Appreciating the Urban Wild

This column was published in the Cranbrook Daily Townsman Tuesday October 12, 2010.

Confessing to being a Toronto native to those beyond the 416 area code can be dangerous. Admitting you’re from the city the rest of the country loves to hate, with its smug self-importance, can still elicit reactions from surprise to disdain.

But as time increases from my Toronto address, I’m comfortable enough to go public: I am proud to be a Toronto native. In one of those rites of aging, I recently returned to the big city for my 25th high school reunion.

I had not previously thought of myself as the high school reunion type. I wasn’t exactly the school social coordinator. Most of my youth was spent trying to escape the city in search of a more rural, if not outright backwoods, existence. Summer jobs took me to bush camps across northern Ontario from Algonquin Park to Lake Abitibi, Moosonee and beyond.

So returning to Toronto to reconnect with a few friends and classmates long since forgotten was not something I would have predicted even ten years ago, let alone when I finished high school.

One product of my youthful dreams of a northern idyll was the belief that the only natural world worth experiencing was true wilderness. What exactly constitutes “wilderness” is debatable, but most conclude that it involves a lack of immediate human presence. More strident definitions also require an ‘untouched’ quality where one might indulge the illusion that few, if any, humans have previously visited.

For me, wilderness lay at least two portages removed from overcrowded canoe routes or well off the main hiking trail. Certainly, wilderness wasn’t to be found in suburban Toronto or any other city. But closing one’s eyes to natural areas within urban cities is to miss many wonderful places.

While in Toronto, I found myself with an hour’s wait at my nephew’s high school in the city’s west end. A large old brick school that his grandfather attended set in a typical Toronto neighbourhood of narrow lots on streets lined with mature hardwood trees.

I happened across the “Hillside Nature Garden” at the adjacent Runnymede Public School. Students restored a narrow slope around the school with native trees, shrubs and wildflowers. A trail runs through the strip of natural cover, maybe fifty metres wide at best.


 

Hillside Garden Project (outlined in red) at Runnymede
Public School, Toronto. Ursula Franklin Academy & Western
Tech High Schools are in upper right corner. from Google Earth



Hardly wilderness by anyone’s definition, it likely supports little more than a few bird nests, the odd raccoon and a few voles. But here, sumac, sycamore and sassafras trees provide shade and cover to a piece of ground that otherwise be mowed lawn, a weed source or a cement retaining wall littered with lunch wrappers and unfinished homework.

More importantly, it provides a wonderful natural classroom to the school’s young students. To many, that small patch of green likely serves as an introduction of the world beyond concrete and computers.

Statistics Canada state that 80% of Canada’s population lives in an urbanized centre of more than 1000 people. By that measure, Sparwood, BC, (population of roughly 4000) is as urbanized as Toronto. But nonetheless, the measurement indicates the degree to which our population lives in developed centres. Urban-rural splits are becoming major political wedges (witness the recent longun registry ballyhoo) with the main complaint of the rural and small community dwellers being that urban folk don’t understand the non-synthetic world beyond city limits.

Natural areas, even small ones like the Hillside Nature Garden can serve as an introduction to city children who may not otherwise have an opportunity experience nature first hand. Through planting and caring for native species rather than nursery-bred exotics, hopefully a better appreciation for our natural world may also be sown and fostered.

Even in smaller urban centres like Cranbrook, with true wilderness at our doorstep, many children have no introduction to the natural world. School programs like Wild Voices for Kids and trips to the Blue Lake Centre should be required curriculum components. The objective isn’t to turn everyone into a wilderness loving environmentalist, but broaden overall experience and appreciation of our world.