The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What We Can Learn From the Cheltenham Badlands

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

The Cheltenham Badlands are an alien landscape in Caledon, Ontario, once home of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Chief Ajetance was forced to sign Treaty 19 which ceded much of their traditional territory to the Crown and opened it to settlement. Colonists accidentally created this unique wasteland through tree clearing and bad farming practices. There was only a thin layer of soil over the Queenston Shale formation, a soft sedimentary rock that runs through Peel and Halton Regions. As news of this alien landscape spread, the footsteps of thousands of visitors hastened the erosion. The Ontario Heritage Trust is now preserving this reminder of how human actions can profoundly change the planet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. There's an alien landscape hidden among the rolling hills of Caledon, Ontario. And while it might look like this place is from another world, the story of how this barren area formed is very human. Mankind accidentally created this wasteland through colonization and bad farming practices, and now human activity is threatening to destroy it all over again. Welcome to the Cheltenham Badlands.

This land has long been the domain of Indigenous peoples, namely the Mississaugas of the Credit. By 1810 settlers were spreading across Upper Canada and disrupting indigenous peoples' traditional lifestyles in the process. By 1818, those settler pressures had severely weakened the Mississaugas of the Credit. Chief Ajitaz had little choice but to sign the Ajitaz Treaty. That gave up much of the Mississaugas' traditional territory to the Crown, and that opened this land for settlement. By the mid-1800s, this property had become a farm, for a whole variety of reasons that probably should have never happened.

Part of the deal with government land grants was settlers had to clear the land of all the trees and brush. But on this property, those plants were the only things holding the ground together. My name is Joe DeLouche. I'm a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. In my area of expertise is geomorphology, which is the study of landscapes, landforms, and the processes that create them. The site was not very good for agriculture because it's steep, it's gullied already, so grazing would have been the dominant kind of land use activity on the site and as soon as you remove even a small patch the erosive characteristics of this particular bedrock type starts degrading quite rapidly and that can spread. Over the years more and more of the soils disappeared. Eventually badlands like

these began to take over much of the property. That wasn't good for the would-be farmers but it did create a new use for this place. My name is Rowena Cooper and I was married to Russell Cooper. His family owned the Badlands from about 1927 until Russell passed away. Russell's father, James Edward Cooper, who purchased the property, they needed somewhere for their five children to run and to play and to enjoy themselves.

And that's where the farm came into being because they loved it. Because of the erosion, which was already there when the family bought it, the farmhouse had been moved off. So there was basically no use being made of the almost 100 acres. They went for picnics, they went on weekends, and it was somewhere that they could get out of Brampton. It wasn't just the Cooper family that enjoyed these badlands.

News of this strange landscape had spread, and it became a favourite spot among outdoor adventurers. In fact, it was outdoorsy people that first brought me here when I was a kid. But not everybody treated the land with respect? He was concerned when he found out for instance that some people were using it with their dirt bikes, some people were using it with their ordinary bicycles because of injury and because of damage to the erosion and I think it was partly that that led him to agree to put in a trail. The Bruce Trail Association approached him and asked if they could put in a trail,

which he happily agreed to. With the Bruce Trail came even more popularity. On weekends, especially in the fall, there could be 50 or 60 or 70 cars parked on the side before social media, the Badlands were always fairly popular among locals, but that's nothing compared to the numbers we see today. When I was a kid, it was discouraged to go and walk on the bedrock, but at the same time, when we did it anyways, nobody came and asked us to leave either. People generally didn't understand how fragile this place was, and then more people like me kept coming. The Ontario Heritage Trust bought this land in 1999. It put up information boards to teach people about how sensitive the area was, but people kept walking on the hills anyhow.

All that time, the Badlands were wearing away. The natural rate of weathering and sediment removal on this particular Badlands site was about 2. a half centimeters or one inch per year and that's about two to three orders of magnitude larger than you might find anywhere else on a soil surface in southern Ontario. To understand the risk we have to understand what the badlands are made of. The red ground you see is actually bedrock but it's a very soft kind of stone. see is actually bedrock, but it's a very soft kind of stone. Queenston shales, which is the formal name for the formation,

these nice red bed shales that extend all the way down to Lake Ontario. You can see them along the base of the Niagara Skartland. They're very red, very clay rich. Most of Oakville Hulton region is built on these clays, a really thick, gooey clay surface and a very dense flat, platey shale formation stretches all the way into New York State. This was the bottom of an ancient shallow sea hundreds of millions of years ago. Like many seafloors, it's made up of sedimentary rock. That's when layers of material get compressed together over time. If you remember the rocks and minerals unit from grade school,

you'll know that sedimentary is the softest kind of rock. As Deloge said, that softness means it erodes much faster. Add in the footsteps of thousands of people each year, you've got a real problem. All this foot traffic on busy weekends were actually accentuating the rate which erosion was occurring and the amount of sediment that was lost every year. And so we had an initial estimate of about 10 percent loss related to human foot traffic alone.

The other 90 percent natural processes, we went back and revised that three years ago, probably closer to 30% related to foot traffic. The Conservation Authority put up fences and signs begging people to stay off the sensitive ground, but people kept walking all over the property. This whole area is essentially a wasteland that was first created by human activity. And now human activity was threatening

to destroy the wasteland itself. In 2015 2015 Credit Valley Conservation closed off the area entirely, aiming to prevent further damage while they found longer term solutions. It took three years, but in 2018 the Badlands reopened. This new boardwalk at the top of the main area offers accessible views of the landscape, and a new wide trail lets people go across the property with less impact. The upgrades also addressed safety. There's a parking lot now, so people don't have to stop their cars on the blind hills of the narrow side road.

There are still people who don't understand the importance of staying behind the fence, and I kind of understand it. It can be tough to imagine how one person going off trail can really harm the landscape, but the data shows it's never just one person. So how effective exactly have the mitigation measures been? Right now, that's still a gap in our knowledge. We were not directly involved with those mitigation efforts. It would be nice to go back in.

Now we're three years since our last set of measurements, and we might find a detectable difference in terms of removing foot traffic from the site. We hope to look forward to working with either the Ontario Heritage Trust, the Credit Valley Conservation Authority, the Bruce Trail Conservancy to possibly getting back to the site over the next two to three years, see if we can't add to the data that we already have and keep that data record going for decades to come, because it's, I think, personally, worth preserving it.

The Badlands' popularity is still rising, and that pressure is going to mean a growing risk to this unique and sensitive landscape. The Conservation Authority could have done the simple fix, putting up a giant fence around the entire property and banning visitors altogether. But that could defeat some of the lessons that we can learn from the Badlands, both from its past and in the present. After all, this is a striking real-world example of how human actions can profoundly change the planet.

It's an area of scientific natural interest. It would have always been classified as such. So helping preserve these little snapshots of landscapes that are somewhat foreign or exotic, I think is really helpful for the education of the public in and around the greater Toronto area where we can see the effects of both climate and human impact. Credit Valley Conservation says it's every visitor's responsibility to

minimize their impact here. That'll determine whether the Cheltenham Badlands get worn down into nothing, or whether they'll be here for generations to come as part of Canada's living history. Thanks for watching!