Logging caribou territory
by Riki Burkhardt
Tucked away in a far corner of northwestern Ontario is the breathtakingly beautiful St. Raphael Signature Site. Named after the patron saint of travel and good health, the remote 153,000-hectare site encompasses St. Raphael Provincial Park and the Miniss Enhanced Management Area (EMA). Within the park and EMA boundaries lie some 400 lakes and 2,500 kilometres of shoreline.
Big thinker: Len Gertler
By Linda Pim
Len Gertler, founding director of the University of Waterloo’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, was Canada’s guru of environment-first planning for broad geographic regions. He wanted our cities to be cities and the countryside – the farmlands, woodlands and wetlands – to stay countryside.
Len was struck by throat cancer in spring 2005, at a fit and youthful 81. He was writing volume two of his memoirs, Radical Rumblings: Confessions of a Peripatetic Planner, until just weeks before his death last December.
Len’s 1968 Niagara Escarpment Study, commissioned by then-Premier of Ontario John Robarts, is so legendary that it is referred to simply as “the Gertler report.” In laying out a plan for a continuous undeveloped corridor along the escarpment, the report spawned many provincial initiatives that culminated in the 1985 passage of the Niagara Escarpment Plan (NEP), which greatly influenced UNESCO’s decision to name the escarpment a World Biosphere Reserve in 1990.
Today, the overall forest cover across southern Ontario is 19 percent. In the NEP area, 47 percent of the land is forested, with the comparatively rich forest cover readily traced to Len. The recently established 728,460 hectare Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt, which beats back urban sprawl, can also be linked to Len.
With characteristic humility, Len wrote to me about receiving Ontario Nature’s escarpment protection award for 2003:
“I could not help but be delighted by news of the award . . . I am not a naturalist like you or some of my ecology friends who have an instinct for knowing the landscape. I share the love of nature, but my inclination is towards concept, coordination of ideas and policy writing. So, to be recognized by an institution like [Ontario Nature] is both surprising and gratifying.”
Amused, I responded by reminding Len that, in commenting on my work in planning for nature without a planning degree, he had written:“Your experience and your education – formal and informal (the way you are so vitally involved in current issues) and the way you think, what’s important to you – make you quite legitimate (forgive my presumption) as an author in an interdisciplinary field like planning.”
In volume one of Radical Rumblings (2005), reflecting on almost 40 years of escarpment protection, Len wrote: “Support for the NEP has, of course, been subject to the vicissitudes of politics …Much credit for the continuity of policy…must go to the vigilance in support of the NEP of non-government organizations like [Ontario Nature] and the Coalition on the Niagara Escarpment.” A person with eclectic musical tastes, Len, in his final weeks, enjoyed singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer’s Escarpment Blues, written to support a Burlington group’s struggle against an escarpment quarry expansion.
Len Gertler was an environmentalist, a pacifist and a big thinker. His thinking produced big results – for nature and for people. I shared my grief with University of Guelph botany professor Doug Larson, discoverer in 1988 of the ancient eastern white cedars on the escarpment cliffs. Doug replied:“At least his passing reminds us of what he helped build in the first place. We should be happy for the life in the people who build.”
Ontario Nature’s conservation policy analyst Linda Pim was a friend of Len Gertler’s.
