Journalist, Environmentalist, Writer
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Our dream is that one day the A2A — the Algonquin Park to Adirondack Park connection — will be a reality, and that we will have helped it come into being. When I say “we’’ I mean a group of neighbours who raised the money to buy, and to donate to the Federation of Ontario Naturalists, 108 acres of forest and wetland near where we live. The donation was made with the understanding that the land will remain forever wild.
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Edwin Sittler’s epiphany came 21 years ago, in the aftermath of a meeting in his Mennonite farming community near Waterloo. More than 300 neighbours had gathered to hear two doctors from Toronto explain that a young girl from their community needed detoxification. She was failing, and could tolerate only four foods. The consensus was that she suffered from sensitivity to herbicides and pesticides. Looking back a generation later, Sittler shakes his head. “You can can wash that stuff off an apple,” he says, “but the chemicals are inside.”
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The McGuinty Government in Ontario has repeatedly slammed the door on first nations trying to establish their rights to negotiate development in their territories. This has created a confrontational situation that now threatens to throw mining and logging in the province into limbo. It didn’t have to be this way, says Doreen Davies, chief of the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation at Sharbot Lake in Eastern Ontario. The Shabot and the neighbouring Ardoch First Nations have always been ready to negotiate, she says, and with the province refusing to sit down with them, the only option left lies in legal action.
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The sad part about losing sight of the past is that it curtails the imagination. You think the present is normal, and since it’s tolerable, it’s acceptable. But without a vision of the past, there’s no springboard to imagine the sublime.I was forcibly struck by this last week when, by chance, I wandered into Todmorden Mills on the east side of the Don River, where Pottery Road connects Broadview and Bayview Avenues.In all the years I lived in Toronto, I had never been there, and I’ve only known the Don as a dirty strip of water with the usual collection of trees that you might find on any abandoned construction site — Manitoba maples, crack willows, and black alders, to name a few invasive species.
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Wendy Banks’ mobile market returns to a better way for those who enjoy food. Wendy Banks has come back from a place of pain and shadows — and she’s doing what she can to make sure no one else has to go there. About ten years ago, she developed environmental sensitivity, triggered by working in a greenhouse where insecticides and herbicides were present.