populations may have reached a tipping point, as federal and provincial governments have failed to initiate any meaningful action that would ensure their survival.

Read the full article…

Can this act be saved?

By Wendy Francis

Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, long criticized for being too weak in its protective measures, is now undergoing a badly needed overhaul. In May, Minister of Natural Resource s David Ramsay released a discussion paper outlining proposals for updating the act.

Read the full article…

Green power comes to Caledon

By Shannon Wilmot

Last June’s announcements by Ontario energy minister Dwight Duncan left many questioning what role conservation and green power will play in the province’s energy future. The goal of closing Ontario’s four remaining coal-fired plants by 2009 was scrapped, and the government is about to invest more than $40 billion in building two new nuclear plants and refurbishing existing plants. Around the same time, one municipality was celebrating its first month using 100 percent clean power. The town of Caledon is bullfrog powered – an energy alternative gaining popularity around the province.

Read the full article…

Sprawl crawls to Simcoe

By Wendy Francis

Urban sprawl continues to encroach on Simcoe County, which lies just outside the northern boundary of the Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt. The county is the scene of an unprecedented land speculation rush that has led to numerous urban expansion applications, now the subject of appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board. Residents and local politicians are becoming increasingly concerned about Lake Simcoe’s capacity to assimilate such growth without lake water quality being impaired further.

Read the full article…

Naming the land

By Geoff Nixon

Stretching across eight counties, from the eastern edge of Lake Huron to the celebrated greenery of Frontenac county, lies a mosaic of granite Barrens and limestone plains. This unnamed are a forms a transition zone between the rocky plains of the Canadian shield and the more fertile farmlands that surround the great lakes. A diverse range of plant and animal species thrive on the unique piecemeal ecology of this area. Here you can find the golden-winged warbler, blanding’s turtle and the five-lined skink, Ontario’s only native lizard species.

Read the full article…

Lands for Life offers no protection

By Christine Beevis

Not for the first time, lodging and mining in northern Ontario have come into conflict with ecotourism and wilderness. The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines (MNDM) recently proposed “minor land-use amendments” for 10 Forest Reserves in northern Ontario: that they be reclassified to allow resource exploitation.

Read the full article…

Deadwood forest

By Sharon Oosthoek

The invasive garlic mustard plant is waging underground “chemical warfare ”in Ontario’s woods, and the casualties – hardwood trees – are mounting.

Read the full article…

Backyard harvest

Fresh, tasty produce. Green space. Conserving the soil, water and air. There are lots of great reasons why city farming has become so popular. And you can’t beat the travel time

by Allan Britnell

On a sweltering Monday morning in late May — by 10 a.m., the thermostat is reading 30ºC — I visit the 2,000-square-metre GROW Herbal Garden, a rented plot of land on the northeast edge of Kitchener, Ontario. The mercury will top 30 by the time the day’s volunteers wrap up their two-hour shift at noon. But the dedicated crew would be here rain or scorching shine.

The produce harvested from this garden will be transported to a nearby soup kitchen — which serves as many as 300 meals a day — a price-friendly café and for craft workshops, all run by a non-profit organization called The Working Centre (TWC), also located in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Last year, GROW reaped some 40 bushels of fresh herbs and another 45-plus bushels of beans, tomatoes, squash, zucchini and other produce.

Another community garden, on the campus of London’s University of Western Ontario, provides sustenance for a different group of needy users: cash-strapped students. Also called G.R.O.W., an acronym for “growing roots over Western,” the school’s eco-action club, EnviroWestern, started the eight-by-15-metre mini-farm last year. This spring, 15 participants sowed the garden’s first crop: tomatoes, radishes, heritage varieties of carrots, cucumbers and lettuce and some more exotic crops such as South American Aztec red spinach. Participants sign a contract committing each to a minimum of 10 hours tending the garden during the growing season.

“The idea to set a schedule for people to commit a certain amount of time was to ensure that the garden was maintained, but also to foster a sense of community and shared experience,” says project leader André Laurin. The garden itself serves multiple purposes, including being a cheap source of fresh, pesticide-free produce, an outdoor social activity and a way of demonstrating to fellow students that food can be grown in a local, sustainable manner. Laurin’s purpose is more personal: “There’s some deep sentimental attachment to gardening. I grew up watching my grandparents garden. I remember how great it was to eat that first cucumber off the vine [and] raid the garden for fresh carrots.”

Members pay a modest $5 fee that helps pay for seeds and garden tools. And for an additional $5 they can have their own one-square-metre plot. The entire garden is laid out using the “square foot gardening” principle, which sets out to maximize the yield in a limited growing area while minimizing labour and water consumption.

GROW and G.R.O.W. are just two of dozens of community gardens sprouting up across the province in city neighbourhoods in places as far-flung as Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins as well as Hamilton and Toronto, and all are part of a North America-wide urban agriculture movement.

“We use a fairly broad definition of what a community garden is,” says Betsy Johnson, executive director of the binational American Community Garden Association (ACGA). “It really is any community based growing project. Typically, they are allotment gardens where folks have an individual plot where they get to grow vegetables. Other forms [include] school gardens, youth leadership projects, or communal growing projects where people grow for a food bank” such as Kitchener’s GROW garden.

The concept of providing produce to those less fortunate is a popular one in Canada. Grow A Row, a national organization that encourages gardeners to donate the fruits (and veggies) of their labour, helped distribute more than 400,000 kilograms of fresh produce to food banks across the country. One 750- square-metre garden run by Toronto’s Stop Community Food Centre alone produced 1,180 kilograms of fresh, organic goodies for the organization’s food bank and meal program last year.

City farming conserves soil, water and green space. It yields fresh, chemical-free produce and a high degree of personal satisfaction. Chuck Wright, a recent Wilfrid Laurier University graduate, volunteers for TWC one day a week as part of an internship he is completing for the Quaker-run Canadian Friends Service Committee. “It’s definitely a change from the office,” says the 25-year-old who, with his beard and straw hat, could pass for one of the local Mennonite farmers. “Food-growing is a very practical skill to have and something that has been lost among [most] people living in the city. I’ve learned about various herbs and what they’re used for and hope through experiences like these I will eventually develop the skills I need to have a garden of my own.”

Autumn 2006

Coalition fights off construction

By Brian Banks

Paul Renaud sighs as he describes the current situation in the South March Highlands, 895 hectares of ecologically and culturally significant forest and wetlands within Ottawa’s city limits that he and a coalition of community groups are fighting to protect. “Subdivisions,” he observes, “follow roads.”

Read the full article…

A very surprising discovery

By Allan Britnell

Flamborough resident Paul D. Smith has turned the beach-vacation hobby of collecting interesting shells into an innovative biodiversity study. Each year since 2007, he has searched for freshwater mussel shells along the muddy shoreline of Cootes Paradise, an 800-hectare wetland sanctuary managed by the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG), at the western end of Hamilton Harbour. And what he has found is changing our understanding of the variety of life in this long-abused watershed.

Read the full article…

Northern solutions

By Peter Rosenbluth

Working with Environment North and Lakehead University’s Faculty of Education and Student Union, Ontario Nature’s Northern Connections program held a one-day conference on adaptation to climate change last March in Thunder Bay, which more than 80 people attended.

Read the full article…

Summer 2011

Conservation politics and a treasured landscape. By Caroline Schultz A win for wildlife: The Bruce Trail Conservancy secures more of the Niagara Escarpment; the great outdoors: having a field day with conservation staff; we object: the Province allows hunting at-risk snapping turtles; pleased to meet you: Chris Rathgeber, treasurer for Ontario Nature’s Board of Directors. Shelly Candel sponsors Ontario Nature’s young Nature Guardians. Conservationists and cattlemen join forces to protect a threatened species. By Ron Reid

From rugged coastlines to old-growth forests to orchid-carpeted swamplands, Ontario Nature’s reserves protect the province’s most imperilled wild spaces. By Brian Banks On the 10-year anniversary of the protection plan for one of southern Ontario’s most treasured landscapes, Ontario Nature and fellow environmentalists concede that the fight for the moraine is not over yet. By Peter Gorrie The disappearance of the exquisite Karner blue butterfly signalled significant declines in Ontario’s rare oak savannah habitat. Undaunted, some naturalists believe the brilliantly coloured insect can still make a comeback. By Peter Christie Unabashed tree lover Diana Beresford-Kroeger declares that forests hold the key to combating climate change and curing a multitude of ailments including cancer. By Conor Mihell On the cover: Home to hundreds of species of trees, flowers, birds, reptiles and mammals, the Oak Ridges Moraine is a hotspot for biodiversity and a direct water source for some 250,000 people. Photograph by Kim Lowes

Birds on the farm

Conservationists and cattlemen join forces to save a rare species.

By Ron Reid
Illustration by Marco Cibola

Grassland birds across North America are in big trouble, none more than the bobolink, whose rollicking songs once graced hayfields and pasture lands across southern Ontario. Since 1968, Ontario’s bobolink populations have plummeted by two-thirds (see “Songs of the bobolink,” Summer 2010), the worst declines having occurred in the past decade.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that, at its fall 2010 meeting, the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario declared the bobolink a threatened species. Under the provincial Endangered Species Act (ESA), the nests and habitats of this bird are now protected. But, as the implications of this designation began to sink in, organizations across Ontario emitted a collective chorus of “oh-oh.”

It’s no secret that many farmers, fearing potential restrictions on how they can use their land, are uncomfortable with having species at risk on their properties. For example, efforts to protect the loggerhead shrike, a critically endangered species whose presence affects only a few dozen farms, have triggered a high-profile demonstration and public vitriol in at least one farming community.

The bobolink’s designation will have a wider impact, as the ESA habitat protection measures for this species will apply to some 25,000 farmers. Since bobolinks depend almost entirely on hayfields and managed pastures for their nesting success, the livestock industry is crucial to their survival. And come early June, any farmer who cuts hay in a field inhabited by bobolinks will be breaking the law. The bobolink’s designation was a stimulus for discord. Fortunately, Anne Bell from Ontario Nature and Richard Horne from the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association teamed up to co-host an unprecedented series of meetings between provincial farming groups and environmental organizations. The farming leaders, much to their credit, chose to focus on practical ways to deal with their members’ immediate concerns, while also being part of longer-term solutions to restore bobolink populations to good health.

For Ontario Nature, bobolinks and farmers pose a particularly difficult issue. Recovery for bobolinks and other grassland birds depends on the voluntary participation and support of farmers willing to maintain their grassland habitats. A top-down regulatory approach is simply not going to work in this setting. But a blanket exemption from ESA regulations for farm operations would be at odds with Ontario Nature’s opposition to such exemptions generally.

Eventually, both sides agreed to a two-pronged compromise: a temporary exemption for farmers under the ESA, matched with a robust incentive and research program for grassland stewardship, to be provided by the provincial government.

During the three-year term of the proposed temporary exemption, farm and environmental groups will work closely with government and bobolink experts to complete a recovery strategy, a government response statement to that strategy, and habitat regulations under the ESA. To make these steps palatable to affected farmers, the incentive and research program would be crucial. Such a program would include funding for stewardship incentives, such as fence replacement to renew pasture lands, applied-research pilot projects to explore best management options, and outreach services for farmers and other landowners.

It remains to be seen whether the provincial government will respond with a meaningful funding commitment. Nonetheless, the consultation has been a very significant process. For the first time, Ontario’s senior environmental and agricultural groups sat down together to resolve a difficult issue, and they jointly produced a position paper, submitted to the provincial government, that addressed a range of concerns in the southern Ontario landscape. At least five major farm organizations and a similar number of environmental NGOs have endorsed the position paper, and more are doing so each week.

Most importantly, the process has helped build bridges and create ongoing relationships between the agricultural and environmental communities and has spurred a growing realization among people on both sides of the bobolink debate that the future of grassland birds is tightly linked to the future of grass-fed livestock, an industry facing severe economic challenges. Maybe someday the bobolink agreement will help lead to long-overdue discussions on how to manage the countryside more sustainably. And what an accomplishment that would be!

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Ron Reid, Carden Program coordinator for the Couchiching Conservancy and former director of conservation at Ontario Nature, enjoys birding in the rural countryside.

Shelly Candel, Nature Guardians Sponsor

Ontario Nature deeply appreciates Shelly Candel’s generous support of Ontario Nature’s Nature Guardians program. We asked Shelly to tell us why this program is important to her. The Nature Guardians are my hope for the future.

I love the outdoors – feeling the fresh air, the sun and the wind. I love hearing songbirds and frogs. I know how important it is to protect wild spaces, places that are not barren and haven’t been paved over, and that are habitats for so many species.

At the same time, I worry that every day decisions are being made based only on economic considerations at the expense of wildlife. These decisions rob my kids, and grandkids to come, of the kinds of life experiences I’ve had. I strongly believe that each of us needs to take personal action to prevent this from happening – so Ontario Nature’s goals of protecting, connecting, advocating and educating the wider community strike a resonant chord in me.

Our young people are really the best hope we have for the future, and I am so happy to be able to assist the Nature Guardians in learning about, and promoting, the protection of our ecosystems, and in becoming leaders. I hope that with knowledge, networking contacts and fresh enthusiasm these young people will be able to turn this province around so that we have natural spaces where more generations can hear songbirds and frogs.

Please join me and support our youth of today in becoming the protectors of our natural world tomorrow.

Dear Shelly,

Thank you so much for your generous donation to Ontario Nature! It truly means a lot to have the support of wonderful people to help our beautiful environment.

My name is Stephanie Glanzmann, and I’m 15 years old. I lead the environmental group at my school and I love to be outside. I especially love to portage and go biking. Nature has always played a large role in my life. When I was younger, I knew I wanted to promote environmental change, but I never really knew how. Every time I heard “Youth need to be more involved,” “Be the change you want to be,” and any other speech used to inspire youth, it always sent a pang of guilt through my stomach. I didn’t want to sit passively and watch our earth be destroyed, but getting involved with such a massive issue seemed too daunting. When I became part of Ontario Nature’s Youth Council, I knew I took a step to change my life and hopefully the environment for the better. The staff from Ontario Nature and my friends from Nature Guardians inspire me to broaden my ideas and become a leader. I’m now more confident, driven and have a greater sense of purpose.

When I go out in nature, a feeling of peace overwhelms me, and I never want that feeling to die out. It puts so much hope in my heart to know that as long as there are people like you, Shelly, the peace will always remain in nature. Thank you!

Stephanie Glanzmann

The renegade

Unabashed tree lover Diana Beresford-Kroeger declares that forests hold the solution to climate change as well as countless cures for a multitude of ailments including cancer.

Text and Photography by Conor Mihell

On her 64-hectare eastern Ontario property near the town of Merrickville, Diana Beresford-Kroeger is taking me on an “exposition.” That’s what she calls the public tours she leads through her forested garden, aimed at showing people the hidden wonders of trees. She points out “anti-famine” trees that sustained First Nations communities when other foods were scarce – disease-resistant butternuts, black walnuts, hickories and oaks she has reared from seeds and clippings of old-growth specimens collected from across southern Ontario. She shows me a mature wafer ash, which is known to release oils and powerful chemicals that repel disease and attract pollinators. Later on, over tea in her humble one-storey post-and-beam home, the self-proclaimed “renegade scientist” and author of Arboretum America, The Global Forest and Arboretum Borealis says that the world’s forests contain countless cures for human ailments, including a solution to what she calls the greatest threat to humanity: climate change.

Beresford-Kroeger’s sprawling garden is drab on the late winter day I meet her, but in a few months’ time her trees will shoot foliage up to the sky and rev up their photosynthetic engines, sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and releasing the oxygen that sustains life on earth. And, simply put, this process is her solution to the problem of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But to reverse the damage of climate change, she is convinced of the necessity of bolstering the genetic fortitude of our forests.

Working with Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a Michigan-based nonprofit organization, Beresford-Kroeger is trying to assemble an archive of genetic material from the planet’s oldest trees, in the form of clones from cuttings of specimens such as the 1,300-year-old eastern white cedars of the Niagara Escarpment. Those spindly cedars and other long-lived trees have experienced centuries of change, including climatic fluctuations due to volcanic eruptions. “They have the genetic memory of changes in temperature of times past,” says Beresford-Kroeger. Even relatively young trees, such as the few remaining 300-year-old maples in southern Ontario, Temagami’s vestigial pockets of towering old-growth white and red pine, and the odd century-old jack pine in the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario, have probably survived outbreaks of disease and periods of drought, phenomena that already seem integral to the initial stages of global warming.

Ontario Nature’s boreal program manager Julee Boan says the United Nations’ declaration of 2011 as the International Year of Forests is but one of many reasons to support visionaries like Beresford-Kroeger. “Forests play a significant role in the climate system, both as sources and sinks of carbon,” notes Boan. “The complexity and urgency of this issue poses a real challenge. Innovators like Diana Beresford-Kroeger – people who are taking action on the ground – are needed now more than ever.”

Beresford-Kroeger’s reverence for trees was shaped during her childhood in Ireland. Orphaned at age 11, she was placed in the care of a scholarly uncle and Druidic aunts, who believed that trees were sacred. From them she learned ancient botanical medicines that parallel those used by Aboriginal cultures in North America and began to appreciate that “if we embrace nature, we will have a far greater understanding of the world around us.” She went on to earn degrees in botany, biochemistry and medicine, and worked as a medical researcher at the University of Ottawa.

Her fascination with botany was reinvigorated when she and her husband purchased their rural Merrickville property in 1973. She immediately set about gardening, experimenting with a variety of species and making road trips around eastern Ontario in search of ancient trees. By studying topographical maps, she discovered that the few remaining old-growth trees tended to inhabit the harshest terrain, which loggers generally avoided. The early settlers in the area learned from Aboriginal communities the benefits of planting nut trees in their orchards – primarily as an important source of protein and fat, but also for the environmental benefits of what is now termed biological diversity. By the time Beresford-Kroeger arrived, however, this practice had been abandoned, and most of the butternut, hickory and chestnut trees in the region “were on their last legs” due to deforestation and disease.

She selected many of the trees for her garden according to their ecological, medicinal and social benefits – a system she calls a bioplan. This involves planting specific trees for the “ecofunctions” they contribute to the greater ecological community and thinking beyond simply their timber values. For instance, she has demonstrated on her property how farmers can add a valuable nut crop to their mix by taking a cue from the pioneers and incorporating black walnut into rows of crops. Such “two-tier” systems reap the benefits of trees’ ability to “recharge the water table, promote beneficial predation, attract pollinators and increase and diversify wildlife habitat,” she says. If she had riparian areas on her property, she would plant them with black willow and red-osier dogwood, trees whose root structures draw pollutants from the soil like magnets, thereby improving water quality.

The notion of using old-growth genetics to produce resilient forests is an extension of the bioplan concept. In studying the specimens in her garden and reviewing the work of researchers, Beresford-Kroeger came to believe that old-growth trees have developed complex biochemistries that allow them to communicate and coordinate responses to environmental changes related to climate and disease. They do this through symbiotic root fungi and by emitting chemical cues known as aerosols. While centuries-old trees share the same DNA as current generations, older trees may have developed more refined epigenetics – “tags” on the genetic code that effectively chronicle a tree’s life experience and can be passed along to successive generations, says Beresford-Kroeger.

The scientist, who is in her sixties, considers herself a renegade because she tends to think in general, holistic terms rather than focusing on details. Some biologists, including legendary Harvard University researcher E.O. Wilson, have lauded her approach. “Her ideas are a rare, if not entirely new, approach to natural history,” wrote Wilson in the forward to Arboretum America. “The science of selecting trees for different uses around the world has not been well studied.” In addition, Beresford-Kroeger is a lyrical storyteller and engaging public speaker. But she has also been criticized for spreading untested botanical theories and embellishing her ideas with anthropomorphism.

Nevertheless, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources forester Barb Boysen says the notion of propagating old-growth stock to hedge our bets against climate change has value. Although we know very little about tree genetics, older trees, by definition, are “proven performers,” says Boysen, who coordinates the Forest Gene Conservation Association (FGCA), a Peterborough-based nonprofit that aims to protect and enhance the genetic diversity of southern Ontario woodlots. Since 1994, the FGCA has delivered a message that parallels Beresford-Kroeger’s campaign, advising private landowners on the importance of choosing genetically robust, geographically appropriate species of trees.

The FGCA deals with some 160,000 woodlot owners, whose average length of tenure on their land is a paltry 20 years. This goes against the grain of the kind of long-term planning that is essential to developing and maintaining healthy forests. “Tree planting is not a natural process,” explains Boysen. “In doing so, we are essentially trying to put 30 to 50 years of natural succession processes into a few years.” Thinking short-term and failing to consider the critical role of good seeds and proper genetics can thwart efforts to create self-perpetuating forests. “The much larger horticultural landscape industry is famous for not knowing or caring where their trees come from,” she adds. “This may be just one of many reasons why the average life of a city tree is less than 20 years.”

The issue gains urgency in light of International Year of Forests initiatives like that of Trees Ontario, a nonprofit partnership, whose 2011 goal is to plant three million trees in southern Ontario, and Environmental Commissioner of Ontario Gord Miller’s 2010 call for one billion more trees to be planted in the southern half of the province. Genetic diversity should be part of the mandate of these initiatives, argues Boysen. “For example, if we only had 50 old oaks left scattered across southern Ontario, I would not want them to be the sole trees we collect [seeds] from,” she says. Rather, it is the mix of older and younger trees, with a wide range of genes, that forms the basis of a resilient forest, promoting genetic mixing – the opposite of inbreeding – a critical factor in the evolution of climate-hardy trees, says Beresford-Kroeger.

Boysen and Beresford-Kroeger both argue that proper forest cultivation, public education and widespread, carefully planned tree-planting campaigns will be necessary to combat climate change. “We’re at the point of climate change where there’s no return,” insists Beresford-Kroeger. “It is a phenomenon that’s causing people to change the way they think. If someone plants a tree, then they’ll also do something else. Getting involved empowers people to think positively.”

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Frequent ON Nature contributor Conor Mihell was the winner of a 2010 Northern Lights Award for travel writing excellence.

The case of the blue butterfly

The disappearance of the exquisite Karner blue butterfly signalled further declines in the rare oak savannahs the brilliantly coloured insect inhabited. Undaunted, some naturalists, like Ontario Nature’s Peter Carson, believe this winged jewel can still make a comeback.

By Peter Christie

When the endangered Karner blue butterfly abruptly blinked out of existence in Ontario 20 years ago, Peter Carson almost literally saw it happen.

A life-long butterfly enthusiast and naturalist, Carson was hiking in what is now the St. Williams Conservation Reserve near his southern Ontario home when he glimpsed perhaps the last Karner blue seen alive in the province. The butterfly was a winking of azure – like a piece of bright sky close to the ground. It turned above the field grasses and flowers, and then, suddenly, it vanished.

“It was one of those things where I came away wondering if I had actually seen it,” remembers Carson of that late spring day in 1991. “It was up and gone in short order. When I went back, I couldn’t find it … I think that was the end of them.” None has been sighted in the province since.

The story of the disappearance of the Karner blue, a small but strikingly beautiful butterfly, has a unique place in Ontario’s growing library of biodiversity tragedies. Among the first insects designated as an endangered species in the province, back in 1990, the butterfly became the poster animal for Ontario’s shrinking pockets of the world’s rarest habitat: oak savannah. Attempts to save the butterfly were too little, too late, however, and efforts to bring it back spawned one of the province’s earliest species-at-risk recovery teams – among the first examples of the dozens of similar teams currently working to save other rare species in Ontario.

But now, the tale of the Karner blue may have a different lesson to teach. In February 2009, the butterfly’s species-at-risk designation in Ontario was changed from “endangered” to “extirpated.” While the move recognizes that the Karner blue is probably gone from the province (it survives in some U.S. states), the extirpated listing also removes any legal deadline under Ontario’s three-year-old revamped Endangered Species Act for the government to develop plans to foster the butterfly’s return.

After two decades of recovery work, and just as a possible reintroduction of the species to Ontario looked more promising than ever, the provincial government’s active interest in the Karner blue has gone the way of the butterfly itself – extinguished, indefinitely.

“I think the ball has been dropped.” Speaking from his home north of Long Point, Carson – usually a tireless conservationist – sounds weary. For the past three decades, he has championed many of southern Ontario’s most remarkable Carolinian ecosystems and species, including the Karner blue. He has been president, director or founder of groups as diverse as the Norfolk Field Naturalists, Ontario Nature, Wildlands League, Tallgrass Ontario, Long Point Basin Land Trust and the Carolinian Canada Coalition. He is a member of many species-at-risk recovery groups and was co-leader of the Karner blue team. Ruddy, with a greying beard and rounded glasses, Carson looks the part of a conservation stalwart. But when he replies to my questions about a once-beloved – and now vanished – butterfly, he suddenly seems dispirited.

Showdown on the Oak Ridges Moraine

On the 10-year anniversary of the protection plan for one of southern Ontario’s most treasured landscapes, Ontario Nature and fellow environmentalists concede that the fight for the moraine is not over yet.

By Peter Gorrie

This summer, the Oak Ridges Moraine marks a milestone: it’s 10 years since the Conservative provincial government of the day, to widespread surprise, took the first step toward saving this ecological treasure from development.

Advocates of conservation generally agree that the rules and regulations enacted in the Oak Ridges Moraine Protection Plan have done much of the job for which they were designed. But their comments convey more satisfaction than enthusiasm. “It was pretty darn good,” says David Burnett of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), which controls some moraine land. “On balance, I’d give it eight and a half out of 10.” Ontario Nature’s executive director Caroline Schultz awards the plan a B-plus. “The plan has done reasonably well in terms of protecting the moraine,” she says.

But all agree there is much room for improvement. With the preservation plan slated to undergo a mandatory review in 2015, many ideas are already being proposed, ranging from bureaucratic tinkering to major alterations to where development is permitted.

What is at stake is a hilly band of forests, wetlands, prairies, kettle lakes and waterways that meanders for 160 kilometres across southern Ontario. Although the area contains fast-growing towns and scattered pockets of development, and lies in the path of relentless urban expansion from Toronto, 40 kilometres to the south, the landscape retains much of its natural beauty and function.

The moraine is home to hundreds of species of trees, flowers, birds, fish, reptiles and mammals. Beneath its rolling surface are aquifers that store such vast quantities of water, filtered by the sand and gravel of the moraine to pristine purity, that it is known as the region’s rain barrel. For southern Ontario residents, the moraine provides a network of parks, horseback and hiking trails, fishing waters, golf courses and places to simply breathe in country air or be replenished by communion with the natural world.

That the Oak Ridges Moraine still offers these benefits is a testament to the many individuals and groups that fought to keep developers at bay. That it will continue largely intact seems more likely now than a decade ago. But this is far from guaranteed. Advocates say new protective measures are essential, as projects on and off the moraine threaten its water resources and increase the demand for highways and other infrastructure that would chop its natural areas into unsustainable chunks. So the same groups that battled for protection a decade ago have launched a new campaign, The Moraine for 2015, aimed at ensuring that the review strengthens the plan and to fend off any attempts to weaken it.

Where the wildlife is

From rugged coastlines to old-growth forests to orchid-carpeted swamplands, Ontario Nature’s reserves safeguard the province’s most imperilled habitats.

By Brian Banks

It’s a few degrees below zero, but the March midday sun beats warmly with the promise of spring. The rays and a semi-hardened snowpack, broken only by tracks of otters and other small animals, makes walking through thickets of aspen, poplar, maple and ash relatively easy.

We’re a party of five, working our way up the north side of the 39-hectare Altberg Wetland Nature Reserve, two kilometres southwest of Balsam Lake in the Kawarthas. The wetland, one of Ontario Nature’s 22 nature reserves around the province, was acquired in 1983, along with a second, bigger property about 30 kilometres north. The portion that we are trekking across is a modest chunk of a much larger, provincially significant marsh and forest swamp complex extending all the way to the lake, which had remained largely unstudied until 2007. That’s when the Kawartha Field Naturalists signed on with Ontario Nature as local stewards and began the first inventories of plants, animals and other features of the property.

It still holds secrets, however. Three of the group on today’s hike are club members, and another, Mark Carabetta, is Ontario Nature’s conservation science manager and head of its nature reserves program. They’re here to post boundary markers and, of all things, locate and investigate a locked shed that was recently spotted in the undergrowth – previously undiscovered, despite four years of intermittent exploration and nearly 30 years of Ontario Nature ownership. The reserve “is untamed,” says Eric Davis, Kawartha Field Naturalists’ steward for the Altberg wetland. “One has to be careful not to get lost in there.”

Stepping off the road and into the wilderness is an appropriate introduction not only to the wetland, but also to a constellation of important vulnerable habitats, threatened and endangered species, vital ecosystems and stirring landscapes that make up Ontario Nature’s reserve network. The undisturbed wilderness makes clear the reserve network’s purpose: the preservation and protection of critical habitat in order to safeguard the existence of endangered plants and animals.

Think of the reserves as microcosms of the best natural areas that the province has to offer – from the rugged Great Lakes coastline near Sault Ste. Marie, to orchid-carpeted swampland in the Ottawa Valley, to old-growth forests near Owen Sound. Ontario Nature reserves, ranging in size from four to 471 hectares, protect more than 2,400 hectares in total. “Our mandate focuses on properties that are provincially significant,” says Carabetta. “We’re targeting wetlands, shorelines, alvars, woodlands, rare species habitat.”

The newest reserve is Malcolm Bluff Shores on the Bruce Peninsula, the result of a three-phase, three-year acquisition process (in partnership with the Bruce Trail Conservancy) that, when completed in 2012, will be Ontario Nature’s second-largest reserve. Since 2000, Ontario Nature has acquired four new reserves, and in the same period at least as many existing reserves have been expanded. The process takes time: potential lands must be evaluated, purchases often require lengthy fundraising and, says Carabetta, each new reserve needs a volunteer local steward– “Ontario Nature’s eyes and ears on the property” – and adds to the workload of managing the network.

The stewards’ role is vital. Most individual stewards, like Davis, are members of local naturalists clubs. Direct involvement not only supports the reserve program, but access to the properties enables the clubs to fulfill their own mandates – protecting habitat, conducting research and providing education and recreation for the public. Davis, a former high school science teacher, has been working with local community college students at Altberg. “One of the best things is our involvement with the students,” he says. “They come in and get very good experience in a variety of areas.” Elsewhere, Doug Lonsdale, a member of the Saugeen Field Naturalists and the head of the stewardship committee for the 280-hectare Kinghurst Forest Nature Reserve near Owen Sound, describes his work as “a labour of love.” His organization does regular monitoring, trail clearing and upkeep, leads tours and works in tandem with Ontario Nature on research and forest maintenance. “It’s been great,” says Lonsdale. “Our aim is to protect and preserve it as it is.”

Ontario Nature (then Federation of Ontario Naturalists) bought its first reserve in 1962, at Dorcas Bay on the Bruce Peninsula. That property is now part of Bruce Peninsula National Park, and the title of oldest existing Ontario Nature reserve has passed to Petrel Point, farther south on Lake Huron. The organization acquired that reserve in 1967 and has since expanded it four times. The network’s fastest growth occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, when 13 new reserves were created. Their creation exemplifies wider interest in the land trust movement in the province, which Ontario Nature has helped foster. Changes in tax policy in the late 1980s, which encouraged landowners to preserve private land, were partly responsible for the growth of nature reserves, followed by, in the 1990s, tax credits for a donation of ecologically sensitive lands. Carabetta says that half to two-thirds of the reserve properties came through donations and bequests.

Meet our board: Chris Rathgeber

Chris Rathgeber is the secretary/treasurer of Ontario Nature’s board of directors and the chief operating officer of Memofix Hitech Services.

John Hassell How did you first become involved with Ontario Nature?
Chris Rathgeber My wife, who was familiar with the organization from her work in the nonprofit sector, introduced me to Ontario Nature in 2007. I found that my concerns about urban sprawl aligned well with Ontario Nature’s Greenway program. It was a good fit, as I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to give back and Ontario Nature needed my skill set.

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Turtle hunting

By John Urquhart

With its large shell – up to 47 centimetres in length – and the series of triangular spikes lining its tail, the snapping turtle looks prehistoric, and it is. Sadly, Ontario’s biggest and longest-lived turtle – estimates based on size and growth rates suggest snapping turtles could live to be over 150 years old – is in decline due to road-kill and habitat loss. Both Ontario’s Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the federal Species at Risk Act list the snapping turtle as a species of special concern. Nevertheless, the animal is still legally hunted as game in Ontario, as the ESA prohibits the killing only of species designated as threatened or endangered. Indeed, a person may kill up to two snapping turtles per day over the course of two to 12 months, depending on where the turtles are hunted.

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The gene pool

Sharon Oosthoek

A tiny water flea possessing more genes than you or I has the potential to be a highly sensitive and inexpensive pollution detector, say scientists who recently sequenced its genome.

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Conservation takes teamwork

By Amber Cowie

In the countdown to the provincial election, the Green Prosperity Initiative, a coalition of 21 environmental organizations including Ontario Nature, released seven green priorities that the coalition believes are the most important provincial environmental concerns in 2011 (see “Seeing green,” Spring 2011, page 8).

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On guard for the moraine

By Caroline Schultz

Formed 11,000 years ago by retreating glaciers, and stretching 160 kilometres end to end, the Oak Ridges Moraine is one of southern Ontario’s most distinctive physical features.

Before European settlement, the moraine’s rolling hills were blanketed by forests and punctuated by kettle lakes and streams. Expanses of tallgrass prairie and savannah extended across the moraine’s eastern end. By the 1930s much of the moraine’s forest cover was gone after decades of clearing the land for farming. The moraine’s sandy soils suffered massive erosion, and silt and sand clogged its streams and creeks.

When the Federation of Ontario Naturalists was founded in 1931, one of the key conservation issues of the day was the Oak Ridges Moraine. At that time our membership spearheaded the push for a major reforestation program, the fruits of which we see in large blocks of mature woodland such as the Ganaraska Forest – where we are gathering on June 11 and 12 to celebrate our 80th anniversary. After eight decades in the conservation business, the moraine remains a priority for us.

Today the moraine is home to 300,000 people. An additional 5 million live close by in one of North America’s most populous metropolitan areas. Where once the moraine was denuded of its forests and topsoils, by the 1980s its ecological integrity was threatened by growing urban development, sand and gravel extraction by aggregate companies, and the rapidly expanding road systems to serve them.

Ontario Nature, with STORM (Save the Oak Ridges Moraine Coalition) and other local groups, fought hard and won protection for the moraine with the passage of the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act in 2001 and the regulations of the Oak Ridges Moraine Protection Plan that immediately followed. Despite this victory, as you will read in Peter Gorrie’s story “Showdown on the Oak Ridges Moraine” (page 24), threats to the moraine’s aquifers and biodiversity are ongoing. So the review of the protection plan for the moraine in 2015 will be a pivotal point in the moraine’s history. Provided that the political will exists, the review is an opportunity to close loopholes and address shortcomings in the protection plan.

Insiders report that stakeholders, such as aggregate operators, who stand to gain from opening up the moraine to more development and resource extraction, are already working on their strategies to challenge the existing protection the moraine receives. The conservation community needs to be prepared to battle back. This is familiar terrain for us. In 1999, Ontario Nature and other nongovernmental organizations released an action plan to protect the moraine. The following year, 465 scientists signed an Ontario Nature-STORM protection statement for this significant landscape. Next, we delivered 3,000 postcards to Queen’s Park demanding conservation for the moraine. A decade ago, all that action paid off.

Now, the Oak Ridges Moraine Foundation has taken a key step by overseeing an assessment of the moraine’s ecological health and the effectiveness of the plan in protecting the moraine’s ecological integrity. We need this reporting to put forward an informed and compelling message.

Ontario Nature’s membership worked hard to restore and protect the Oak Ridges Moraine. We are ready to do it again.

The 3,000-mile salad

Southern Ontario contains some of Canada’s most fertile farmland. Why, then, is so much of our food imported?

By Linda Pim

It used to be that when I ate a salad in winter, it was a long-distance affair. I munched on the “3,000-mile salad” consisting of organic loose-leaf California lettuce that, according to American writer James Kunstler, will soon disappear from our plates thanks to the depleting supply and increasing price of fossil fuels. But last year Orangeville’s whole foods store began offering the 10-mile salad: mixed organic greens grown under glass just down the highway. I buy the beautiful local greens.

For me, local produce gets top priority. If faced with a choice between an organic import and local, conventionally grown produce, I choose the latter. If locally grown organic produce is available, I buy that.

Ontarians are beginning to embrace the regional meal. In doing so, we do our health a favour by eating fresher and tastier food. By not buying broccoli that has been transported across the continent, we save fuel and improve air quality. We foster domestic food security in an increasingly dangerous world, and we help Ontario shed its role as a net importer of food and become a local supplier. We contribute to global justice by reducing our demand for tropical cash crops grown on land that should feed needy local people instead.

Consumers consider more than just the price when choosing what food to buy. A 2004 Ipsos Reid poll found that only 15 percent of Canadian consumers consider the price of food as the most important factor. In a revealing contrast, 55 percent ranked quality and nutrition as more important than price. Consumer interest in eating local/ regional foods is booming globally. Martin Gooch of the George Morris Centre, an agri-food think-tank in Guelph, reports that the market for regional foods in most Western countries is expanding by 60 percent per year.

If so many people want to eat regionally, why is Ontario awash in imports? Supermarket chains prefer to buy from producers in warmer climates who can supply a given fresh vegetable every month of the year.  The chains buy in massive quantities and favour fewer and larger contracts for imports over numerous smaller, seasonal contracts with local growers.

Not only retailers need to change, however. Gooch says food producers and suppliers need to adjust what they grow or process to meet consumer needs, for example, by tapping into multicultural consumer tastes and preferences.

Innovative local food programs abound in Ontario and abroad. A U.K. supermarket chain has a “Local First for Fresh” campaign promoting local produce supported by in-store tastings. Here in Ontario, Foodlink Waterloo Region publishes a map for finding fresh regional produce at farm gates in the Waterloo area, helping farmers market their products and improving consumer access to local food.

Local Flavour Plus (LFP) encourages institutions to purchase food produced in a sustainable manner. The University of Toronto is its first major client. Farmers working with LFP agree to several sustainability conditions including the reduction or elimination of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, safe and fair working conditions, and soil and water conservation.

Elbert van Donkersgoed, executive director of the Greater Toronto Area Agricultural Action Plan, says that in addition to farmers’ markets as a local food experience, supermarkets need to create “local as a destination.” Supermarkets should create local food sections so we do not have to hunt for Ontario products.

The Ontario government’s Foodland Ontario labelling program needs to expand beyond fresh products to include Ontario-produced processed foods. It needs a more in-your-face advertising approach if it is to build consumer awareness and attract more people to local food. One British initiative promotes “Deliciously Dirty “unwashed potatoes, featuring the tag line “Rub me, don’t scrub me.”

Southern Ontario contains more than half of Canada’s Class 1 farmland. We will save it only through sprawl-busting planning policies and a sustained market for local food. If, as a society, we do not act to protect Ontario farmers and farmland by eating locally grown products, buying them will no longer be one of our options.

But what about the occasional avocado or mandarin orange? Yes, they can find a place on our salad plates. The journey to the regional meal begins with a giant first step. Ontario society has not yet taken that step, and it’s high time we did. We can sweat the small stuff later.

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Linda Pim is the former conservation policy analyst for Ontario Nature.

Inside Ontario Nature

Leading edge conference
The seventh-ever leading edge conference will be held in Burlington, October 4 to 6, 2006. Presented by the Niagara Escarpment Commission, the conference is focused on issues of sustainability, environmental monitoring and biosphere research. “people (attending) can walk away and explore the possibilities of how these interrelated themes can be put into action,” says Karen Carruthers, co- chair of leading edge 2006. “ we’re a very accessible conference. We welcome members of the public, from community groups and fro m government.” with more than 250 attendees and 35 speakers from government, industry and academia, the conference will also present 25 academic papers and feature 15 different discussion panels. Among the few speaking about Ontario nature’s greenway vision.

A generous donation
In June, Ontario Power Generation (OPG) announced its donation of $160,000 to Ontario Nature for the stewardship of our nature reserves system. The donation is part of OPG’s support for community outreach efforts that focus on the conservation of biodiversity in Ontario.

Ontario Nature’s reserves system safeguards some of the province’s best remaining examples of endangered and sensitive habitats. OPG’s donation will be directed to the management, stewardship and restoration of key areas in Ontario Nature’s 21 properties (totalling 2,045 hectares) and will contribute to the realization of its Greenway vision, in which habitat and wildlife are protected through an interconnected system of green cores as well as considerable potential for the restoration of old agricultural lands to native woodland, which will provide critical habitat for a number of key species and support the conservation of biodiversity. Such habitat will also provide an important contribution to the sequestration of greenhouse gases.

OPG supports organizations dedicated to Biodiversity Management Program, the company has helped more than 180 initiatives preserve regional biodiversity and engage in environmental stewardship and habitat restoration.

Nature network news

Ontario Nature’s 7 5th AGM a Great success!

More than 200 people gathered from June 2 to 4 for Ontario nature’s 75th annual general meeting and conference, hosted by the Kitchener-waterloo field naturalists at Wilfrid Laurier university in waterloo. The conference Was a great opportunity for participants to connect and reflect on past accomplishments and future opportunities for the protection and restoration of nature in Ontario.

Steve Hounsell, Ontario nature’s past president, gave a presentation about Ontario nature’s greenway vision of a system of connected habitat cores and corridors across Ontario. This set the stage for the greenway panel, where representatives from the land-use planning, agricultural and conservation sectors gave their views on the greenway.

On Saturday morning Alan Morgan, professor of earth sciences at the university of Waterloo, discussed the impacts of Modern society on the greenways and waterways of Waterloo region. Bill Lishman treated conference participants to an illustrated presentation about pioneering efforts with ultra-light Aircraft to establish a new flock of migrating whooping cranes in eastern North America.

Ontario nature would like to thank the Kitchener-waterloo field naturalists for its dedicated Efforts toward planning a fantastic 75th anniversary celebration. Mark your calendars for June 8 to 10, 2007, as the Peterborough field naturalists are already hard at work planning for another successful Ontario nature conference to be held at Trent University!

Ontario Nature Network is growing

Ontario nature is pleased to welcome the Friends of Point Pelee, Ganaraska Hiking Trail Association, Humber Watershed Alliance and Toronto Field Naturalists to its province-wide network of member groups.

The Friends of Point Pelee work to preserve the natural and cultural heritage of Point Pelee National park. The Ganaraska Hiking Trail Association is dedicated to the conservation of natural Resources and is working to develop a public hiking trail stretching from port hope to the Bruce Trail near Collingwood. The Humber Watershed Alliance facilitates numerous activities to conserve and restore the Humber River watershed, including community plantings, aquatic habitat enhancement and cleanups in several natural areas. The Toronto Field Naturalists encourages the enjoyment and preservation of nature.

The Ontario nature network of 141 groups protects Ontario’s nature and provides provincial Leadership in parks and protected areas, land-use planning policies and conservation science. Member groups share a strong commitment and concern for nature, which they demonstrate through their activities.

Field Trip: Tree spotting

A guide to Ontario’s rarest trees

By Lorraine Johnson

The loneliest tree in all of Ontario must surely have been the redbud found on Pelee Island in 1892 by botanist John Macoun. Growing on the sandy soils of Fish Point, at the south end of Pelee Island, this single specimen was buffeted by wind and waves, and, by the time Macoun spotted it, half dead. When it finally succumbed, the only known wild representative of this species disappeared from Canada’s flora.

While the lost, last and perhaps only ever redbud is the most extreme example of botany’s stark label “of limited distribution,” a number of other native Ontario trees are in similarly precarious situations. Limited to just a handful of locations, some of these trees are barely holding on with wild populations measured in double digits.

The Ontario trees with the lowest numbers of extant natural stands – trees such as cherry birch, cucumber-tree, Kentucky coffeetree and dwarf hackberry – are found in the Carolinian zone, the most densely populated region of the country, running roughly from Toronto west to Grand Bend, then south to the U.S. border.

Many of these Carolinian trees have always been rare inhabitants of the zone, restricted by climate and habitat to the northern edge of their natural range. It can safely be assumed, however, that all were once more abundant but have become less widespread due to habitat loss and fragmentation, among other factors.

In the last three decades, though, Ontario’s flora has expanded as well, with the discoveries by keen-eyed botanists of swamp cottonwood, pumpkin ash, Shumard oak, scrub or bear oak, and Ohio buckeye. Some, such as pumpkin ash, have turned out to be widespread despite eluding identification for so long, while others, such as Ohio buckeye, exist in a wild population in only one place.

Clearly, Ontario’s forests have yet to yield all their tantalizing secrets. “We’ve been looking at them, but we just haven’t realized what we’re looking at,” says Donald Kirk, a natural heritage ecologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Listed here are Ontario’s rarest naturally occurring native trees and where you can find them – if you know what you’re looking at.

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Lorraine Johnson has written numerous books on native plant gardening and environmental issues. Her most recent book is 100 Easy-to-Grow Native Plants for Canadian Gardens. She is the editor of a collection of essays on Carolinian Canada, to be published in 2007.

Cucumber-tree (Magnolia acuminata)

The showy yellow-green flowers of the cucumber-tree, also called cucumber magnolia, are intriguingly adaptive: the female organs (the stigmas) of the flowers mature and become unreceptive to pollen before the male organs (the anthers) have shed their pollen; hence, the tree requires pollination assistance. Enter a beetle, which gets trapped inside the flower during its female stage. According to University of Guelph biologist Peter Kevan, the inside surface of the petals is covered with microscopic wax rollers that cause the beetle to fall back into the flower every time it tries to escape, thus causing it to brush against the stigmas with each hapless tumble. When the pollen is finally released and the petals open, the beetle, now dusted with pollen, is free to find and cross-pollinate another tree’s flowers.

Size: Up to 30 m

Distribution: Occurs in only two areas of Ontario: southwest of Simcoe in Norfolk County and in the Town of Pelham in the Regional Municipality of Niagara. With just 12 extant populations, the total number of known naturally occurring trees and saplings is currently 283.

Status: Provincially and federally listed as endangered
Cherry birch (Betula lenta)

Only one population of cherry birch trees occurs naturally in the province, and all 14 of those trees can be found near the Lake Ontario shore at the mouth of 15 and 16 Mile creeks, west of St. Catharines. Also called sweet birch or black birch, the tree produces abundant sap that can be boiled into syrup or made into birch beer.

Cherry birch grows on moist, well-drained soils, though also on rocky shallow soils. In Ontario, it is found with upland hardwoods such as red oak, white oak and sugar maple, and eastern hemlock. Cherry birch can attain a surprisingly ripe old age (for birches) of 200 years or more.

Size: Up to 25 m

Distribution: Only one natural population in Canada, in the Niagara Region, west of St. Catharines

Status: No legislative protection, though the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) designation (Endangered) is pending

What good is nature?

More than 100 children told us the answer in Ontario Nature’s first writing contest for kids

ESSAY CONTEST INTRODUCTION
By Caroline Schultz

When I was a child, our summers on Ireland’s Atlantic coast were endless days of exploring and rock-pooling. We netted crabs, shrimps and fish and stored them in bucket-sized habitats of seaweed, stones and shells. Returning to our unmanicured suburban backyard, we tunnelled through the tall grasses of a wild jungle. In our secret hideouts, we built spider farms from bits of wood and dissected flowers. A parent’s call for something as trivial as lunch was the greatest intrusion.

Many of us remember such childhood experiences – running wild physically and imaginatively in the fields, woods or vacant lots finding beetles, frogs and wildflowers. Sadly, today’s children have fewer opportunities to experience nature this way. Most grow up in urbanized environments, where natural areas to explore – the raw material for such adventures – barely exist.

We also structure our kids’ time to an astonishing degree. Families rush to and fro to “do” activities such as soccer, dance lessons, karate. Paradoxically, there is an epidemic of childhood obesity despite all this organized physical activity – partly because kids often spend the little free time they have in front of the television or computer screen.

In his recent book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv documents the alarming consequences of what he calls “nature-deficit disorder,” which include obesity, likely due to the lack of unrestricted free play in nature. He also notes a growing body of evidence indicating that exposure to nature is essential to mental health and may well alleviate symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and can improve children’s cognitive abilities, as well as their resistance to stress and depression.

Louv describes the human costs of alienation from nature: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. These have huge implications for future environmental stewardship. As the collective knowledge of – and familiarity with – our natural surroundings diminishes, so too does the capacity for watchful and caring environmental stewardship.

There is a growing awareness that we are approaching a crisis – that we must stem the tide that is pulling our kids away from nature and recreate the bond between us and the natural world that is so fundamental to the human psyche. Louv describes a budding movement in the United States to reconnect childhood with nature. We need to help such a movement germinate here in Canada. To do so, we must unite a broad spectrum of people who care about children. This would include public health professionals, educators, parents, conservationists, naturalists and, above all, children and youth, like the more than 150 grade 7 and 8 students who wrote about what nature means to them for Ontario Nature’s first nature writing contest for kids. The winning essays appear on the following pages. At Ontario Nature, we believe that as long as we have such passionate and eloquent young people who find beauty, joy and inspiration in nature, there is hope that every child can connect with nature and form an essential life-giving bond.

My two young daughters are lucky to live close to green spaces. We make sure to “book” time to let them explore the great outdoors near our home. Nevertheless, I have to check my impatience with the inevitable complaints when it is time to move on from the frog pond to the grocery store. It takes a conscious effort to ignore perceived time constraints and allow for unstructured time in nature. But it is an effort we all must make, for the benefit of our children and the planet.

Caroline Schultz is the executive director of Ontario Nature.

Honourable Mention WINNERS

“WHY DO WE NEED NATURE?” by David of Kincardine
“BEHIND EVERY TREE …” by Marie-Claude of Roslin
“IN MY BACKYARD” by Rebecca of Alfred
“WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT NATURE?” by Ben of Chute a Blondeau

A different kind of crop

A new agricultural incentive may be key to saving wildlife habitat: paying farmers not to grow

by D’Arcy Jenish

Two rows of towering maples line the drive of the Barrie family farm in the municipality of Clarington, 75 kilometres east of Toronto, and at one end is a sign that tells visitors they have arrived at Terwidlen Farms. Terwidlen — Welsh for “wide, peaceful lands” — is an apt name for the rich, black soil that the family has farmed since the First World War. These days, Tom Barrie, a tall, thickset man of 55, runs a 50-head dairy and cash crop operation on 147 hectares with help from younger brothers Steve, 52, and Glenn, 38. They took over from their father, Gordon, now 87, who began farming in 1934 at age 15 and still mixes the feed every morning. He inherited the farm from his father, who acquired it back in 1917. “I started right out of high school,” says Tom Barrie, as he strolls from his parents’ ranch-style bungalow to the barn. “Once you get started, you can’t quit.”

There are days, though, when he would like to walk away from it all. Farming is hard work physically and a tough way to earn a living. The costs of inputs such as feed, seed, fertilizer and fuel have risen sharply in recent years while prices for many agricultural commodities have fallen.

In 2004, Ontario farmers reported an average income of just over $53,000, but earned only $10,850 of that from farming. The balance came from government supports and off-farm jobs. Despite the grim economics, Barrie and his brothers are doing what they can to protect and enhance the environment on their farm.

They have been enthusiastic supporters of the Environmental Farm Plan (EFP), a program launched in 1993 by several of the province’s leading producer groups, including the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), and funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Under EFP

guidelines, farmers review all aspects of their operations to determine whether they are farming in an environmentally responsible way. Qualified farmers review any subsequent action plans, and remedial efforts are partially paid for by federal or provincial grants.

Barrie and his brothers have made a number of changes following EFP reviews. They have reduced waste by purchasing seed contained in reusable plastic bulk containers rather than paper sacks. They have erected three-strand electrical fences along a creek that bisects their property to keep the cattle out of the water. They have planted trees along the banks to prevent erosion, and built three manure storage tanks. They apply manure only when necessary whereas once they spread it almost daily, winter and summer, just to get rid of it. They also practise conservation tillage, also known as no-till, which reduces erosion, allows microorganisms to flourish in the soil and saves fuel. According to some estimates, as many as two-thirds of Ontario farmers still do things the traditional way — ploughing crops under after the harvest, and tilling and cultivating the soil again in the spring. No-till operators cut their crops in the fall but leave the roots intact and sow with a large piece of machinery called a no-till seed drill that creates a shallow furrow and drops the seeds into the soil.

“No-till has made us money,” Barrie says matter-of-factly. “It cuts down on the use of equipment and yields have increased. We see a lot more hawks now, too. There’s more ground cover, which provides shelter for the mice that attract hawks.”

Producer spokesmen say that environmentalism has taken hold in Ontario’s farm community in a big way since the early 1990s. Farm leaders recognized that they had to change, or governments would force them to through laws and regulations. The EFP is the most significant result in that shift in thinking. “More and more urban people are coming into the rural landscape,” says OFA president Ron Bonnett, who raises 200 head of cattle on 324 hectares in Bruce Mines, Ontario, about 55 kilometres east of Sault Ste. Marie. “We wanted to demonstrate that we were being proactive, rather than reactive.”

Furthermore, many farmers now recognize the importance of environmentally sound agriculture. Collectively, the farming community owns a huge chunk of the province, albeit in relatively small parcels known as the family farm. Because their lands are home to endangered species and threatened habitats, any widespread conservation efforts must include them. As well, urban sprawl is consuming the province’s agricultural base at an alarming rate. According to the 2001 census, the most recent data available, land under cultivation amounted to 5.5 million hectares. The figure has fallen from 8.5 million hectares, or by about 35 percent, since 1951, says Stewart Hilts, chair of the department of land resource science at the University of Guelph. He adds that between 1996 and 2001, the province lost 150,000 hectares of farmland.

But critics say EFP is not doing enough, pointing out that the program is voluntary, the incentives are inadequate and that in tough economic times the environment will always take a back seat to financial concerns. One of the sternest critics, Ann Clark, an associate professor of plant agriculture at the University of Guelph, charges that EFP does nothing to change a system of intensive farming that is inherently damaging to the environment.

“The foundational problems are intensification, specialization and concentration,” she says. “We insist on farming in ecologically dysfunctional ways, which we fix with capital-intensive solutions. We’re striving for very high yields because margins are so low. That means we have been using more fertilizers, especially nitrogen-based fertilizers and have had greater dependence on pesticides. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Perhaps farmers across the country need a new system of financial incentives, one that goes further than EFP, to preserve ecosystems and promote environmentally sound agriculture – or so say two Manitoba-based organizations, Keystone Agricultural Producers (KAP) and Delta Waterfowl. The groups are promoting something called Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS). Under this system, governments and other stakeholders would pay farmers annually for ecological goods and services (EGS) such as preserving wetlands, woodlots and riparian areas or restoring native flora on less desirable lands.

“ALUS is a major initiative,” says Robert Bailey, Canadian vice-president of policy for Delta Waterfowl, an organization that supports habitat preservation conservation and research on waterfowl. “It requires a huge change in thinking on the part of farmers, environmental groups and governments.”

Officials with many Ontario agricultural organizations say EFP has earned the support of the province’s farmers and that it is fulfilling its mandate with respect to environmental concerns. Andy Graham, who manages the program on behalf of the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement

Association, points out that since April 2005, 3,000 farmers had applied for funding under either federal or provincial cost-shared programs, and that Ottawa and Ontario together had allocated $48 million for 6,100 projects. In addition to that, farmers themselves have invested $100 million in remedial projects. “That,” says Graham, “is a huge commitment to environmental improvement in Ontario.”

But the problem with EFP, counter proponents of ALUS, is that it pays farmers one-time subsidies to cover a third to a half of their expenses for such things as planting shelter belts or buffer strips along waterways. The individual landowner is responsible for all ongoing maintenance costs and must absorb the costs that result from taking farmland out of production in order to preserve a wetland or restore sloped lands to natural grasses.

Under ALUS, such measures would be recognized as environmental goods and services that provide benefits to all Canadians. Therefore, the public would compensate farmers on an annual basis because they would incur ongoing costs. The idea, says Robert Sopuck, Delta Waterfowl’s vice-president of policy for the Prairies, is to convert environmentally sound practices from financial liabilities into revenue-producing assets. “It is too much to ask farmers to bear these costs on their own,” says Sopuck. “ALUS would allow the farmer to add a new crop to his land, an environmental crop.”

The new farm

Ontario’s agricultural landscape has gone industrial as big box, high-tech greenhouses, impervious to seasons, weeds and weather, replace field crops. How food grows on…

by Ray Ford
photography by Evan Dion

Outside the fumes from Inco’s superstack blend into an overcast sky, and the restive summer atmosphere is limbering up for a thunderstorm. But here beneath two layers of six-millimetre plastic, Don Blais is tending his own private Eden. “I just love the green and the smell of growing things. You see how nice and clean and beautiful it is. It’s absolutely gorgeous,” the Sudbury-area greenhouse grower says, kneeling to clip an infant cucumber plant onto twine suspended from an overhead wire. The plants seem frail and vulnerable, with their 20-centimetre stalks, their roots fed and watered by a network of tubes. But in a week, they will have grown by 30 centimetres. In less than a month, long English cucumbers will be ripening in the muggy, 45 C afternoons beneath the plastic. Even after four years in the business, Blais still marvels at the fertility, the powerful life force contained and fostered inside the greenhouse.

As a farmer myself, I share Blais’s enthusiasm. This plastic-bubble world with its earthy, rainfall scent and heavy, warm air is far removed from my domain of muddy rubber boots, bawling ewes and electric fencing. Even Blais’s optimism is in striking contrast to the volatile mix of anger and desperation that fuelled farm rallies this past spring, or the broader sense of resignation that hangs over most of rural Ontario. Maybe that is because the greenhouse sector has, until recently, been on the sunny side of Canadian agriculture. During the 1990s, Ontario’s greenhouse vegetable sector increased from 160 hectares to 400 hectares, pushing tomato, cucumber and pepper production to almost $400 million last year — more than $1.1 billion if you include greenhouse flowers and plants.

The result has been a sort of crystalline rural sprawl over the deep soils of the Niagara region and Essex County, where immigrant families first built greenhouses to augment their market gardens. Now Essex features the continent’s largest concentration of greenhouses: more than 500 hectares of glass and plastic. At night, the pinkish orange glow of grow lights vies with the glare from Windsor and Detroit. “You can quite clearly see the greenhouse glow from Pelee Island,” says Phil Roberts, president of the Essex County Field Naturalists.

In Niagara, greenhouse production has displaced the penin­sula’s iconic peach and grape crops, at least in economic terms. “When you drive through the Niagara Peninsula, everyone sees vineyards and peach trees and thinks of grapes and wine,” says Tony Thompson, the Niagara Economic Development Corporation’s horticultural business consultant. “But the farm gate value of everything Niagara farmers produce is $511 mil­lion a year. Out of that, 42 percent comes out of greenhouses. Grapes are 9.8 percent.”

The staggering thing is that Ontario’s greenhouse production comes from just over 1,000 hectares, or about 2,500 football fields. That may sound vast, but for farmers it amounts to a single good-sized prairie grain farm. Dusty outside farmers just cannot compete with greenhouse growers when it comes to productivity. During an industry meeting last year, the gen­eral manager of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers compared economic returns from an acre of corn and an acre of greenhouse vegetables. They differed by a factor of 1,000: where the sodbuster might bring in $300 to $600 per acre, his glassed-in counterpart might realize $300,000 to $600,000. True, those estimates were based on 2005 numbers, and margins have tightened since. Greenhouse growers also have much higher costs: Statistics Canada reports greenhouse growers spent about $1.96 billion to bring in $2.15 billion. Still, any kind of profit would leave most corn farmers envious. When corn prices fell 23 percent last year, Ontario farmers couldn’t sell their corn for the $3-plus a bushel it cost to grow it.

Growing food — like writing or teaching — is one of those jobs that only looks simple. Any kind of farming requires hefty investments in technology, real estate and know-how. Once you have specialized in one area of agriculture, you are unlikely to rewire your brain and pony up the $1 million or so it takes to set up a half-hectare state-of-the-art greenhouse. But such was the pull of greenhouse growing during the 1990s that even outdoor farmers were anxious to try growing under glass.

Ed Feenstra was keeping his Dunnville farm alive by work­ing at a local greenhouse. “I loved being in the barn and out in the fields, but pig prices were all over the place,” he says. “I thought, ‘What am I doing working all day in the greenhouse and trying to run my farm at night? It’s going to kill me.’ So we decided to let the farm go.” Today he’s growing oriental lilies in a 3,150-square-metre greenhouse. “It’s the next best thing to agriculture,” he says. “It’s independence and country living.”

Farther west, in St. Thomas, Jack Vanderkooy sold his dairy cows and entered the greenhouse business, first growing tomatoes and now producing young plants for other growers. “It’s been a good change,” he says. “On the dairy farm, at the end of the year I seemed to have nothing left to reinvest. But with hydroponic tomatoes, we actually had 10 percent of our revenues we could put away for further investment and expansion.”

Unlike most Canadians, farmers still wrest a living from the environment. We feel the push and pull of weather, work with birth and death, and try to tilt the odds in our favour with diesel fuel, fertilizers and technology. But given the vagaries of the weather, livestock and one’s own limitations, things inevitably go awry: hay is ruined in a summer downpour; tangled twin lambs die despite the efforts of their labouring mother. You find yourself, like generations of farmers before you, wishing you could control the rain, deflect the frost, attend every troubled birth.

Now greenhouse growers are close to realizing the age-old dream of a farm without frosts or hail, of a field with predict­able rains and a crop that can be attended, almost manicured. I visited Don Blais’s greenhouse not just to marvel at the greenery, but to see whether this kind of farming — high-tech, capital intensive, highly productive — really is the better way: better for the grower, better for the consumer, and better for the earth. Having put a chicken in every pot, industrial agriculture is now putting a salad in every bowl.

When the Roman emperor Tiberius demanded a year-round supply of cucumbers, his gardener’s instinct for self-preservation became the mother of invention. He placated the emperor by growing cukes under translucent slabs of mica, warming and fertilizing the vines with composted manure. Cosseted by imperial decree, the cucumber became the first greenhouse vegetable.

Today’s greenhouse cucumber is vastly different than the ones the Romans enjoyed soaked in wine. By the 19th century, growers had selected varieties that could produce fruit without pollination — a cucumber that not only thrived in a green­house environment, but because it was seedless it had more cachet than the seed-filled outdoor varieties. More modern varieties are seedless whether pollinating bees are present or not because they lack male flowers. Their hybrid vigour makes them extremely productive if not reproductive. “Last year one got left behind for a few days, and it was a torpedo. It had to have been 24 inches long and the girth was like this,” Blais says, forming a 10-centimetre circle with his hands.

Greenhouses have changed at least as much as the produce grown in them. As in Roman times, the structure allows sun­light in and holds the warmth by trapping radiant heat. But mica gave way to greased paper, then glass, acrylic and plastic. (Glass is again the industry favourite, in part because plastic has to be replaced every few years.) Except for a few organic growers who continue to fertilize with manure, greenhouse operators mix fertilizers into their irrigation water. In a twist on the “greenhouse effect,” some growers enhance plant growth by piping in carbon dioxide from their heating systems.

To avoid problems with pests and diseases and gain more control over plant nutrients, most vegetable growers use a hydroponic approach, replacing soil with a sterile, sponge-like “growth medium” — typically rock wool, a sort of candy floss spun from volcanic rock, or a substitute made from coconut husks. Plants grow with their vines attached to twine, their fruit suspended for more even sun exposure. Tomato vines wind more than 10 metres, while peppers reach 3.5 metres toward the ceiling. Bumblebees housed in cardboard hives flit among the blossoms and pollinate the crops.

An electronic consul, the Programmable Logic Controller, orchestrates every aspect of the environment. It oversees humid­ity, temperature, light, carbon dioxide and moisture levels. It opens vents, switches on lights when the sun fades, rolls down insulating “energy curtains” and irrigates the crop.

Today we can all eat like Tiberius, demanding perfect-looking fruit and vegetables and paying scant regard to season or distance. “What’s grown here in Ontario is probably the highest quality, safest food you’re going to get anywhere in the world,” says Cole Cacciavillani, chair of the Ontario Greenhouse Alliance and son of a pioneering Leamington grower.

But our imperial diet comes with hefty environmental costs in water, waste and energy. Greenhouses in Leamington and nearby Kingsville draw about 6.36 billion litres a year from the municipal water system, or about 35 percent of the region’s overall water demand. Because plants do not use all the water, Ontario’s agriculture ministry estimates a typical one-hectare tomato greenhouse could leach as much as 7.5 tonnes of fertil­izer salts and 4,000 cubic metres of irrigation water into the ground annually. The need to replace plastic greenhouse covers means one Leamington-area recycling firm handles up to 204 tonnes of spent plastic a year. Rock wool needs to be replaced too, and if it was all tossed out at once, the pile would fill 83 transport trucks. Greenhouses are also big energy users, but they are hardly the only source of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. One British study found that eight tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions were emitted just to grow, process, ship and cook the food that feeds a family of four for a year.

Kathy Nihei profile

By Moira Farr

Not everyone would maintain composure when interrupted by a Canada goose during an interview, but Kathy Nihei, director and founder of the Wild Bird Care Centre in Nepean, merely furrows her brow, turns to the honker waddling down the corridor and says, “You’re loud.” Whatever ailment brought the bird to the centre has been remedied enough that it now has the strength to wander out of its caged run and explore its surroundings, trumpeting all the way. Soon, the bird will take flight back to the wild, like the tens of thousands of other birds that have passed through the centre in the 25 years of its existence.

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Seeing green

A great deal

By John Hassell

Congratulations to our partner organization, the Bruce Trail Conservancy (BTC), for raising $1 million to secure an additional 114 hectares of Malcolm Bluff Shores, a spectacular 423-hectare (1,045- acre) area on the Niagara Escarpment, north of Owen Sound. Together, Ontario Nature and BTC have raised the funds needed to permanently protect 346 hectares, or over 80 percent, of this reserve for diverse plant and animal communities alongside the Georgian Bay shoreline.

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Having a field day

By John Urquhart

Ontario Nature’s conservation staff is back in the field! We are continuing our research on reptiles and amphibians as we work toward the completion of the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas. One of the unique aspects of the atlas is the opportunity it provides for citizen scientists. Anyone can contribute valuable data that, once the project is complete, will constitute the most up-to-date information on Ontario populations of reptiles and amphibians (together called “herpetofauna”).

To date, more than 400 people have submitted observations of reptiles and amphibians, and we have received more than 162,000 records, noting when and where specific species have been sighted in Ontario, from the public, researchers and other conservation organizations. The data is shared with the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Natural Heritage Information Centre and used to help determine the most effective conservation strategies for these species. In just two years, the atlas project has doubled the number of herpetofauna records in the existing provincial database.

You can learn more about these species on Ontario Nature’s atlas website (www.ontarionature.org/atlas). The account for each species includes a page of photos, range maps, detailed descriptions and identification tips. Also listed are outreach events planned for this year. Last year, more than 1,500 people attended some 40 presentations, field training events, workshops and exhibits.

Interested in joining our conservation efforts this year?  Send me an e-mail at johnu@ontarionature.orgjohnu@ontarionature.org or check out the atlas website. With your help, we can make a difference for these increasingly vulnerable creatures.

Mining company sues band

By Christine Beevis

It seems incredible that, under the Ontario mining act, today’s prospectors are just as entitled to “free entry” on any crown or private land as they were a century ago. By simply placing a stake on each corner of an area being claimed and registering the staked claim, prospectors gain exclusive rights to explore that area. If enough minerals are discovered to justify a mine, the company will apply for a mineral licence, which the government cannot refuse. But a dispute between a mining company and a First Nations community has set the stage for a legal battle that could change all that.

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