The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Centennial Seeds: Toronto's Port Lands Discovery

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Meet the joyful and dedicated team working with and for Waterfront Toronto and learn how they are adding resilience to the watershed and at the same time revitalizing the city's waterfront to some of its former glory. With contributers: Shelley Charles, MinoKamik Collective; Netami Stuart, senior project manager of parks, Waterfront Toronto; Melanie Sifton, MinoKamik Collective, Department of Forestry, University of Toronto; and Shannon Baker director, Parks & Public Realm, Waterfront Toronto.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. I see red-winged blackbirds and I can hear them. It's the magical sound of the wetlands and they've come back to this place now that these wetlands have been restored.

When we first came to this land here, it looked like it was on the moon. It was a mine. It looked like a mine. There were giant rock trucks and excavators and pile drivers and it was like, it was a mine. When we did that first initial ceremony, we really weren't sure what was going to happen, but we had our faith and we had our belief. And we did all those things that we have been instructed to do in the best way possible and now we see the evident truth of those indigenous plants that are thriving. It was from that original connection with the land and stating our intention with the tobacco and the water and the songs and the prayers that we were given direction. And part of that direction was to reach out to those people who actually walked along this land, walked along the wetlands here.

In this area here, we know this, and that's talking about our rivers that meet together, bringing those clan families together and asking them for their recommendations. You know, we connected with elders, knowledge keepers, historians, young people, along with urban indigenous groups, and from there we received direction. From there we received really important recommendations on how to revitalize this land, our wetlands. This place, we know this as Nojimawanning, where all the wetlands are on the shores. That's where the healing is. That's where our medicine roots are, that's where the

plants are that we make our, we make everything that we use. And it was also in this place that huge trading would go on and a lot of that trading had to do with the natural, the natural fibers and and those sorts of things as gifts, those sorts of exchange between nations. We pay a lot of attention to what's above the surface of the soil, to the above ground parts, but there's a whole world below the surface that we need to pay more attention to. And as we see here with this project, all it needs is a little bit or even a lot of attention in some cases to really bring it back to life and to allow the life within the soil to regenerate

on its own. Back in 2021, this site was a giant open pit mine. It was 10 meters deep and full of mud. And there was a portion of it that had been left exposed to the sun and the rain of the nice warm summer of 2021 and one of the site supervisors from Ellis Don one day was walking along and spied some plants that didn't quite look exactly like the the weeds that you normally see on a construction site. Paul Zizek called botanists and called the landscape architects and we called the Conservation Authority and we all came and took a look at at the plants and it turned out that they were actually wetland plants growing in the middle of an excavation and this excavation was about seven meters below the surface of

where a building had stood on Commissioner Street. So there we were way down deep and because this area was once the largest wetland on Lake Ontario, we we thought maybe these were some of the plants that had sprouted and in fact it turns out that they had been these seeds had been underground for 100 years. And when left exposed to the sun and the rain, started to grow. A hundred years later, they just sat there waiting under all of that weight, under all of the Portland's infrastructure, under all of the tank farms and the munitions factories and they started to grow.

This was a very important wetland for the Great Lakes region and it was one of the largest peat wetlands in all of the Great Lakes. Peat is compressed types of wetland plants compressed types of wetland plants that builds up over time. And there are peat bogs all across the north, spanning from down here in this region, going all the way up into the boreal. It's a very specialized ecosystem. It's something that you just can't see here in Toronto anymore.

It holds a lot of carbon, so it's very important for carbon balance globally to be preserving and paying attention to peat ecosystems. It was in that type of peat where a lot of the seeds were still preserved. We took some back to the lab. We germinated as many as we could, again, back in the greenhouses to see what more would come up if we continued to water it and look after it. Then we looked at the soil under microscope and picked out and carefully identified as much of the pollen as we could because the pollen

in many cases can be well preserved as well. So there was an entire pollen bank which is the story of what was here at least a hundred if not hundreds of years before we were able to identify with expertise from professor at Trent native or indigenous cattails we had European species of cattails that we found and we also found a hybrid it's looking like many of the material that we saw sprouting here is in fact at least a hundred if not a hundred and more years old. Right now we're standing in what once was the largest freshwater marsh in the Great Lake system. And a hundred years ago or so, the Toronto Harbour Commission filled the whole area in the hopes of developing out a large port on Lake Ontario.

And as a part of that process, they channelizedize the Don River which used to flow into the marsh and now the Don River takes a hard right into the Keating Channel. The urbanization of the watershed as well has left the water with less places to go and so when we get a large storm event, it rushes into the river. And right now there are 290 hectares of land which are at risk of flooding in a major storm event. So the work that we're doing on the portlands is to flood protect this area by adding a new pathway for the water to come down the river in a flood and actually over top of this bank and out into the ship channel in a major flood event which relieves that pressure. Flood protects some parts of south Leslieville,

Riverdale and downtown Toronto from a major flood event. The materials that we're using are all inspired by nature, so there are a lot of bioengineering techniques that we've used to construct the river. Because this area was filled, and over time industrial uses came in and they were heavily impacting the soils. There were some oil storage tanks that were here, munitions manufacturing, which have left a legacy of contamination in the area. And so we've had to excavate out over 1.4 million cubic meters of soil. Much of that is contaminated soil, and we've treated it on site,

we've had to stockpile some of it and some of it, the most contaminated of the material, has been taken off site to safe storage locations. That material makes room for the river. makes room for the river. The river is constructed between secant pile walls, which are massive concrete walls that extend down to bedrock. In some locations, that's over 40 or 50 meters down below, which creates a large sort of bathtub area and separates out the contaminated material from the clean material that we have within the river valley. After we excavated the river, we then began to build it up with clean fill, clean materials, imported soils. So there's resiliency that's built into all of the finishes here that was considered when

the landscape architects were designing the park, they considered the materials that they would use for the trails. The plant species that we have here were all selected to be resilient and to establish themselves in the river valley. We've planted now over 2 million herbaceous plants, 77,000 shrubs and over 5,000 trees. So again, we're taking our cues from nature to establish an ecological habitat. The form of the river valley and the habitat that we're creating is based on precedent sites that have been studied by the design team throughout the process, looking at the second marsh in Oshawa or the Humber River for example, to really watch and observe how

those habitats function and then try to recreate that type of habitat here on the Don River. In the design of Cherry Street and Commissioner Street, we've put green infrastructure and pedestrian spaces first in terms of the space that we've given over within the road right-of-way. swales and places where storm water can go and that's kept on the landscape for irrigation of the trees that are planted within the boulevards as well. Making sure that we have 25% of the space given over to the roads also helps with things like urban heat island effect which is another thing that is becoming more intense with climate change. And so when we add trees and green space to our cityscapes and to our urban grid, that improves livability for everyone that lives within a city as well. Soil is alive and we have to pay attention to it. It's fundamental to everything that we do above the soil. So it's really foundational and what we've been doing

here is really paying attention to soil and earth first and then moving forward from there and as we see everything else can follow. This project is for me I think about connecting people. It's connecting the river back to the lake. It's connecting landscapes and ecology, but it's also connecting people to place and people to each other. There are a lot of strong relationships that have been built throughout this process, which is an eight-year detailed design process. There have been a lot of stakeholder and

community engagement meetings and exercises and people from all different disciplines that work on the project and I think what's really special about this place is that it's it's nature right in downtown Toronto that that people will be able to be close to, that we'll be able to come and spend time with and be in relationship with on a really regular basis. There are muskrats, there are beavers, there are bald eagles and red-tailed hawks,

and there are fish in the river, and we're building this for them in downtown Toronto, and it's so amazing. When I think about our intention, what we start to see unfold is a creation story of its own. How people, how teams are helping this unfolding of the natural environment. We see the Wajash, you mentioned, Negig, all of these animals, they're listening. They're already here looking for where's my home going to be.

It's alive already. There are coyotes. There are geese. There are too many geese. They're eating all of our plants. Even before it opens, even before we're done, everybody wants to come and live here. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.