The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Greening of Sudbury

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Sudbury, Ont., has a complicated past. Settlers came to the area with the building of the railway, but the mining and logging industries made the area so toxic that not even shrubs or grasses could grow. But over the last half-century, governments, researchers and the industries themselves have been working to bring natural life back-and it's only halfway done. In this episode, contributor Warren Schlote describes how Sudbury became a desolate wasteland. We'll meet one of the people who has led the 'regreening' process, and hear about how some unresolved industrial damage is harming marginalized people to this day.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you were born in the 1970s or earlier, chances are you might picture a barren landscape, scenes perhaps better suited to Mars or the Moon than to Northern Ontario. Sudbury did look like that for much of the 20th century after years of industries exploiting this land. But things have changed. Green is coming back to the hills all thanks to the hard work of brilliant thinkers and everyday people alike. But there's still work to be done.

In fact, in some places, industrial damage is harming marginalized people to this day. Welcome to Sudbury, Ontario. The area now called Sudbury was once a dense forest. This is the traditional territory of Anishinaabe peoples. Sudbury's name in Anishinaabemowin is Nsukamak, meaning the Three Trails. These lands are part of the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty which set up the reserves around Sudbury that we know today. I'll have a little bit more on that a little later in the video.

The first settlers came to this area in the 1880s with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That was the first major industry in this area, and it brought another, logging. The railway needed a lot of wood, and as a result, massive sections of forest were clear-cut. This was a time before people really thought about sustainable practices. But that wasn't the only industry the railway brought to town. While building the line in 1883, a blacksmith noticed copper ore in one of the blasted rock cuts. Of course, Indigenous peoples had known about the area's metals since time immemorial. There's evidence in northeastern Ontario of copper tools dating back thousands of years. But this discovery set off a copper mining rush among settlers. Soon nickel would take over as the area's most prized mineral. A key part of

mining is pulling the metals out of the rocks from the ground. Until the 1930s in Sudbury, one of the steps in that process was open bed roasting. They would put down a layer of logs, then the ore, and light the whole thing on fire. It was a massively damaging process, both in terms of the clear-cutting required to get all of their fuel logs, but also because of the toxic fumes it created. Clouds of pollution covered the area, and they killed plant life and harmed the people around Sudbury. Through the first half of the 20th century, the hills around Sudbury became more and more barren. Technology improvements had brought down emissions quite a bit, but they were still a major problem. Then with so many areas having been clear cut, there was little holding the soils in

place and they began to wash away. In many places, exposed rock was all that remained. Then, emissions from the smelters caused acid rain, and it stained those rocks black. The International Nickel Company, INCO, needed to fix these problems. It was one of the few major mining companies left around here after years of mergers. Today, it's a part of Valley. Its answer still stands at its Coppercliff smelter, the Superstack. This chimney came into full operation in 1972. At that time, it was the tallest smokestack in the world.

Today it is the second tallest freestanding structure in Canada behind the CN Tower. Now, it was only a partial fix. The smelting process had gotten cleaner, but it still produced toxic gases. The Superstack simply spread those out over a wider area rather than right over Sudbury. Later improvements in recent years would bring emissions down even further, and by the 2010s the Superstack was obsolete. But back to the emissions cuts of the early 70s. Now that the pollution output had gone down, the Sudbury area faced a new challenge. How could it reverse years of environmental damage and bring natural

life back to the moonscape? In 1978, after five years of planning, Sudbury's Regreening Committee was born. I'm Peter Beckett. I'm chair of the VTAC Committee, which is the advisory panel on re-greening for the city of Sudbury. Well it's a mixture of local citizens from Sudbury, government, industry and academia all working together to try and improve the image of Sudbury. It was one of the earliest ones to start to take a whole devastated landscape with the objective of beautifying the area and also improving the whole environment for the systems of Sudbury. Researchers found the soils were so acidic that only a few types of plants could grow. They also found high levels of metal because of all the emissions.

Regreening isn't as simple as throwing a handful of pine cones out and hoping for the best. It's a sensitive process that has to be built up in stages. Here's a basic version of what had to be done. Well actually we call it the basic Sudbury recipe and it consists of applying limestone which helps to reduce acidity. A little later we will add fertilizer just like one might be adding fertilizer to a garden and then we add some grass seed which gives us the initial cover and then into that we plant a whole host of trees and shrubs. We're now using 85 species of native trees and shrubs. That was the regreening in theory at least and, and I should add, a large portion of this work was done by summer student workers and volunteers.

But Sudbury was the first place this had ever been tried at this scale before, and it was hard to know how it would turn out. As I record this video, it's been about 45 years since regreening work began in Sudbury, and the results speak for themselves. regreening work began in Sudbury, and the results speak for themselves. Where I'm standing was once a barren hilltop. This dense forest on my right has had the full regreening treatment, and this land on my left has had nothing done to it at all. It's to see what nature could do on its own around other regreened areas. This place where I'm standing right now used to look like this. There's countless examples just like this all over the city. There are some areas in the city that haven't had the full regreening treatment, or any treatment at all. These are meant as sort of control sites,

showing what nature can do on its own. The hill I'm standing on is a partial regreening site. According to the city's website, crews limed, seeded and fertilized this very hill in 1997, but they never planted any trees. A little farther away, the map says this area behind me hasn't been re-greened at all. It's quite a stark difference compared to the fully replanted areas of the city. The Sudbury re-greening program has become a positive example on the world stage. Many countries have used these same principles to recover from their own environmental damage. We in fact run tours every year for students, for scientists, for other municipalities

who are interested to see what has actually happened in Sudbury so that they can take the lessons home to the Worm community. I have been involved along with some other members with trying to encourage the Russians to improve some of their smelter disturbed landscapes as well as well as the Chinese. Certainly members of VTAC go around the world spreading the message about if we can do it in Sudbury, you can do it too. Sudbury has also had support from conservationist Jane Goodall. It named a trail after her in honour of re-greening. She visited the city in the summer of 2022 for an important milestone,

planting the 10 millionth tree. Of course that had to happen the one weekend I went out of town. In many ways, Sudbury's re-reening program looks like a great success, but there's some problems with that statement. First, after 45 years Beckett says regreening is only about halfway done. Second, regreening isn't so much a noun as it is a verb. It's an ongoing process that's going to be with us for quite some time. And more than that, it's about a change in mindset, about how we think about our actions now, and how they'll impact the future. There are still a lot of industries working these lands. As societies around the world depend on technology more and more, mining is only going to become more important. There's a shared responsibility for every government, every company,

and every person. A responsibility to remember what Sudbury once looked like and how much work it's taken to get it only halfway back to what it once was. There's another gap I'd like to mention. As I said near the start of the video, this is Anishinaabe land. Despite the trillions of dollars of resource extraction that has happened, First Nations have never really received their fair share. The Robinson-Huron Treaty was supposed to include payments in exchange for accessing the resources, but it's never lived up to that intent. In one corner of a Tikmikshin Anishinaabeg territory, there's toxic tailings from an

old gold mine. They've been leaching deadly chemicals into a key water source, and while there's been talk and planning of how to clean it up for years, it's still not done. This might be seen as tangential to the main regreen up for years, it's still not done. This might be seen as tangential to the main regreening project, but it's still an example of industrial damage that isn't yet fixed. Despite its flaws, Sudbury's regreening story is important to share. Humans have had a major impact on the planet. Of course, not all problems can be fixed in the same way, but the Sudbury story is a reminder that people can make a difference. We have the ability to undo some of the harms we've caused,

even if it does take a lot of work. Sudbury is a lesson that through innovation and perspiration, positive change can happen. Because of that, it's a part of Canada's living history.