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Our town

Transition cities are sprouting up across the province as urban environmentalists prepare for the triple threat of rising energy costs, resource depletion and climate change.

By Ivor Tossell

The movement that is changing the face of environmentalism started with a school project six short years ago.

Rob Hopkins, who taught permaculture (which includes the science of growing sustainable crops close to home) at a continuing education college in the rural town of Kinsale, Ireland, asked his class a question: The era of cheap energy is about to end, so what – right here, in this town – can we do to prepare for it? The students started with the premise that in 2021, their town would have half as much oil than is currently available, and that the price of energy would cause major disruptions in the global supply chains providing for almost all their needs.

His students created what amounted to a road map for the near future, a document packed with hundreds of recommendations – practical, incremental suggestions on how to prepare for daily life in a post-oil time. From competitions among towns to see which could grow the most food locally, to recycling standards for demolished buildings, to medicinal herb farms, to alternative currencies, the students took a no-stone-left-unturned approach to the transition they saw coming. “It is not the work of professionals,” Hopkins wrote in the resulting document, which he prosaically titled Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan. “It may occasionally be guilty of naivety, being misinformed or overly optimistic, but it is our attempt at starting this process rolling.”

The project did more than that. The document so impressed Kinsale’s town councillors that they adopted it as a guiding policy. In a few short years, the practical ethos of so-called Transition Towns spread to the United Kingdom and, from there, around the world. Transition Network, one of the websites devoted to tracking the movement, has plotted its spread: hundreds of local projects have sprouted globally in recent years, especially in Europe, North America and Australia.

Today, Transition Initiative groups are appearing across Ontario, in urban centres such as Ottawa and Toronto as well as rural areas such as Prince Edward County and mid-sized communities such as Peterborough and Guelph. The groups conduct seminars, hold festivals, run publications, share information, plant gardens and coordinate any number of small, local initiatives.

The popularity of the movement springs at least in part from the ripped-from-the-headlines urgency of its message: a triple whammy is coming in the form of the end of cheap oil, climate change and economic instability. To address it, a new strain of environmentalism has emerged that combines environmental concerns with a small-business sensibility and a streak of individualist self-sufficiency.

The Transition movement has no single creed; every local group seems to hew to a slightly different vision. But some themes are pervasive: community focus, local self-reliance and using less energy rather than seeking to produce more of it – or, as one activist succinctly put it, “more simple living.” Transition groups tend to work across a variety of disciplines, ranging from food security and energy planning to transportation and economic development, trying to foster local-scale innovations in all of them.

I.T.

Transition Guelph, for instance, has taken on a variety of small projects. Last spring, it launched a “treemobile” program through which fruit-bearing trees are planted around the city, and another initiative in which private landowners can have their urban fruit trees harvested and split the crop between owners and community kitchens. The Transition Guelph team launched two community gardens, working closely with other local groups. An alternative transportation group is working with bicycle shops to run bike-repair workshops, pushing maintenance capabilities out into the community. Yet another has undertaken the task of a “skills inventory” – a community registry of who has skills they would be willing to share, “everything from beekeeping to permaculture to darning socks,” says Chris Mills, the co-founder of Transition Guelph.

Since the Transition movement is polymathic by nature, it is well suited to serve as an umbrella for existing environmental initiatives, even lending them a new focus and urgency. “Often, Transition groups find themselves as hubs for things that people are already doing,” says Sami Grover, an environmental blogger who has written extensively about the movement. A Transition organization might, for example, bring the people spearheading a local-food movement together with those involved in social justice, and introduce both to neighbourhood businesses, says Grover.

The power of local networking is just as potent in the rural reaches of Prince Edward County, the picturesque peninsula on the shore of Lake Ontario, where environmental activism co-exists with the monster homes of wealthy retirees and the more pragmatic concerns of local farmers. “The part I’m really interested in is building a community that you can rely on,” says Christine Renaud, a member of the Prince Edward County Transition Group, which has been organizing lectures, many emphasizing self-reliance. The talks have covered everything from debt reduction to surviving economic turmoil to growing crops in winter and the finer points of producing sprouts.

The talks have found an audience among county residents who see the potential for a sustainable future – in some instances, by looking to the past. “At one time, ending in the late fifties and early sixties, Prince Edward County grew massive amounts of vegetables, and there were canning factories here,” says Myrna Wood, a member of the Prince Edward County Field Naturalists, an Ontario Nature member group and one of the groups that invited Renaud to speak to its members. “All of that was closed down as agriculture in Canada became industrialized.”

But Renaud sees networks of skills and cooperation as critical to communities’ survival in a precarious future. If rising oil prices cripple the corporate-run, long-distance supply chains that deliver our staples today, people will fall back on skills available locally, she says. “There’s also a kind of building of trust, and being able to have a good time with other people.”

The Transition movement has its survivalist streak, too. Indeed, if the movement has a watchword, it isn’t “sustainability” – a term some people consider to have been greenwashed by commercial overuse – but “resilience”: the ability to withstand the trials that are coming for our global infrastructure. “The whole world is rushing for sustainability, which is really not attainable in the lifetime of anyone living on the planet,” says Fred Irwin, the affable but blunt force behind Transition Town Peterborough. “It’s all about community resilience.”

To drive his point home, Irwin posits a familiar scenario gone awry: “What will happen if the power goes out for three hours – and then three days?” Three hours is nothing out of the ordinary. But extend that outage, and the Western world gets into trouble. As it turns out, Irwin says, Peterborough stores three days of food reserves. Like much of the country, the town is woefully ill prepared for prolonged blackouts or fuel shortages.

So Transition Town Peterborough, like others, is fostering community projects that will help build that resilience: a slow-food festival this fall, permaculture seminars and a quarterly magazine spreading the message. The organization is also building networks between small businesses. For many Transitioners, strengthening small, local companies is as important as establishing small, local food suppliers.

Will the Transition movement gain traction? In communities like Guelph and Peterborough, municipal and university officials have shown interest and offered support in the form of providing meeting space and sending officials to work with Transition organizers. The uptake in the general population, however, has been slow. Irwin says that local politicians understand the Transition movement as a community builder, but aren’t engaging with the broader shift away from oil. “It’s a hard sell in Canada,” says Irwin, noting that a vast, cold country with a dispersed population is an energy hog by default. “Emissions are going up, and energy demand is going up.”

But observers from other disciplines are taking note. “I frankly think that they’re really on to something,” says Lloyd Alter, a prominent Toronto architect and conservationist who blogs for Treehugger.com. “All of my studies over the last couple of years have been about how old buildings and old communities were designed before oil started running everything, and they will survive after. This is exactly what [Transition groups] are doing.”

Mills of Transition Guelph compares the movement to the minority in pre-war Britain who believed that war was coming and took steps to prepare for it by doing things like planting gardens and building bunkers – blazing a path for the general population. “When war did break out, people asked: ‘What did you do? And what do I do next?’” Thanks to the prepared few, says Mills, the rest of the country had an answer.

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Ivor Tossell is a Toronto-based writer who covers urban affairs and technology.

 

Here be giants

 

First overfishing, then hydro dams. Lake sturgeon, Ontario’s largest and longest-lived fish, now belongs to one of the most beleaguered groups of animals on the planet.

 

By Peter Christie

Tim Haxton shifts his chair to allow his visitor a better view of the photograph on the computer screen. The dark image of a fossilized fish makes a subtle “S” in the lighter brown mud-stone that surrounds the shape. It is as if the creature suddenly turned to stone during a lazy swim through murky water. The petrified details – even the fine rays of fins – are crystal clear, and the identity of the fish is unmistakeable. “Sturgeon,” confirms Haxton, a fisheries specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR). “This one is probably about 200 million years old, from the Jurassic period. They really haven’t changed much in form or function since.”

The soft-spoken biologist has collected hundreds of photos during his 15 years of studying lake sturgeon, Ontario’s largest and longest-lived fish. His picture of the fossil, however, adds an almost mind-boggling historical view to our discussion of sturgeon conservation: close ancestors of this formerly indomitable animal were swimming the world’s waters before the Atlantic Ocean was born, before birds flew and about 200,000 millennia before humans first appeared. They swam right through the great extinction of the dinosaurs and, despite volcanic eruptions, ice ages and other climatic calamities, have overcome every threat they encountered – until now.

Sturgeon today confront a higher risk of extinction than any other non-insect animal in the world, says Haxton, citing the conclusions of a 2010 workshop of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Decimated by periods of overfishing and prized for their eggs, which are sold as expensive caviar, many sturgeon populations around the globe have been in free fall for decades. All 27 sturgeon species – including lake sturgeon – are on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. Two-thirds of these are considered “critically endangered” because their plummeting numbers or shrinking, fragmented ranges mean that the odds of this fish disappearing for good are “extremely high.” Four sturgeon species may already be gone forever.

Which is why, Haxton says, conservation of Ontario’s lake sturgeon is so crucial. These fish are better off than many sturgeon species but have troubles of their own. In 2009, two of the three populations of lake sturgeon – the only type of sturgeon found in Ontario – were listed as threatened on the province’s Species at Risk roster. The other, most northerly population is considered of special concern. In the Great Lakes in particular, stocks of this now rarely seen fish never recuperated after an overzealous fishery a century ago reduced their numbers to a fraction of their former population. Meanwhile, human interference seems to be hampering their recovery. The worst culprits are hydro dams, whose number is expected to surge as the province pushes for more renewable energy (see “Waterpower,” facing page).

All this only makes Haxton’s main point more significant: the lake sturgeon that live in at least 128 lakes and reservoirs and 101 rivers across Ontario (as well as sturgeon in parts of Quebec and Manitoba) represent “the last, good remaining stock of pristine sturgeon anywhere in the world.” They are, in other words, possibly the final hope for one of the oldest and most beleaguered groups of animals on the planet.

“That’s what I’m trying to get across,” he says. “We have one of the few bastions left.”

If lake sturgeon are a living link to our primeval past, they certainly look the part. Lead grey or deep, primordial brown, adult sturgeon appear to belong to another time. Their skin is without scales and leathery, and their fins set back toward their sickle-like tail. Mature sturgeon are huge, frequently a metre or more long. Some are giants, reaching a length of four and a half metres and weighing up to 185 kilograms (the weight of a small piano). Despite their size, lake sturgeon inhabit the relative shallows (between five and 10 metres deep) where they patiently scour the bottom, using four sensory barbels hanging near their noses to locate insect larvae, snails, crayfish, clams and sometimes small fish. Like sharks and other ancient fish, sturgeon have a skeleton of cartilage instead of bone and move with an almost fluid gracefulness. Also like sharks, these prehistoric fish have a long snout, and their eyes are eerily black.

“The first European settlers hated them,” says John Casselman, an adjunct professor at Queen’s University and a former senior scientist at MNR’s Glenora Fisheries Station near Picton. Before the mid-19th century, vast numbers of sturgeon swam in the clear water of the Great Lakes and its undammed tributaries, and were despised for fouling nets and gear set for trout and other, more useful species. (The settlers’ view of sturgeon was in sharp contrast to the centuries-old beliefs of many Ontario First Nations people, who revered it as a source of food, oil and leather, and celebrated it in rituals and legends.) Fishermen stacked “nuisance” sturgeon onshore by the thousands and left them to dry, later to be used as furnace fuel for steamships.

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The high road

In a groundbreaking alliance, the aggregate sector and conservation groups, led by Ontario Nature, make common cause on a green certification standard for gravel.

By Ray Ford

It has been a decades-long cold war, with some very hot engagements. But the struggle between Ontario’s $1.3-billion sand, gravel and stone industry and the people seeking to safeguard the province’s landscape, could, at last, be reaching a detente.

That may be tough to believe for residents of Dufferin County, where the application for a mammoth 937-hectare Melancthon Township quarry in the heart of Ontario’s potato-growing country (see “The big pit,” Autumn 2011) seems to indicate the conflict is scaling up. The bid elicited more than 2,000 objections, sparking marches and a tractor convoy, and inspiring Foodstock, a culinary demonstration sponsored by the Canadian Chefs’ Congress. This sort of opposition is not cheap, especially when donations come in $20 and $50 at a time. But North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce vice-chair Carl Cosack promises that if the quarry’s backers “are willing to go down to the wire, we’ll meet them, step for step.”

Yet even as new battles brew in parts of the province, potential for a new accord exists between industry and environmental groups – one that could result in gravel being extracted in a greener, more sustainable way without generating the kind of confrontation inherent in the present system. Taking the lead in the effort is the Ontario Aggregate Forum, founded by members of both camps in 2008. “We’re looking for a more systemic way of lessening the impact of aggregate extraction,” says Caroline Schultz, executive director of Ontario Nature and the organization’s representative on the forum.

The forum hopes to have the basic outlines of a plan for greener aggregate extraction next year and has already hired consultants from Deloitte to scan the world for leading standards and practices. For Bob Patrick, president of the Coalition on the Niagara Escarpment (CONE) and the coalition’s representative to the forum, the process could yield third-party environmental certification similar to that in place for lumber, paper, coffee and seafood.

If petroleum is the lifeblood of modern society, aggregates – including sand, gravel, stone, earth, clay and shale – form the bones. In 2009, the last year for which complete figures are available, Ontario’s pits and quarries produced 153 million tonnes of aggregates (almost 12 tonnes per person) for use in everything from roads, bridges and sewers to buildings and foundations, glass, paint, paper, fertilizers, even pharmaceuticals.

These resources take a heavy toll on the environment. Even with a sensitive rehabilitation after a pit or quarry has been played out, extraction is a permanent eviction for the plants and animals originally on the site. Then there are the problems with dust, noise, lighting and truck traffic, potential changes to the filtering and storage of groundwater, and carbon emissions. Every kilometre a gravel truck travels adds about 1.5 kilograms of greenhouse gases to the already burdened atmosphere.

“If you look at all the stresses on the landscape, aggregate extraction is significant,” says Schultz. “It all boils down to growth and urban sprawl, where we build and where roads are needed. Growth is the monster that needs to be fed.”

The fact that industry and environmentalists have come together to tackle these issues is a near miracle, considering that the two sides have spent decades, as Ron Reid of the Couchiching Conservancy says, “tossing bricks over the wall at each other.” Members of the forum are familiar with the sort of bitter, protracted and expensive dispute now taking place in Melancthon. When CONE and Halton-based Protecting Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER) teamed up to fight the 2004 expansion of Dufferin Aggregates’ Milton quarry, the $175,000 bill “basically bankrupted us,” Patrick says. Hobbled by debt and without the cash to maintain fulltime employees, “we’ve been limping along ever since.”

Industry has deeper pockets, but also larger bills. “We have to buy land on speculation and hope we can get approval” to mine it, says Ken Lucyshyn, another forum member and vice-president of aggregates and construction for Walker Industries, based in Thorold. His firm has spent more than $10 million on a quarry application in Duntroon and, after six years, has yet to receive a go-ahead. A delay of that length is not unusual for large and contested proposals that, like the Duntroon application, are appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), the province’s land-use adjudicator. “When you go through a months-long OMB hearing and spend millions,” says Moreen Miller, president of the Ontario Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, “to me that’s a colossal waste of energy, money and time.”

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