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June 2010 issue

“An old-growth forest is not just a collection of trees frozen in time like a photograph. It contains a history of what came before and the potential for what is to come.”
Photo: Eamon Mac Mahon

• PHOTO ESSAY
• INTERACTIVE
• MORE STUFF

See lush photos of Ontario’s remaining old-growth forests and the effort to replant them. Click to view photo essay

Read success stories from Ontario communities racing to plant 50 million trees. View now

Discover videos, interactive features and photos on the ideas, science and communities behind our biodiversity issue. View now

Along the back roads of eastern Ontario, among the sleepy towns, antique shops and touristy locks that squeeze the Rideau River south of Ottawa, “Back Off Government” signs pepper a mixed countryside of cattle farms and small woodlands. Landowner pride runs strong here, although many traditional farms have given way to properties bought up by transplanted urbanites escaping the city and relishing the natural scenery.

Read tree planting success stories from Ontario communities.

The morning air is muggy as I approach the crossroads hamlet of Toledo, which sits halfway between two wetlands and is the focal point for the Bellamy to Irish Lake Connectivity Project, a tree-planting and conservation strategy. Just south of the village intersection, I park and walk up to an old stone schoolhouse that’s a regular meeting place for Garnet Baker and Dwayne Struthers, two lifelong Toledo residents who initiated the project. “By the time we’re finished, there won’t be any area around the waterways between these two wetlands that’s not covered,” says Baker, who learned how to swim in the creek that slices through his old farm and connects the two lakes.

Both retired after careers in the region — Baker was an elementary school principal, and Struthers owned a furniture store across the road from where we’re chatting — they now volunteer much of their free time to the Leeds County Stewardship Council, a community organization that works to preserve the natural landscape. So far, they’ve helped plant more than 155,000 trees throughout the project area’s roughly 3,000 square kilometres, a swath that includes the properties of more than 40 farmers and other landowners who initially did not have to pay but now cover part of the cost of planting trees on their land.

On a sawdust-covered table, we unfurl satellite maps to view the project’s progress, and I ask the men how they convinced landowners that it was worth their effort and money. “The first time, we invited people to the Legion,” recalls Struthers. “I just said, ‘Look, folks, you know me. If this wasn’t a good idea, we wouldn’t be doing it.’”

Since trees absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, the 50 Million Tree Program started primarily as a carbon-sequestration scheme in Ontario’s battle against climate change. It will also help restore southern Ontario’s degraded ecosystems and provide corridors for wildlife. But that clear sense of purpose is one of the few straightforward things about the project. The effort requires nothing less than the reconstruction of a tree-planting infrastructure that was all but lost in the mid-1990s due to government cutbacks. And, in order for it to work, planners are banking on sophisticated computer models to help them plant strategically to connect isolated patches of forest. What’s more, rural residents must be convinced to get on board in a region that’s about 90 percent privately owned.

Anti-government sentiment is rife throughout rural Ontario. In Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington — the riding just west of Leeds-Grenville, which contains Toledo — Conservative MPP Randy Hillier, one of the founding members of the fiercely libertarian Ontario Landowners Association (OLA), was elected, in part, for his strong stance against government interference on private lands. The OLA argues that rural Ontario is under “systematic attack by government bureaucracy and false environmentalism.” Under this kind of scrutiny, eco-initiatives can face stiff resistance.

From its main office in Peterborough, a 90-minute drive northeast of Toronto, the MNR relies on local stewardship councils and conservation authorities to counter that resistance. The arrangement makes logistical sense, since these agencies are intimately aware of their regions’ landscapes, but perhaps more important, it also builds trust. Stewardship councils function primarily through the leadership of volunteers such as Baker and Struthers, but regional coordinators are also employed by the MNR to act as conduits for government-based information and resources. It’s a relatively hands-off method that allows the government to promote responsible land care in rural communities.

In the drawn-out cold of mid-winter, Gary Nielsen, coordinator of the MNR’s climate-change program in southern Ontario, is taking that message to an audience of farmers and landowners at a woodlot conference in Kemptville, about 60 kilometres south of Ottawa. As a former stewardship coordinator whose territory included the Toledo area, Nielsen helped conceive of the Bellamy to Irish Lake project with Baker and Struthers. But here, he’s representing the big, bad government to a skeptical crowd.

The gym at the University of Guelph Kemptville Campus is filled to capacity, and portable chairs squawk on the concrete floor. “Climate change is likely the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced,” flashes a PowerPoint slide, which features graphs that depict global carbon emissions and average temperatures increasing exponentially. While recognizing that it is only one small cog in a larger strategy that involves reducing fossil-fuel use and promoting renewable energy, Nielsen makes sure to stress that new provincial funding will translate into drastically reduced costs for planting trees.

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