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.

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.

In the 1860s, that negative attitude changed. Canneries appeared in the United States that could process sturgeon meat for markets elsewhere, and caviar became a sought-after delicacy. A huge commercial sturgeon fishery boomed throughout the Great Lakes, as well as in other large Ontario waters such as lakes Nipissing, Nipigon and Simcoe, Lake of the Woods and the Ottawa River. More than seven million kilograms of sturgeon were harvested in Ontario at the peak of the fishery between 1885 and 1889. Then, with spectacular suddenness, stocks collapsed. In the period from 1905 to 1909, the catch fell to less than one-tenth of what it had been 20 years earlier.

Lake sturgeon in Ontario and elsewhere in the southern reaches of its range have never really recovered, either in number or, says Casselman, in our imaginations. “I think we lost our association with the fish. People just didn’t think about them anymore. The commercial fishery continued, but it was small, until the seventies and eighties, when it virtually disappeared altogether.”

Almost 40 years have passed since Ontario ended commercial harvests of sturgeon in three of the four Great Lakes. (A limited fishery in Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair was closed in 2009.) In 2008, even recreational fishermen were forbidden to take sturgeon – if they could find them. Indeed, sturgeon became an uncommon sight in the province; in some former sturgeon rivers, none have been seen in years. For decades, even scientists seemed uninterested in the species.

Then, last September – more than 100 years after the great decline – MNR completed an official recovery strategy for the Ontario lake sturgeon. The government has until summer 2012 to respond to the report. But nothing is easy about sturgeon conservation in the province – especially since the government continues to actively encourage the development of new hydroelectric dams, perhaps the greatest threat to the sturgeon’s survival.

“Sturgeon are a big fish, and they’re highly mobile,” says University of Guelph biologist Rob McLaughlin. “If you put in a dam … you’re going to fragment the population.” Dams are widely acknowledged – including in the MNR recovery strategy – as one of the top reasons why lake sturgeon populations are in trouble in Ontario. Many sturgeon migrate long distances (more than 100 kilometres) upstream from their adult habitat to breed in shallow river rapids or at the bottom of falls. Typically, these are historical spawning sites, revisited year after year. Dams can block the migrants’ routes or spoil the fast-flowing, pebbly breeding beds on which the sturgeon depend. Some facilities even chop up adult fish or trap the downstream-drifting fry. Almost 200 waterpower projects already interrupt many Ontario rivers.

This is a serious worry in light of what a long-term and tentative business sturgeon breeding is. The fish live up to 150 years, and females can take 33 years to become sexually mature. Even then, they spawn only every four to nine years. (Males mature somewhat earlier and spawn about twice as frequently.) As well, the potential mothers remain in spawning condition for only a short time, and they reabsorb their eggs if no suitable sites on which to deposit them are available.

While dams have been clearly linked in the past to reductions in sturgeon populations, including the collapse of sturgeon stocks in Lake St. Francis (which has dams at both ends) and declines on parts of the heavily developed Ottawa River, they’re not the only pressures on lake sturgeon. Climate change may warm some waters above the cool temperatures spawn need to hatch, and water pollution threatens to poison the eggs. Invasive sea lamprey prey on adult sturgeon, but efforts to control the lamprey are proving to be hazardous to sturgeon as well: the chemical used to kill young lamprey in streams can also affect the struggling fry of sturgeon. While invading mussels and gobies are a source of food for sturgeon, gobies also eat sturgeon eggs and mussels cover and spoil the pebbly spawn beds.

Nevertheless, dams are of most concern, if only because of the very real potential that the problem is about to get much worse. Two years ago – just months before lake sturgeon were added to the Species at Risk list – the Ontario government passed its Green Energy Act, partly in an effort to encourage more renewable power in the province. As of September, 102 new hydro projects had applied to take advantage of a guaranteed pricing program (the feed-in-tariff, or FIT, program). More are likely to follow: according to an inventory by the Ontario Waterpower Association (OWA), an industry group representing hydroelectric companies, 2,000 other sites across the province have at least the water-flow potential to support hydro dams in the future.

The conundrum is that laudable efforts to generate more clean power threaten to have other environmental consequences, especially for river-dependent fish such as sturgeon. “I worry about it big time,” says Casselman of Queen’s University. “What we have is two renewable resources competing for our attention, and we’re not paying enough attention to the fish component of this … We need to take a deep breath and step back to look at our impact in terms of river fragmentation.”

Colin Hoag, a policy advisor with OWA, argues that saying that all dams hurt sturgeon is overly simplistic. “Each case is different,” he says. In 2009, OWA – with input from MNR, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and others – published a “best-management practices” guide to minimizing the impact of hydroelectricity generation on lake sturgeon in Ontario rivers. Although sturgeon have difficulty climbing dam “fish ladders,” such as those used in the United States and Quebec to help eels, other possible mitigation methods include managing downstream, sturgeon-friendly water levels, flows and habitat; physically trapping and transporting the fish past the barriers; or simply choosing to locate projects on other rivers, where their effects will be less disruptive to sturgeon.

Many of these tactics are reviewed in the OWA report, but it is only a guide. (“There’s no requirement for our members per se,” says Hoag.) What is urgently needed, advises the University of Guelph’s McLaughlin, is more research and, with it, a more thorough, informed public discussion. “What I’d like to see is a clearer explanation to society of what the trade-offs are when we are going to build a dam,” he says. “What are the options? There may be options that allow us to generate the electricity society needs in ways that we believe will minimize the impact on the fish.”

Tim Haxton supports McLaughlin’s central idea. At his brightly lit desk in the science section of the Peterborough MNR office, Haxton explains his current, multi-year sturgeon research program as a way to move discussions forward, by getting to the bottom of the complex relationship between sturgeon and river dams.

While doing his PhD a few years ago, Haxton was among the first to link the population health of sturgeon in stretches of the Ottawa River with the type and intensity of dam development there. Now, with a crew of other MNR biologists, he is hoping for similar findings in 30 other representative waterways across Ontario. “You can have dams and you can have sturgeon, in my opinion,” he says, but “there seems to be a right way and a wrong way.”

Meanwhile, there are some reasons for optimism about the prospects for Ontario sturgeon. In Lake of the Woods and Rainy River, studies by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (which shares these watery jurisdictions with Ontario) show that lake sturgeon longer than a metre more than tripled in number between 1990 and 2004, from approximately 16,000 to almost 55,000. Sturgeon stocks in the Detroit River have also increased, according to MNR. Casselman believes that sturgeon in the 1000 Islands area of the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall appear to be rebounding as well. “Fishermen here would tell you that they believed these fish spawned in the Long Sault rapids and, of course, the construction of the Moses-Saunders [hydroelectric dam project] cut them off,” explains Casselman, who has started a new study of sturgeon in the St. Lawrence. “It’s taken about three generations, but it now looks as though they’ve started to reproduce in the fractionated river.”

Sturgeon are resilient, says Haxton. Indeed, their ability to adapt should hardly be surprising in a fish with a history that goes back to the time of ichthyosaurs. Despite river dams, overfishing and a host of other troubles facing them today, the sturgeon’s long evolutionary past may be the best clue to the promise of their future. “Here you have this living dinosaur,” says Haxton. “It’s incredible to think about what they have survived.”

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Peter Christie is a Kingston-based science writer who remembers being introduced to his first leviathan lake sturgeon years ago by his late father and former Ontario coordinator of Great Lakes fisheries research, Jack Christie.

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.”

Miller has been a driving force behind this new collaboration ever since she reached out to the environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 2008. “We’ve had real opportunities to find common ground, but we never got to the discussion that would find it,” she says. “In the past, perhaps our approach was to say, ‘Here’s our position, like it or lump it.’ This time, we sent out an invitation that just said, ‘We’d like you to come and talk to us about aggregate management.’”

Twelve environmental groups were invited; six – Ontario Nature, CONE, Save the Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM), Nature Conservancy of Canada, Gravel Watch Ontario and the Couchiching Conservancy – took up the offer. On the industry side, participants included Miller, Lucyshyn and representatives from Lafarge, Miller Paving Ltd., Capital Paving and, initially, Holcim Canada, a member of the Swiss firm that now owns Dufferin Aggregates. (Holcim Canada left the forum in March 2011 and later announced its own green gravel program with Environmental Defence.)

Early meetings were “like a blind date, only one where you don’t have a very positive image of who you’re going to have a date with,” Schultz says. Participants debated such contentious issues as recycling, shipping and greenhouse gas emissions. They went on field trips to pits and quarries, as well as to rehabilitated sites. And they began to develop a rapport. At a field trip to a rehabilitated Lafarge pit near Mono Mills, threatened bobolinks swooped and arced over rippling grassland. The green crowd was delighted. “All the aggregate producers looked at each other and said, ‘OK, now I know what a bobolink is,’” Miller recalls.

“The encouraging thing was that everybody seemed to be civil, well-meaning people who were trying to find solutions,” Schultz says. “In some cases, we had to agree to disagree. In others, we need to invest time in learning.” One issue that has proven hard to resolve, for example, is terms for aggregate licences: environmental groups and local residents want firm “sunset” times for shutting down pits and quarries; the industry prefers the flexibility of being able to idle pits or adjust production to meet market demands.

Despite these disagreements, Schultz argues that the aggregate business is ripe for the kind of third-party certification that began in the forest sector in the 1990s. The most obvious example is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which places its stamp on forest products that are both environmentally sustainable and grown and processed for the benefit of local communities and First Nations. A similar program in the aggregate sector could set standards for taking into account the natural environment when selecting sites for aggregate extraction, approval and rehabilitation of quarries and pits, including guidelines for reducing energy use and carbon emissions, and recycling aggregates and construction materials.

Industry, meanwhile, sees certification as a way to offer a marketing advantage to progressive firms, reducing what Lucyshyn calls the “costs and uncertainties” of opening new operations for companies with a record of good environmental stewardship. Obvious markets for green gravel include governments (which already buy more than half the aggregates produced in Ontario) and contractors participating in green building programs such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

When Holcim Canada and Environmental Defence opted to draw up a separate certification regime, called Socially and Environmentally Responsible Aggregates (SERA), their decision raised the spectre of competing standards for green gravel. But Schultz sees a silver lining. As in the forest sector, where various standards programs fight for market share, Schultz says competing aggregates standards may “up the ante” for environmental protection. SERA executive director Lorne Johnson adds the competition also helps organizations develop more effective and practical standards and procedures, including audits. “There’s a tendency for an upwards harmonization of standards, not a downwards harmonization,” he says. “By having two standards to compare and contrast, nothing but good can come from that in terms of the long-term stewardship of the resource.”

Still, the two sides must work through some knotty problems before an effective certification system is possible. Unlike timber, aggregate is a finite resource. Stewarding it involves balancing conflicting demands. Take the tradeoff in deciding how close to the final market gravel should be produced: On the one hand, extraction in southern Ontario places more stress on an increasingly limited natural landscape. On the other, hauling aggregate from the hinterland could damage other, equally sensitive areas and, due to the longer truck routes, pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the latter scenario, “trucks are still going to be pounding the pavement through your community to reach aggregates farther afield. It’s a lose-lose option,” Schultz says. “Rather than make a beeline for a particular model, we’re doing our due diligence in terms of researching the various options out there.”

Another challenge with an FSC-style approach is the limited retail markets for aggregates. Sales to do-it-yourselfers are minimal compared with the demand from governments and contractors. And those buyers, especially government, are heavily invested in what York University associate professor
Mark Winfield labels a “policy of putting cheap aggregate close to the market.

“People have been trying for more than 40 years to bring about a change in the province’s approach to aggregates, with zero success so far,” says Winfield, who studied Ontario’s aggregate sector when he was director of the Environmental Governance Program at the Pembina Institute.

Certification may start nudging those policies in a greener direction, but government still has a role to play. “I don’t see certification as replacing what government does, or should be doing,” says the Couchiching Conservancy’s Reid. He argues that issues such as promoting rail or marine transportation, recycling and researching ways to make more efficient use of aggregates all require government leadership.

But the primary need – and a key factor in creating a lasting peace in the sector – lies in getting aggregate buyers to go green. “If the province was going to say, ‘We’re going to use green aggregate,’ you’d see the level of interest escalating,” Reid says. Schultz agrees that the big challenge for the NGOs is to push municipalities to see the benefits of green procurement. “There will be some ups and downs with this,” she predicts, and adds, “Ultimately, it’s up to voters to decide what’s important to them and for citizens to make their voices heard.”

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Ray Ford is a freelance writer based near North Bay. His story, “Sanctuary for shorebirds,” appeared in the Winter 2010/11 issue of ON Nature.