A strong wind whipped in heavy grey clouds, and the threat of rain was imminent as several hundred shivering people queued up at the edge of a woodlot north of Shelburne at the beginning of a unique demonstration of civil society. They were lining up to protest against the proposed “mega-quarry” in North Dufferin County’s Melancthon Township and to raise funds to fight the application and to celebrate the area’s farmland and the food it produces. Eight hours and 28,000 people later, world-renowned chef and president of the Canadian Chefs’ Congress Michael Stadtländer had pulled off the coup he had planned: Foodstock, with 100 top chefs from across Ontario and beyond and an army of local volunteers.

Like most who attended Foodstock, I drove two and a half hours on roads and highways made of the very stuff that was the reason for this protest journey of thousands of Ontarians. The proposed quarry, which would be North America’s second largest, is the most recent in a long history of pits and quarries that have stirred public outrage. But this project is astounding in the way that the land was acquired from farmers and its sheer size and scale. The quarry would spread across 2,135 acres (937 hectares) and be almost 80 metres deep in places, bringing with it the spectre of major loss of some of Ontario’s best farmland, threats to ground and surface waters, and loss of wildlife habitat and other natural heritage.

Irish rock band U2’s 1987 song “With or Without You” could be the theme song for society’s relationship with the aggregate industry. As long as the population in this province continues to grow, we will need to feed it with the raw material for constructing roads, buildings and other infrastructure. Apparently, we can neither live without stone, sand and gravel nor live with the way these materials are produced. Or could we?

In his article on page 32, Ray Ford describes a new bend in the road of aggregate production in Ontario – a collaborative initiative of six environmental organizations and six leading aggregate industry players, including representatives from some of its heaviest hitters, to tackle the major sources of conflict between the environment and communities on one hand and the producers on the other. The Ontario

Aggregate Forum’s flagship initiative, a voluntary certification program based on rigorous environmental and community standards, has the potential to be a game changer, raising the performance bar well above the level required by regulation through creative and collaborative problem-solving and innovation.

Ontario Nature is a founding member of the Aggregate Forum. Over many years, we have fought the granting of specific aggregate extraction licences and worked to change legislation to protect natural heritage from the impact of pits and quarries. Now we are looking for something different. With more than 3,000 pits and quarries currently licensed in Ontario and many more in the pipeline, we need systemic change rather than fighting one-on-one battles. Sitting down with this industry to figure out how to make it “green” has been an interesting challenge but is an investment that may in the end reap great rewards. There will always be a need for occasional David and Goliath battles, such as the one in Melancthon Township, but we hope these will become increasingly rare – not because environmentalists and communities are depleted and defeated but because we have found a better way to protect our communities and environment.

Most of us have known for years that trees are good for the environment, particularly because of their ability to sequester greenhouse gases spewed by cars and the other conveniences of our lives. Yet, until recently, no one knew precisely just how much carbon forests could store. But a detailed analysis published in the August 19, 2011, issue of the journal Science has cleared the air on how significant a factor forest-carbon capture is.

The study, which analyzed forest inventory figures from countries around the globe and grouped them according to temperate, tropical and boreal regions, estimates that forests cumulatively sequester approximately 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon every year. That means that trees capture nearly one-third of the estimated 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted annually.

“This study clearly indicates the important role that forests play in absorbing carbon and regulating the climate,” says Anne

Bell, Ontario Nature’s director of conservation and education. “The science is complex, and there are many uncertainties, but of note is the finding that, globally, the net forest carbon sink is mainly in the temperate and boreal forests.”

That is in part because the carbon released from the ongoing deforestation in the tropics almost entirely negated the amount sequestered in patches of undisturbed tropical forest. One saving grace for the region was the surprisingly high level of carbon capture – 1.6 billion tonnes – of forest regrowth following logging and slashand- burn operations.

Closer to home, the researchers also came to some troubling conclusions. Over the course of the two time periods studied,

1990 to 1999 and 2000 to 2007, the biomass of Canadian forests actually decreased by half, primarily as a result of losses to forest fires and damage from invasive species.

This summer, the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation took a bold stance to protect the Big Trout Lake watershed by ratifying a watershed declaration and consultation protocol aimed at preserving 1.3 million hectares of boreal lakes, rivers, forests and wetlands that form the spiritual, as well as physical, centre of the community.

The watershed is within KI territory, which lies some 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. The declaration is a strong example of a First Nations community taking a proactive lead in determining what, if any, industrial activity is permitted on its territories.

KI has run up against unwanted industrial projects in the past, most recently when Platinex, a mineral speculation company, began exploring the lands upriver of Big Trout Lake without the community’s permission or knowledge. Subsequent legal battles, along with active assertion of KI’s rights and protests to keep Platinex off KI lands, led to the temporary imprisonment of the chief, Donny Morris, and five other KI community members in November 2007. The community’s refusal to back down and its acts of civil disobedience pushed Platinex eventually to surrender its mining claim in December 2009 – a decision Morris saw as a major victory. Even so, he determined that there is more work to be done to ensure the conservation of the watershed.

Nearly two years later, the people of KI rallied around the watershed declaration and consultation protocol to ensure that “all waters that flow into and out of Big Trout Lake …[are] completely protected.” The declaration goes on to state that “no industrial uses, or other uses which disrupt, poison, or otherwise harm our relationship to these lands and waters will be permitted.”

The declaration sets a potentially game-changing precedent demonstrating the potential of First Nations-led land-use planning and serving as a model for northern communities that struggle to find a balance between industrial development and land stewardship. Earthroots campaigner David Sone, who works closely with KI, notes that “far too many First Nations communities are forced to suffer from industrially contaminated water sources.” The declaration represents a written manifestation of KI’s traditional Aboriginal law. As well as demanding complete watershed protection, the community is calling on all stakeholders to consult directly with KI before undertaking any development on its land; moreover, industrial activity of any kind will require KI’s prior consent.

Ontario Nature supports the KI watershed declaration and consultation protocol. Learn more about KI’s efforts at http://KILands.org.

Many in the environmental community found that the recent provincial election was as notable for what was not discussed as it was for the points of contention. Absent from most debates was any discussion of conservation in an era of climate change. While candidates crossed swords over, for example, the applicability of the HST to the price of gasoline, no one considered the near future impacts of global warming on the enormous, yet fragile, northern ecosystems.

To offer an opportunity to discuss important environmental issues, Ontario Nature’s Northern Connections program hosted the Green Economy Forum for Northern Ontario last September in Thunder Bay. Michael Gravelle, then the minister of northern development, mines and forestry, Steve Mantis of the NDP, Scot Kyle of the Green Party and Anthony Leblanc, running for the Conservatives at the time, participated in one of the featured panel discussions. The then-candidates were asked to consider a number of questions, ranging from whether Ontario could become a post-carbon economy to how to ensure that a robust economy can accommodate habitat protection for endangered species such as woodland caribou.

The goal of the forum was to push our political leadership and engage local citizens in thinking beyond the election cycle of the next four years. Moreover, the forum aimed to develop a long-term vision for a sustainable economy – one that looks after the needs of people while respecting the real limits of the natural world.

Fifty-three participants from across Ontario discussed ways to support community based renewable energy projects, restructure our forest industries to get more value per unit of wood, create markets for ecosystem services, reduce food insecurity in remote communities and create communities that can withstand economic and environmental transformation.

The Green Economy Forum helped kickstart a longer conversation we need to have as we struggle to find ways to balance our own needs with those of future generations and the earth’s other species. As one of the participants at the forum said, it is important to be able to hear from your MPP, but it is much more important that your MPP hears from you.

After nearly a decade of destruction due to a voracious, invasive insect, a glimmer of hope is stealing into Ontario’s gloomy ash forests.

The emerald ash borer has already destroyed most of its host trees in southwestern Ontario, specifically Essex County where this creature entered the province nine years ago. On its own, and with help from humans moving firewood and other wood products, the brilliantly coloured beetle has expanded its range eastward past Toronto. Also infested are Sault Ste. Marie; the Ottawa area; Gatineau, Quebec; and, this year, Montreal. The pest is also widespread in Michigan, its North American entry point in the early 1990s, and has been recorded in 14 other states.

Bans on transporting wood from infested areas have had little impact. “Populations are about to explode,” says Taylor Scarr, forest entomologist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.

Still, researchers are making progress on two fronts – earlier detection and containment. “We now have the tools we didn’t have a couple of years ago,” explains Scarr.

“We’re hoping there will be an equilibrium level achieved,” says Brian Hamilton, a regional manager with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which leads the control effort. “People will lose a lot of ash trees, but they won’t lose all of them.”

The borer, notable for its jewel-like green wings, crossed the Pacific Ocean in wooden packaging from China. In the absence of predators, the beetle thrived in Ontario’s forests, woodlots and gardens. It lays eggs on bark, and the resulting larvae burrow into the tree and, tunnelling in a serpentine pattern, eat the cells between bark and sapwood. The tunnels girdle the trunk, cutting the flow of nutrients, and the tree dies.

Until recently, researchers could detect infestations only by evidence such as the Dshaped holes the emerging adults left in the bark. By then, the borers were well established and the tree doomed, along with those nearby.

However, two new methods promise improved and quicker detection: One is a prism-shaped lure that traps borers on a sticky surface. The second, developed by Canadian scientist Krista Ryall, involves looking for borers beneath the bark of treetop branches – the pests’ usual attack point. This might allow them to be spotted before they infest the entire tree.

Early detection should improve containment, says Scarr. Borer-free trees in urban areas could be inoculated with the protective agent TreeAzin. Infested trees could be burned, nipping outbreaks in the bud and buying time for larger-scale controls.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is experimenting with predator wasps imported from Asia while Canadian scientists focus on native species of wasps. The predator wasp lays eggs on borer larvae, which its own larvae devour. The native wasp hunts and paralyzes adult borers, then carries them to its nest where it lays eggs on them. Hatching larvae consume the borers.

Researchers are also investigating whether a fungus found on several dead borers can be disseminated, Scarr says. It is hoped that the males will pick up the material from traps, then infect the many females they mate with in the few days before the fungus kills them.

“Everything that is a potential [control], scientists are trying to figure out if it can be used,” Hamilton says. “We have all the biology we need. The next step is figuring out what kills this beetle.”

From Toronto to Thunder Bay, Ontario Nature staff have been travelling across the province in search of snakes, salamanders and other creeping, crawling and slithering wildlife. As part of the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas project, conservation staff have conducted workshops, presentations and field surveys to increase awareness of and gather data about this unique group of creatures. The goal is to learn more about where reptiles and amphibians can be found and their population sizes, largely through observations that members of the public submit.

You do not need to travel far and wide to find these animals. Sometimes the best places to find snakes, salamanders, turtles and frogs are where you would least expect. On a walk around a small pond in downtown Thunder Bay this summer, I noticed something poking out of the vegetation. I thought it was a stick until “the stick” dropped below the surface of the water. Ten minutes and a metre or so of swampy muck later, I found myself face to face with a beautiful western painted turtle. I spotted four turtles swimming around the small pond and coming up for air. These adaptable reptiles can live in ponds on golf courses and in backyards, and even in large ditches in cities – in addition to more natural settings such as swamps, bogs and lakes.

The atlas project is now wrapping up its third season of fieldwork and outreach. In 2011 alone, a thousand people have attended Ontario Nature presentations and guided hikes at more than 20 different outreach events across the province. The atlas now has more than 550 registered participants keeping an eye out for this secretive group of critters. Nevertheless, more participants are always welcome! Ontario Nature’s database now contains more than 162,000 records. Despite being launched only in 2009, the Ontario Nature atlas project tally already matches the number of records the Natural Heritage Information Centre holds.

Please keep your eyes and ears open for snakes, turtles, frogs, salamanders and lizards. Report your sightings online at www.ontarionature.org/atlas. The information submitted will be used to influence conservation efforts across the province. Questions? E-mail jamesp@ontarionature.org for answers.

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.

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 southern Ontario, we have borrowed heavily from our children. The story is well known, if not well heeded: urban sprawl has paved over large tracts of green spaces at an alarming rate.

The Couchiching Conservancy has met this challenge head on by managing 10,000 hectares of protected land, with title to nearly 4,000 hectares. The protected land constitutes the most sensitive and threatened landscapes surrounding Orillia, mostly located on the Oro Moraine and the Carden Plain. Guided by their Natural Heritage

Action Plan, the group owns 17 properties and looks after another 11 through easements and partnership agreements with other conservation organizations such as the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

With strong support from the public, the Couchiching Conservancy is able to work closely with landowners, ranchers, residents and other stakeholders. Past president Gord Ball describes the Couchiching Conservancy as “an organization that people feel good about,” an assessment with which many people familiar with the group agree.

The extensive hardwood forests of the Oro Moraine contain the groundwater for surrounding wetlands and streams, and also provide drinking water for thousands of local residents. The Carden Plain is a rich mosaic of globally rare alvars, grasslands, shrublands and wetlands. It is also a birding mecca and habitat for one of Ontario’s last known breeding populations of the eastern loggerhead shrike, a bird that has the unique habit of impaling its prey on thorns and barbed wire. In 1998, the Couchiching Conservancy successfully nominated the plain as a nationally significant Important Bird Area (IBA).

Given the rapid growth in population and development in southern Ontario, the success of the Couchiching Conservancy in protecting significant habitat is all the more important. This group is actively making good on the debt we owe to our descendents.

For more information about the Couchiching Conservancy, visit: www.couchconservancy.ca.