Disoriented by glare and reflective surfaces, millions of birds crash into office buildings every year. Now, conservationists and city planners are teaming up to create a safer urban environment for avian travellers.

By Brian Banks

Evening comes, the sun sets and a brown-and-white wood thrush rises from a clump of trees beside a farmer’s field in upper New York State. As it climbs, it joins a gathering storm of migratory songbirds moving across the region. This nightly event in a three-month spring procession includes tens of thousands of birds, each making the flight across Lake Ontario en route to summer breeding grounds farther north.

The wood thrush, which weighs about as much as a golf ball, has already been travelling for about two weeks. It left its wintering grounds in Honduras and flew across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi Valley before making this pit stop in New York State. Two nights later it will reach its nesting area in central Ontario.

Clouds cover the lake, obscuring the stars by which the thrush usually navigates. After a few hours, the bird is heading toward the misty glow of the Toronto skyline. City lights become a powerful distraction. The thrush grows disoriented and smashes into the window of an office tower. The bird’s 3,000-kilometre journey, the same that innumerable generations before it have flown, has come to an abrupt and violent end.

Welcome to an urgent new battlefront in bird conservation: the city. Urban areas are filled with obstacles and threats to migratory birds, and, as such areas grow up, out and ever denser, so do the problems they cause. The dead wood thrush is one of an estimated one to 10 million birds killed in Toronto every year due to collisions with buildings and other structures. According to one expert, an average of 10 birds a year hit each Toronto building.

Collisions with buildings are only part of the issue. Destruction of natural habitat and the loss of food and shelter that urban expansion causes may be taking an even bigger toll, according to Bridget Stutchbury, a biologist at York University who studies migratory songbirds. The eastern half of North America is an “urban obstacle course,” she says, with fewer and fewer places where birds can refuel quickly enough to get to their summer grounds in time to reproduce. Add rapid habitat loss in the birds’ wintering grounds, and it’s not surprising that migratory bird populations are “crashing,” says Stutchbury.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is fresh optimism among bird conservationists about reducing the urban toll. In January, Toronto became the first major city in North America to require most new buildings to meet “bird-friendly” construction standards. And two months earlier, more than 100 bird experts gathered in the city for its first-ever international Symposium on Bird Conservation in Urban Areas. “We suddenly find ourselves leaders in this area,” says Kelly Snow, the planner who coordinates Toronto’s bird-friendly initiatives. “It’s an interesting and exciting step.”

Toronto may be garnering attention and credit for taking up the cause of migratory birds, but a small, mostly volunteer-run organization – Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) – got things rolling.

Michael Mesure founded FLAP in 1993. A former artist and gallery operator, the bird enthusiast started by simply picking up dead and injured birds around downtown buildings. Within a few years, he made bird rehabilitation and conservation in cities his life’s work, aiming, according to FLAP’s website, to create “a 24-hour, collision-free urban environment for migratory birds.” Similar organizations or programs now exist in Montreal, Halifax and several U.S. cities. Two of them – Project Safe Flight in New York and the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors – got start-up help from FLAP. The group has also been working with communities around Toronto, including in Markham and Mississauga.

FLAP volunteers patrol the bases of downtown and suburban office buildings throughout the day, looking for fallen birds. (Although lights at night attract birds, more collisions actually occur in the daytime, when birds are fooled by deceptive reflections in the glass.) Volunteers take any injured birds to the Toronto Wildlife Centre for care and rehabilitation. About 40 percent of the birds the volunteers find alive survive, says Susan Krajnc, FLAP’s program assistant and volunteer coordinator.

Of course, preventing the injuries and deaths by reducing collisions is the ultimate goal. To that end, Mesure has been lobbying municipal officials and encouraging building owners to make their structures safer for birds. Initially, this meant turning out the lights at night. Then FLAP increased its emphasis on averting daytime collisions through the use of visible window treatments, shading and screening, as well as grills, artwork, awnings, overhangs or even angled walls and glass to minimize reflection. The city became an active participant in the cause, and now most new buildings must incorporate such features up to a height of 12 metres above ground.

Over the last decade, more than 100 buildings in Toronto have adopted FLAP’s recommendations. Now, FLAP expects this number to grow as the city takes on a bigger role educating builders and property owners. FLAP plans to spend more time working in other cities as well as the Great Lakes. “It’s a huge flyway area for so many birds,” says Krajnc.

Few people can appreciate Krajnc’s point more than Stutchbury. In 2007, the York University professor headed a research team that attached tiny geolocators to the backs of wood thrushes and other songbirds to track their movement and location during migration – the first time the technology was used on such tiny fliers. Birds were caught on their summer grounds, fitted with the “backpacks,” released and then netted again the following spring when they returned to Canada. The researchers then downloaded and plotted the data.

“Each one of these tracks is an individual bird,” explains Stutchbury, pointing at a computer screen in her office. On the monitor is a map of North and Central America with several sets of lines, each representing the outbound and inbound journeys of a bird between the breeding area in northern Pennsylvania (the focus of Stutchbury’s study) and its winter range in Central America. The data also tell her how far they flew each day and in what direction. “We’ve never been able to capture this before,” she says.

Better air quality. Pollution control. Habitat for wildlife. These are just some of the reasons why a band of dedicated volunteers is determined to save the urban forest.

By Susan Grimbly

The condition of the Manitoba maple was woeful. Covered in scars, it struggled up through the cement, slouching over the beer drinkers. Standing on either side of the fence surrounding the patio of a Toronto pub, my teammates and I were animatedly assessing the condition of the tree and trying to measure its height when one rough fellow shouted, “You’re not cutting down that tree, are you?” Patrons’ heads shot around as if, like a village mob, they would lynch anyone who tried. “No, no,” we said hurriedly, “we’re not from the city. We’re volunteers with the Harbord tree committee,” and we launched into our spiel about trees, urban health and NeighbourWoods.

Developed by the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto (U of T), NeighbourWoods is a community-based program that, usually with volunteer labour, surveys city trees. On the basis of these inventories, forestry experts try to figure out how to enhance and protect the urban tree canopy.

The issue is an increasingly urgent one. Urban forests improve air quality, offer shade, function as a windbreak, reduce stormwater runoff and smog, and provide wildlife habitat, but they are in trouble. For one thing, the city tree canopy is aging. Trees on boulevards and in residential yards tend to be one of a few predominant species, such as Norway maple, and many of them are reaching the end of their lifespans. Street salt, soil compaction, overcrowding and drought weaken them further.

In creating NeighbourWoods, Andy Kenney and Danijela Puric-Mladenovic wanted to tap into the public’s enthusiasm for tree planting and extend it to stewardship, because maintaining a healthy tree population requires long-term commitment. “Remember, if you stick a 60-millimetre burlap ball into the ground and mulch it carefully and sprinkle with holy water and hope for the best, it still won’t make a significant contribution to the canopy for many, many years,” says Kenney.

NeighbourWoods grew out of a project Kenney led in Ottawa in 1995. A lecturer in community and urban forestry at U of T, he fell in love with trees while growing up in western Quebec, where his father ran a small pulpwoodcontracting business. He has followed the interactions of people and forests for most of his career, but for the last 16 years has been directly involved with urban forestry. So, together with Puric-Mladenovic, then a U of T grad student, he conducted a tree inventory in the city of Elora that recorded the size, species and health of each tree. The idea was to increase public awareness of trees in their community. “We thought maybe if we got a little information from it, that would be a bonus,” says Kenney, an engaging man in his fifties with a deep, winning laugh. “Very quickly into the project, though, we realized the data was very valuable” as a starting point for a long-term stewardship plan.

The following year, the project, which became the NeighbourWoods program, undertook a similar inventory of the U of T’s St. George campus. Over the subsequent 14 years, NeighbourWoods refined its assessment protocol, rating the condition of trees on the basis of such factors as defoliation, reduced height, unbalanced crown, weak or yellowing foliage and dead or broken branches.  Afterwards, Puric-Mladenovic, an adjunct professor now in the forestry faculty at U of T who also works as a senior analyst at the Ministry of Natural Resources, graphs the results, showing such data as the species composition, height classes (to indicate age) and condition of trees on public and private land in an area.

Since NeighbourWoods started, about 12 groups in Ontario, from Hamilton to Sarnia, have used its tree-assessment protocol. The town of Mitchell, northwest of Stratford, mapped each of its roughly 13,500 trees. Students in Kenney’s urban forest conservation course then developed a 20-year strategic plan for Mitchell (and six other communities), setting out recommendations for an urban forest stewardship based on the tree inventory. Then came the tough part: persuading the residents to put the recommendations into action.

Myth and misinformation have sullied the bruin’s reputation.  In truth, the big mammal evolved as a prey species that learned to survive through caution and stealth.

By Conor Mihell

Jim Johnston’s efforts to redeem the reputation of black bears began with a close encounter in 1982 that left him stunned. The president of the Friends of Algoma East (a member group of Ontario Nature), based in the northern Ontario town of Elliot Lake, was napping at his campsite while on a moose hunting trip north of Sault Ste. Marie when he was startled by a shove. “I opened my eyes and there was a bear,” he recalls. At the time, Johnston was an avid hunter but had never hunted Ursus americanus. “I believed in a lot of the myths and misinformation, the stuff you learn from hunting magazines,” he says. “I thought that encounters equalled attack. I bought into the attitude of hysteria and fear. And I just couldn’t believe it when that bear didn’t eat me.”

That encounter changed Johnston’s attitude. He went from fearing bears to educating the public about their behaviour and ecology in hopes of ending the persecution of this species that has been going on since European settlers arrived in North America. Since Ontario cancelled its spring bear hunt in 1999, Johnston’s former colleagues at the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) have lobbied hard for its reinstatement, arguing that early-season hunting is a “vital bear management tool.” In a 2008 press release, OFAH president Jack Hedman claimed that the ban on bear hunting was causing Ontario’s black bear population to spike out of control, endangering “the welfare of our children, the safety of our workers in the bush and people simply enjoying their camp or backyard.” Newspapers such as The Sault Star reinforce the fears with sensationalist accounts of “bold” black bears that have “multiplied over the years” and are “too big for other animals to cull.”

Johnston is eager to set the record straight. The fact is that the roughly 6,200 bears killed by hunters in Ontario in 2007 (the most recent statistic available) is only 9 percent fewer than the average number taken in the decade leading up to the cancellation of the spring hunt. Research also shows that Ontario’s black bear population is stable at around 100,000 animals. The species has the second-lowest reproduction rate of any mammal in North America, so OFAH’s claim that Ontario’s bear population has increased by at least 30 percent in the past 10 years is remarkably inaccurate. Furthermore, statistics show that black bears are rarely aggressive toward humans: only 61 black bear-related fatalities have occurred across the continent since 1900; humans are about 250 times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a bear.

Humans have much less to fear from bears than bears do from us. Development increasingly shrinks black bear habitat, which historically covered most of the province, including all of southern Ontario. “We need to recognize that we’re the problem,” says Ainslie Willock, the president and director of outreach of the Get Bear Smart Society, a nongovernmental organization, based in Whistler, B.C., that created Canada’s first program to reduce conflict between humans and black bears in an urban area. “If we’re going to be petrified of them, then there’s no future for black bears,” warns Willock. “The reality is, they’re quite easy to live with once you understand them.”

At the end of a 90-minute telephone interview, Dr. Lynn Rogers, an international authority on black bear behaviour and ecology, says he has told me all that he has learned about black bears in 43 years of research. The affable 70-year-old is the founder of the North American Bear Center, an educational facility in Ely, Minn. Proof that Rogers is not exaggerating when he says that he is still just “scratching the surface” in understanding his subject is that I catch up with him while he is driving across the state to deliver a deceased female for the first-ever autopsy of a black bear that has died of old age. The procedure on the 30-plus-year-old bear at the University of Minnesota will give Rogers his first opportunity to study a mature bear that died of natural causes. “Almost every [black bear] death is human caused,” explains Sue Mansfield, Rogers’s research assistant. “Bears are killed by automobiles and legally and illegally by hunters.” The average age of bears taken in the state’s fall hunt is just two for males and three for females. “These bears aren’t even having the chance to reproduce,” says Mansfield. By analyzing the aged bear’s heart, muscles and joints, Rogers and Mansfield hope to learn more about the physiology of older bears.

The pair’s research focuses on Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, a 16,000-square-kilometre stretch of wilderness and rural land south of northwestern Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. The habitat, climate and geography of the area are similar to those of central Ontario, making it a good analogy for the circumstances in which Ontario bears live. Rogers, who is often called the “Jane Goodall of black bears,” has gleaned most of his findings by “walking with the bears” – observing at close range and documenting, over 24-hour periods, their social and environmental interactions and dietary preferences. Each summer, he offers popular workshops during which ordinary citizens can learn more about black bear behaviour through first-hand experience, including attaching radio collars to nontranquillized bears and interacting closely with mothers and cubs. “One of the biggest myths is that mother black bears are dangerous,” says Rogers. “But nobody’s ever been killed by a mother bear defending her cubs.” He often crawls inside dens to inspect bear cubs – and has always emerged unharmed. Out of the den, juvenile black bears are able to escape danger by climbing trees, Rogers explains.

Inspired by the joy of biodiversity, a pioneering scientist discovered the rapids clubtail along the rivers of southern Ontario. Today, the species is the first of Edmund Murton Walker’s beloved dragonflies to be declared endangered.

By Peter Christie

On May 29, 1926, Edmund Murton Walker, a quiet professor with a trim beard and a (usually) dignified manner, lunged net-first into Toronto’s Credit River to bring ashore a mystery. For Walker, this was a typical activity for a late-spring Saturday; he was well known for transforming even a casual outing into a wild, energetic hunt for insects. The animal he netted – a pale dragonfly nymph – was puzzlingly unfamiliar, and solving the riddle took time: Walker was obliged to raise his captive in the laboratory until it finally crawled from its larval armour.

“On June 7th an adult male Gomphus emerged and was killed on the 10th when the colours were mature,” Walker wrote in the journal Canadian Entomologist. “This specimen proved to be G. quadricolor, a rare species hitherto unknown from Canada.”

Gomphus quadricolor is commonly known as the rapids clubtail, and finding the medium-sized, boldly marked dragonfly was one of many firsts for Walker. The long-time University of Toronto zoology professor and former assistant director at the Royal Ontario Museum continued to discover new or regionally unknown insects, especially dragonflies, almost until his death in 1969. His three-volume

Odonata of Canada and Alaska set a standard for insect science in Canada and, for more than half a century, no one in this country – perhaps no one on the continent – knew dragonflies and damselflies better than Walker did.

Last September, the rapids clubtail became the first of Walker’s beloved dragonflies to be declared an endangered species in Ontario.

According to biologists, the rapids clubtail population on the Credit River – where Walker caught his mystery nymph – has been wiped out. Of the other Ontario populations subsequently discovered along southern Ontario’s Humber, Thames and Mississippi rivers (in 1939, 1989 and 2001, respectively), only three sites (one on the Humber and two proximate spots along the Mississippi) still sustain rapids clubtails.

“This was never a common dragonfly. Its populations are isolated throughout its range, and Canada is at the northern fringe,” says Allan Harris, co-author of a 2008 status report on the species for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). “But there certainly is evidence of decline.”

Dragonflies and damselflies are among Ontario’s most charismatic creatures. These sleek hunters of midges, mosquitoes and other airborne bugs dart and dive over fields and ponds with a mesmerizing aerial genius. Most of the 171 species in the province (a small number compared to that of other orders of insects) are strikingly coloured, and many are large enough to spot as they glance by a gliding canoe or patrol a summer lane.

Larval dragonflies and damselflies live in the water – often for years – and this biological trait makes them useful as indicators of ecological health and water quality. For this reason, the news of the rapids clubtail’s decline is especially disturbing. While the numbers of other insects are often estimated to be in the millions or billions, Ontario’s rapids clubtail dragonflies can be counted in mere hundreds. A 2005 survey of historic and suitable sites for the animal estimated that fewer than 320 individuals (adults and nymphs) remained north of the U.S. border.

Although dragonfly numbers are notoriously uncertain, the Canadian population of the rapids clubtail (confined solely to this province) is clearly in peril: a number so small in so few locations brings to mind the flickering before a candle goes out. In 2008 – the year of Harris’s report – COSEWIC declared the dragonfly nationally endangered. Ontario followed suit a year later.

“It’s vulnerable,” says Harris. “There’s no question.”

Concern for vulnerable species was not something Walker discussed much in his writing; in many ways, conservation biology came into fashion after his time. Instead, he wrote about the thrill of discovery and, by implication, the joy of biological diversity. At a time when most biologists were, as he said, “exclusively laboratory men,” Walker preferred the outdoors: forests and streams were places for a chance meeting with something remarkable and new. “I had an inborn love of animals,” he once recalled, “both as fellow creatures and as objects of interest and attraction.”

From the beginning, Walker’s ardour was encouraged by his gift for identifying plants and wildlife. He became a painter and an illustrator, and his careful drawings complemented the articles and books he wrote. He also developed a lively habit of imitating insect sounds and sometimes flapping his arms during his university lectures to mimic insect behaviours. “He was a delightful person,” says Conrad Heidenreich, the zoologist’s grandson. “He had perfect pitch and would chirp to attract insects. He delighted in making one land on his arm.”

By Joe Crowley

A few summers ago, I was driving to North Bay when I noticed a painted turtle up ahead crossing the road. I quickly pulled over and ran back to help hasten its progress. But before I could save the turtle, another car sped by, crushing the animal.

Roads are a serious threat to Ontario’s wildlife, especially endangered species. Canada has the highest road density per capita in the world, and southern Ontario has among the highest road density in Canada. Southern Ontario’s network of major roads has increased dramatically, from 7,133 kilometres in 1935 to 35,637 kilometres in 1995. It is now so extensive that no point in southern Ontario is more than one or two kilometres from the nearest road. Needless to say, roads have become a dominant threat to southern Ontario’s biodiversity.

Road mortality is bad news not simply because animals are being killed, but because the mortality rate is often high enough to eliminate entire populations. Ontario’s turtles are particularly vulnerable. Turtles have long lifespans (over 70 years in some species) and slow rates of reproduction. Consequently, the deaths of even a few turtles a year will cause populations to decline. Roads have contributed to the sharp drop in Ontario’s turtle species – seven of the province’s eight turtle species are now so diminished in number that they are classified as at risk.

The impact of a roadway on the landscape, however, extends beyond the area of the road corridor itself. For instance, some songbirds cannot use habitat located within a kilometre of busy roads, because the traffic noise prevents them from communicating. A study in the United States found that, although roads cover only about 1 percent of the land, they affect as much as 20 percent of it. Roads also act as barriers to movement, either because animals avoid roads or cannot cross them. In doing so, roads subdivide and isolate populations in smaller and smaller patches of habitat.

Even provincial and national parks are criss-crossed by roads. Indeed, Algonquin Provincial Park has more kilometres of road than the City of Toronto. A recent study in Ontario found that rates of road mortality in a national and provincial park were as high as road mortality rates outside the parks. Ironically, the roads we drive on to get to parks to appreciate nature are probably the primary threat to wildlife populations in those areas.

But the most detrimental impact of roads on the natural environment is that they provide access to previously undisturbed areas. By providing access to natural resources, roads create opportunities for illegal collection and poaching, point-source pollution, the spread of invasive species and other forms of environmental degradation.

Obviously, the most effective way to reduce road mortality is simply not to build roads – an unlikely scenario. Worse, when road projects are undertaken, species at risk are often overlooked during the environmental assessment process. When endangered or threatened species are detected, their protection rarely trumps construction. Ontario’s Provincial Policy Statement safeguards wildlife habitat from development, yet it does not consider road construction. Even the new Ontario Endangered Species Act fails to offer effective protection from roads, since permits can be issued to projects that will destroy habitat if those projects provide a significant social or economic benefit. For example, a permit is being issued to the Detroit River International Crossing project even though its construction will damage the habitat of eight species at risk.

Other solutions to lessen the impacts of roads on wildlife populations include wildlife overpasses and underpasses for large mammals, specially designed culverts for small animals, wildlife fencing and animal-crossing signs. The most effective mitigation measures, however, are the most expensive and are rarely used. Ontario has yet to construct a single large-wildlife underpass or overpass.

To address the threat roads pose to the natural environment, scientists, policy makers, biologists, government representatives and engineers have come together to form the Ontario Road Ecology Group. Answers will require a shift in our thinking about roads, must be multidisciplinary, involve multiple stakeholders, and range in scope from local solutions to invoking provincial policy. We need to acknowledge that mitigating the impacts of roads on Ontario’s wildlife and wilderness areas is essential to preserving this province’s biodiversity.

Joe Crowley is Ontario Nature’s reptile and amphibian atlas coordinator.

In reaction to the severe deforestation in an area once rich in woodlands and tallgrass prairie, the Sydenham Field Naturalists club was founded in 1985 with a mandate to enjoy, protect and restore the wildlife and habitat of Chatham-Kent and South Lambton in southwestern Ontario.

The group stewards some of Ontario’s most rare ecosystems that include ecologically important wetlands and grasslands. While some protection is afforded these sensitive habitats, much of the landscape remains vulnerable to habitat loss and degradation. The area also supports a globally significant Important Bird Area where king rails and least bitterns breed, and where hundreds of thousands of waterfowl such as tundra swans and canvasbacks stop during migration.

One of the group’s more recent conservation victories is the preservation of a woodland near Wallaceburg that was slated for clearing; 4.5 hectares of a mixture of old-growth trees, American sycamores, Shumard oaks and swamp white oaks are now protected.

In collaboration with its many partners, the club has undertaken a range of restoration, education and stewardship activities over the years that include arranging tours to locations that demonstrate the club’s nesting box program for bluebirds, wood ducks and screech owls. Members spend an estimated 100 hours annually planting native species such as spice bush, trilliums and bloodroot to restore Wallaceburg Sycamore woods. They will soon add the management of two hectares of pawpaw trees to their list of stewardship duties.

This member group was part of a strategic planning process with the local municipality to increase the percentage of forested area in Chatham-Kent from three to 10 percent, which Council subsequently incorporated into the official plan. In all likelihood, the Sydenham Field Naturalists will achieve this milestone.

Learn more about the Sydenham Field Naturalist club at its website, www.sydenhamfieldnaturalists.ca.

I grew up in Scarborough, at the time a rapidly growing suburb on the outskirts of Toronto. My days were spent exploring Highland Creek, Rouge Valley and the Scarborough Bluffs. Over the years, a lot of the woods and creeks I loved were lost to urban sprawl and pollution. This made a lasting impression on me. For the past 25 years, I have been an active conservationist in the Rouge River watershed. My mantra is: think globally, act locally. I am inspired by a deep love of nature and a belief that protected areas are fundamental to our mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

Working with the inspiring group of people that successfully pushed for the creation of the Rouge Park is a personal highlight. Basically, we drew the park on a map and then rallied an environmental and community-based coalition to advocate for it. In time, decision makers got excited about the idea. Rouge Park now encompasses more than 4,700 hectares, protecting two national historic sites and a variety of ecosystems, and joining the Oak Ridges Moraine, roughly 50 kilometres north of Toronto, with the city’s biggest wetland, where the Rouge River empties into Lake Ontario.

We are now pushing to expand the parkland to 16,000 hectares and to have it designated as a national park, which would boost the level of protection afforded. A bigger park would include a much-needed ecological corridor stretching 25 kilometres and benefiting biodiversity in the Greater Toronto Area. The expanded park would also be a sanctuary for people and wildlife species, some of which, including the red-headed woodpecker and the milksnake, are federally at risk.

As general manager of the Friends of the Rouge Watershed, I have had the pleasure of working with more than 40,000 community volunteers in conservation activities. We have planted more than 400,000 native trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Additionally, we have restored 140 hectares of forests, 15 hectares of wetlands and 10 hectares of native wildflowers.

I also belong to the Rouge Duffins Greenspace Coalition. We’re pushing for the creation of a Markham foodbelt and natural heritage system in the Rouge watershed that would cover 2,000 hectares of some of the best farmland in Canada and 1,400 hectares of natural heritage systems that are important to the area’s streams and headwaters. Markham is 60 percent urban and 24 percent greenbelt land. The remaining 16 percent is rural – but it is up for grabs and increasingly vulnerable to development. As I saw in Scarborough, rapid and unchecked urban expansion comes with a social, environmental and economic price tag.

And then there’s the “big pipe” sanitary sewer expansion, more formally called the York Durham Sewage System South East Collector Trunk Sewer. The sewage system carries 100 million litres of groundwater from Lake Simcoe to Lake Ontario, drawing down drain water that would otherwise feed into the surrounding watershed and rivers. This phase of the York Region sewage system would require the big pipe to deal with increased volume, as the current population of 970,000 is projected to grow to 1.5 million by 2031.

But the coalition I work with believes there are better alternatives to the big pipe. We’re asking the government to stop massive groundwater wasting, avoid disturbing Bob Hunter Memorial Park and introduce progressive, within-region water treatment and recycling – such as those used in California. At present, the quality of water treatment is substandard and jeopardizes human and aquatic life.

Over time, I’ve learned how to run a successful campaign. To start, find something that is in the public interest and in which you passionately believe. Then put together a team of people with diverse talents, particularly in communications. Always bear in mind that it is better to propose than oppose.

Together, you’ll find a solution.

It sounds like a bad Hollywood film, but truth can be stranger than fiction. While gardeners love to see earthworms in their soil and eco-conscious apartment dwellers rely on them to compost food waste, most people do not realize that the vast majority of worms in Ontario are invasive species. Furthermore, scientists recently discovered that the earthworm’s ability to decompose organic matter makes it a growing threat to our hardwood forests, including Canada’s iconic maple trees.

The majority of the approximately two dozen species of worms we see today arrived with European settlers more than two centuries ago, in ships’ ballast and agricultural products. (Before that, only two species of worms were in Ontario.)

But the very trait that makes the worms the darling of gardeners everywhere also makes them a menace in Ontario’s hardwood forests. European worms are much better than native species at munching through leaf litter. In doing so, they alter the structure of phosphorus and nitrogen – nutrients on which northern hardwood trees and plants depend – such that they are no longer bound up with organic matter and they leach away with the rain.

A 2008 study of northern Minnesota hardwood forests found significantly smaller growth rings in maple trees from forests that contained European earthworms compared to those from worm-free forests. “Our research would apply to the hardwoods of southern Quebec and Ontario’s maple forests,” says University of Minnesota forest ecologist Lee Frelich, who worked on the study.

While European worms have been here for more than two centuries, according to Frelich it takes roughly 1,000 years for a hardwood forest to adapt to such drastic change. And, as the climate warms, these worms are thriving farther and farther north.

While worms can move five to 10 metres a year on their own, their wide dispersal is believed to be mostly due to fishermen transferring bait from one lake to another. In 2008, Trent University graduate student Stacy Gan found European earthworms on Akimiski Island in James Bay; their eggs probably arrived there in soil on the runners of float planes carrying goose hunters. Before that, worms had not been found farther north than Moosonee.

A relative newcomer to farming, Graham Corbett is beginning his third year managing Whole Village Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a farm located just outside of Orangeville. Corbett is part of what he describes as a “growing movement among organic and new farmers in Ontario who are embracing the CSA model, which redefines relationships between farmers and consumers.”

Under the CSA model, consumers purchase “shares” of a farm, entitling them to a portion of the crops harvested (the “dividends”) that is directly proportional to the farm’s productivity. So, if tomato blight hits a CSA farm, or there is a bumper crop, the consumer’s share varies in accordance.

Typically, farms that participate in the CSA system are organic, small in scale and grow a diversity of crops. While there is no reliable census data on CSA farms in Canada, there are an estimated 1,700 in the United States.

By virtue of having purchased shares in the farm, consumers develop a connection to the rhythms of the seasons and the variation in yields – and, of course, support their local farming community. Says Amy Ouchterlony, Graham’s partner and co-manager, “CSAs are strengthening communities while caring for the planet. They allow farms like ours to be sustainable, small-scale and diverse.”

Within the CSA model, the consumer bears much of the risk and the rewards associated with farming: crop yields – always at the mercy of weather conditions, pests and other hazards – can be bountiful or dismal. The model also helps the farmer raise capital to pay for expensive upfront investments such as land and equipment.

Consumers enjoy access to fresh, seasonal and often organic food. The direct connections with farmers provide a clear idea of growing practices, thus allaying consumers’ concerns about food safety, quality, labour practices and sustainability.

For more information about the Whole Village CSA, email: csagarden@wholevillage.org.