Last of the Last: Windsor’s Savannah and Tall Grass Prairie
This article is part of the series Downstream Stories: towards a watershed-scale resistance
Arriving in Windsor from Hamilton feels very familiar. The first thing we notice entering town are the many abandoned buildings with trees sprouting from their foundations and their walls covered in vines. In Hamilton, this decay makes space for more life and seeing it here makes us feel at home. Also like Hamilton, Windsor is one of the most toxic and polluted places in Southern Ontario, and it’s inspiring to see how the wounds of industry can be so joyfully bandaged by the delicate, climbing fingers of vines.
Both Hamilton and Windsor were once largely covered by Oak Savannah, an ecosystem characterized by frequent fires that keep the ground clear and by oak trees towering above. In Hamilton, we see only small remainders of this forest type in Cootes Paradise, but today, we’ll be visiting the largest and healthiest Oak Savannah and Tall Grass Prairie ecosystem remaining anywhere.
On the outskirts of Windsor, along Matchette Rd, there’s a large series of parks called Ojibway Prairie. Stepping into the cathedral of Oaks, our eyes follow from a low understory made up of prickly brambles and Poison Ivy, straight up massive trunks to a tightly packed canopy of Oaks. In between, a thin understory of Witch Hazel, Sassafras, and Hawthorns reside.
The Ashes of Essex County: on Emerald Ash Borers in Hamilton’s forests
It was here in Comber, a town in Essex county, which makes up the southern most tip of Ontario, that we first noticed it. We’ve stopped in a sports field to watch the sunset. What we see though, silhouetted against the sky’s red glow, is a long line of dead Ash trees. Ever since the Emerald Ash Borer first appeared in Hamilton, we have been hearing stories about its effect on forests further south. But this is our first time seeing a whole stand of Ashes killed by the exotic beetle.
Now we sit with the dead trees as it gets dark, reflecting with concern on the forests we love back home. Last year, we started spotting the irridescent green beetles in Cootes Paradise. This year, we can’t go for a walk there without passing one. The White Ashes that grow on those hills, with their tall diamond-bark trunks and elegant symmetric branches, are old familiar forest friends – it’s heartbreaking to imagine the trails without them.
Relaxing on the east bank of Twelve Mile Creek in downtown St Catharine's
The papers have been hyping it all week and it’s finally here: Thursday July 21st, the supposed hottest day of the year. We’re in downtown St Catherines, watching as the scorching heat pushes everyone off the north side of St Paul st in favour of the shady south side.
We talk about this kind of scorching, desert-like heat as completely unnatural for this area. It’s a consequence of cutting down all the trees and replacing them with ridiculous concrete wastelands like this one. From St Paul st and Ontario st, we cut South-East, taking a foot bridge over the highway and descending down to the banks of Twelve Mile Creek. If this heat is unnatural, then the best way to beat it is by getting into spaces that are.
We hurry through the meadow and into the welcoming shade of the forest on the creek’s east bank. The relief is immediate – we slow down to savour the cool of the creek and the trees it supports. On a narrow peninsula that extends out into the creek, we find comfy spots in the shade and relax. On one side, the water runs fast and high, flooding the Elms and Willows that grow low on the bank – on the other, sheltered by the peninusla, the water pools, making space for Cattails, Lilies, Ducks, and Herons. Read more…
From the series, Trent University's Private Residence, by Holly Norris
From the sidewalk, we can peer past the thick, tangle of Raspberry and Red Osier Dogwood framing a tantilizing vision of Cattails beneath Black Willow. But it’s difficult to find a clear passage into this cool slice of green, and so we’re left fumbling along the sidewalk under the hot sun, adjacent the sun-scorched grass of Trent’s lawns.
This wetland is a hotly contested space in Peterborough, as it is slated to become the site of a privately owned residence for Trent students. We are here to explore this site, to appreciate the health and value that it has as a healing wetland.
While searching for a path in, we reflect on all the work that has been done to oppose the university’s scheme to sign a ninety-nine year lease of this land to a private company that will build a residence here. The students at Trent are overwhelmingly opposed to this project – they see it as a step towards increased privatization and fragmentation of their education. This new residence will not pay into the university, and will not be part of the college system that currently supports Trent students as in their studies. The project was recently approved by the Peterborough city council.
However, on the websites and articles that describe these struggles, we were lucky to find even one sentence about the value of this site as a wild space, as a wetland somehow thriving between a busy road and a neighbourhood. And that one sentence would usually focus only on the presence of endangered species that may be present, but not mentioning all the other signs of health that do not have special legal status but are clear to anyone who looks. Read more…
Like this:
Kingston: By the Shores of the Tannery Grounds
Willows at the Tannery Grounds, courtesy Hilbert Buist
A tall fence surrounds the old Tannery Grounds out at Orchard st and River st, but the wildflowers spill out and press close to the pavement. Cottontails scatter as we approach, and birds are greeting the dawn from the welcoming branches of a big White Oak. On the fence there are several “No Trespassing” signs, but where River st approaches the water, a well-travelled trail enters the Tannery Grounds through a deliberate gate.
There was once a tannery here that leaked its poisons into the soil for decades, and hazardous waste continued to be dumped here even after the old tannery was torn down. The popular story is that the Tannery Grounds are poisonous, unsafe, and need to somehow be dealt with.
This story keeps most people away, and it has meant that, for the past forty or fifty years, this site has been rewilding on its own. Our first steps through the gate immediately reveal the richness of what has come to be out in this forgotten corner of Kingston. Read more…
Downstream Stories: towards a watershed-scale resistance
Downstream Stories is a new series of articles from Knowing the Land is Resistance, with each piece introducing a wild space and community that we visited during the Seeds of Resistance tour.
Southern Ontario is intricately sewn together by the largest watershed in the world: The Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Watershed. All of the wild spaces we’ve visiting are profoundly interconnected within this system, and each is a hopeful vision of healing from the past few centuries of colonial destruction.
This series is also an exploration of land defense and forest restoration in settler communities throughout the region. These struggles are often isolated, both from other kinds of social and ecological justice movements and from similar campaigns in different places.
Observing the ways that different communities are dealing with similar issues is what has motivated us to write about them. Although disconnected, these struggles do perhaps form a sort of loose movement in this region. Land defense struggles are also, at their roots, deeply connected with issues of poverty, gentrification, food security, immigration, education, and anti-racist / anti-homophobic / anti-sexist organizing.
Through these workshops and conversations and articles, we can begin to envision a watershed-scale movement in defense of the land. In doing this, we can draw inspiration from the struggles that First Nations Peoples have carried out for centuries, and that they continue to lead today. We can look to their work as we move away from local, reactionary struggles in settler communities towards a movement that truly acts on the interconnectedness within watersheds.
Rooting ourselves in a relationship with the land we live on and its history is the first step towards allying ourselves with the land’s abundant capacity to heal and flourish. We are in the midst of an urgently important large-scale ecological crisis, and by building links between our local struggles, our resistance can reflect this.
Our hope is that Downstream Stories can be a step in building that connection.
Seeds of Resistance *new* Tour Dates
We’re excited to announce the stops of the Seeds of Resistance tour that we have confirmed so far. If you are interested in hosting a stop in your area, there’s still time! Get in touch!
Tour Dates
Sunday July 17th KINGSTON 2pm at the Artel, 205 Sydenham
Tuesday July 19th PETERBOROUGH – 4pm at Trent’s Bata Library
Thursday July 21st ST CATHERINES 11am at OPIRG Brock’s Infoshop at 10 Summer st
Saturday July 23rd WINDSOR 1:00pm – Ojibway Park (Meet at Nature Centre)
Sunday July 24th LONDON 3-6pm meetup near Meadowlily woods – rsvp for location
Saturday August 13th COLLINGWOOD – Collingwood Public Library 1pm
Monday August 15th INNISFIL- 6pm, 813 Cook Street
Saturday August 27th TORONTO- details TBA
Sunday August 28th GUELPH – The Arboretum
Dates TBA: BRANTFORD
For Hamilton workshop dates, see Learning from the Land
Second KLR Zine Released
Although it’s been hard to stay inside glueing and scanning during the summer time, the second Knowing the Land is Resistance zine is now released! This second collection contains the nine most recent articles from the KLR collective, including the map of the Spencer Creek Watershed and lots of handy tips for ID’ing plants and animals in the Carolinan zone. The zine is 16 sheets, double-sided, black and white, and you can download it over at indybay.org in either printable or electronically readable version:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/15/18684812.php
The articles in this zine represent a lot of learning and growth for our little collective. But although KLR has grown, it remains a project rooted in our intimate relationship with the land where we live. These aticles are then part of our continuing adventure in deepening our love and understanding of the wild spaces that energize and inspire us.
Over the past ten months, one recurring theme for us has been to challenge ideas of value. When is land deemed to have value and when is it dismissed as worthless? Is there another way to value wild spaces outside the logic of capitalism? While playing with that last question, we began to focus on systems and interconnectedness rather than on single places.
In our earlier work, we were trying to understand this or that patch of forest, but most of our articles in this zine ask bigger questions. What is the relationship between different parts of the same watershed? how does the health of the lad relate to the social and political conditions of the human communities around it?
In working on the Seeds of Resistance article, we became so enraged about the senseless destruction of trees along the Niagara Escarpment that we decided to call a forum to vision solutions for better defending it. This desire to network with other people who share our values morphed into the Seeds of Resistance Tour.
We hope you enjoy the zine! Drop us a line or leave us a comment with any feedback.
KLR interviewed on Health Justice Radio
Colt's Foot flower, with bee
On Monday, members of the KLR collective were interviewed on
Health Justice Radio, a weekly half-hour program that “explores ways in which social factors like housing status, income and gender affect an individual’s ability to access health care and ultimately, one’s health”.
Click here to download the interview: KLR on Health Justice Radio (it will make you wait a minute before you can download it). The interview is about twenty minutes long and deals with the relationship between connecting with wild spaces, the health of the land, and our health as humans. We talk about the basics of connecting to the land, engaging with the history of colonialism, building watershed-wide land defense movements, and lots of other stuff. It was our first time on the radio, and it was lots of fun!
Health Justice Radio airs on Mondays at 1:30 on CFMU, 93.3 FM in Hamilton, or online at cfmu.msumcmaster.ca .
Learning from the Land: Workshop Series in Hamilton!
Want to learn more about local forests and ecosystems around Hamilton this summer? Want to share your knowledge and passion for wild spaces with a group? Then come join us for our four-part series of workshops in Hamilton
All sessions are three hours long, with one hour indoors and two outside. The workshops each have a different theme build on each other to allow us to explore many parts of the city and take the time to focus on the different knowledge and skills that those sites inspire. Write to us at knowingtheland(at)gmail.com to let us know you’re coming, and we’ll tell you where to meet us.
1) Forest Literacy — July 2nd at 2pm. Emphasizing some simple techniques for building our awareness of wild spaces, we’ll get to know some Carolinian tree, plants, and ecosystems.
2) Forgotten Hills — While appreciating scrublands, we will read the landscape’s history and understand how colonialism has affected and continues to effect this area. Date TBA.
3) Deepening our Connection — Play is resistance! by playing in the forest, we can develop new skills, like tracking creatures and enjoying edible plants. Date TBA
4) Seeds of Resistance — What threatens wild spaces here in hamilton? by understanding water and watersheds, can we envision a regional movement in defense of the land. Date TBA.
