Fragile World

When you’re an expert, people listen. And when you’re a thought leader on environmental education, even better. The Magazine caught up with three York professors who recently gave public talks on the theme “Our Fragile Planet” for the -Toronto Public Library (TPL). They discussed Toronto’s hidden aboriginal history, the city’s amazing sewage and the fate of our, so far, (still) Great Lakes.

On Sewage
and the Sublime

Michael McMahon, a doctoral fellow in York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), deals with at least one area in his research that most people might prefer to ignore (if not forget about entirely) – and that’s sewage. In his recent TPL talk, “Sewage and the Sublime: The R.C. Harris and Ashbridges Bay Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants,” he explored Toronto’s environmental -history through the lens of its waterside treatment plants and citizen concerns about the city’s waterfront. 

“Funnily enough, I didn’t envision ‘Sewage and the Sublime’ as being the title of my talk,” says McMahon, who is intent on marrying two subcategories in the academy – urban environmental history with urban political ecology. “That came partly out of my dissertation topic on sewage and the sublime and the political ecologies of Great Lakes water. The head of public programming at TPL loved the title and thought it might very well intrigue people.”  

So, how exactly did McMahon become interested in the whole realm of human excrement and its treatment? “Well, I was wondering where the sublime might be found in this subject matter,” he says. “In the traditional sense, we look to the heavens for the sublime, but might it not also be found – perhaps newer ‘sublimes’ – in a return to earth and, more specifically, in our own bodies and their relationships with the bacterial swarm that’s in our midst?”

For McMahon, beauty is where you choose to find it – even bacteria that can kill us, can also aid us. The apotheosis of that is the modern sewage treatment plant whose antecedents stretch back into both the creation of sewers and methods for treating effluent and providing safe drinking water that date back to the mid-1800s. Today’s sewage plant is what -McMahon calls the “organic machine.” “We are literally embracing the muck here,” he says. “They are the equivalent of the human digestive tract. And, like our body systems, it is a delicate balance between purification and putrefaction. We need chlorine, which kills bacteria, to produce safe drinking water, but we need the bacteria that can potentially cause disease to aid in breaking down human waste.”

The germ theory of disease came to be accepted in the late 19th century  in the wake of Louis Pasteur’s discoveries. It was suddenly realized that while germs can make us sick, they are also our friends. “Cheese, wine, fermentation … we’ve been living with bacteria for centuries,” says McMahon. “It is this wondrous, invisible realm, and eventually we came to enlist bacteria in our water and sewage treatment.”

Chlorine and bacteria live in an uneasy truce in our society, he notes. “Our individual health continues to be shaped by the health of the wider environment of which we are a part. Our urban environmental history is one that has seen substantial public improvements in the quality of water. On the other hand, given the amount of chlorine put into our water supplies to combat disease, we are no longer likely to die of typhoid, yet we are more than ever likely to contract some form of cancer due to the amount of so-called ‘organochlorines’ dumped in the Great Lakes environment.”

McMahon is also interested in the inputs and outputs from our cities, which have been shaped not only by the engineers of our water and wastewater systems, but also by public health professionals and, indeed, members of the wider public. Remember the “Sewage Sisters” who battled for changes to the Ashbridges Bay sewage treatment processes in the 1990s?

R. C. Harris, Toronto’s commissioner of public works from 1912-45, was  considered somewhat radical for his time in that he believed in technology for solving the problem of pollution and moving away from the 19th century idea that the best “solution to pollution was dilution.” The result was the first large-scale rapid sand filtration plant in North America and the first superchlorination process. 

“The point was and is today to use biomechanical and chemical engineering to insulate us from our polluted environment, rather than cleaning up the environment itself,” notes McMahon. “Unlike New York City, we never had a large and natural, upstream source of water to draw on, so we’ve had to use lake water and treat it with chlorine. Originally, Toronto’s water came from the inner harbour, but that was so polluted that it was deemed too much of a risk.”

Along with technological change for treating waste and water were concomitant collective east-end neighbourhood uprisings against plants like Ashbridges Bay, which historically received all the waste from Toronto’s more affluent neighbourhoods. Once in Toronto’s east end, it was processed and burned. Aside from air quality issues, there is also a history of collateral natural disasters. Ashbridges Bay, filled in for industries now gone and a sewage megaplant that continues to be built and rebuilt, used to be one of Lake Ontario’s largest premier wetlands. Only a remnant remains.

As for what our sewage can tell us about our cities and the ways we live in them, McMahon says first and foremost we can find nature in the city if we think of a few related things: one is that our bodies are largely made up of bacteria; another is that, going by percentage of weight, we are comprised largely of water so, in a sense, many of us “come from” the Great Lakes. Our bodies are that part of nature which we directly inhabit, he says. “We get to a wider nature through our water and sewage treatment systems, and we live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. We need to nurture our relation with non-human life forms and bring them in line with the more conflicted elements of our urban political ecology.”

McMahon’s background includes a master’s degree from the University of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture & Planning and work as the curator of exhibits at the former Metro Archives in Toronto. His talk was based on two essays: “We All Live Downstream,” which appeared in the Coach House Press book HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake -Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets; and “Toronto’s Organic Machines,” which appeared in Urban Explorations, Environmental Histories of the Greater Toronto Area. The latter collection of essays was prepared under the editorial direction of York Professor Anders Sandberg.

Toronto’s
Indigenous History

If you’re a Toronto resident, you may not realize that there’s a rich indigenous history right under your feet – or maybe even in your own backyard. According to York PhD candidate Jon Johnson, if you’re a fan of strolling up Spadina Avenue, along Davenport Road or up Yonge Street, you’re walking in the footsteps of established native trails that could date back 11,000 years. In fact, the city’s name is derived from the Mohawk term “tkaronto.”

Johnson’s research focuses on First Nations cultural traditions and the connections among cultural integrity, environmental integrity and health for native groups living in both reserve and urban communities. His TPL talk centred around the indigenous environmental history of Toronto, based on work he conducted in collaboration with the city’s aboriginal community.

Johnson is also involved with First Story Toronto tours based out of the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto at 16 -Spadina Rd. (the road’s name itself comes from the indigenous word “ishspadeena,” Ojibwa for hill). “Because of my involvement with the tours, I learned a great deal about Toronto’s native heritage, including the stories about all the places across the [Greater Toronto Area] that featured indigenous history, and I eventually began leading many of the tours myself,” he says.

Some of the well-documented aboriginal burial sites in Toronto include Baby Point and Tabor Hill Park in Scarborough. Johnson points out that Davenport Road follows an important portage trail east and west along the bluffs (the prehistoric shoreline of Lake Ontario) from Spadina, connecting to a native trail that roughly followed the Don River (in the east) and the Humber River (in the west). 

“Baby Point was the site of a prominent indigenous settlement,” he says. “It was a Seneca village that was established during the 17th century to take advantage of the burgeoning fur trade in the area. Toronto was really unique in that respect – many of the major rivers and their mouths were important routes in the development of the fur trade. Before the Seneca, routes like the -Carrying Place were used by the Wendat for travel and trade, and they predate European arrival.”

Johnson’s talk was held at 10 Spadina Rd., just south of the Native Canadian Centre. Why there? “The Native Canadian Centre is a great place to stop and it’s certainly the heart of the city’s contemporary indigenous community,” he says. “Indigenous people began migrating back to the city beginning in the first half of the 20th century, after being pushed out. After a critical mass of native peoples returned to the city in the post-war years, the centre, along with other native initiatives, developed.

“I think [these stories of Toronto’s aboriginal history] are more important than ever for many different reasons. Historically, there’s the notion that somehow native people don’t belong in the city. So part of my academic and personal mission is to make people aware of Toronto’s indigenous heritage and that there’s a vibrant, contemporary native community in the city that has continued that tradition.”

Johnson says that more awareness of First Nations people’s history in and around Toronto is also very healing for the community itself. “To know your ancestors have been here from the ice age to the present is a very deep thing,” he says. “You know, I continually hear people in the city say they’ve never seen a native person in Toronto. I guess they think native people should be walking around in buckskins and feathers. They don’t realize they probably see native people every day in their neighbourhoods, workplaces and on the subway. There’s a lot of evidence of First Nations people’s long presence still extant on the land and in the historical record, and it’s time to reconnect to that.”

Stressed Out?
So are Ontario’s Lakes

FES Professor Lewis Molot doesn’t take the health of Ontario’s lakes for granted and neither should we, he says. Molot received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Toronto and his PhD in oceanography from the University of Alaska in 1981. 

He has been an FES professor at York for the past 24 years, and during that time, Molot has conducted long-term studies on the effects of eutrophication (enrichment with fertilizers), acidification, climate change and ultraviolet radiation on lakes in Ontario. His recent research focuses on how ferrous iron and phosphorus promote blooms of nuisance cyanobacteria – a type of algae that is often toxic in fresh waters. Molot is a member of the Provincial Lake Simcoe Science Committee and chair of the Ontario EcoSchools program, specializing in energy conservation, waste minimization and school yard naturalization in public schools across Ontario. 

“There are about three million lakes in Canada and about 250,000 of those are in Ontario,” says Molot. “Of those, nearly 4,000 in Ontario are greater than three square kilometres in area. Most are small and the majority are situated on the Precambrian Shield, which runs in a line from Port Severn on southern Georgian Bay to Carleton Place in eastern Ontario, north to the Hudson Bay/James Bay region.”

While the majority of Ontario lakes in this region are remote, many also have small populations nearby and are heavily “cottaged.” Some may be compromised by nearby resource extraction, including mining and forestry. But even remoteness does not guarantee lakes are protected from environmental stress caused by either human visitors or airborne deposition of chemicals. Molot cites a number of common threats to water quality of inland lakes, including acid rain, invasive species (introduced by boaters or fishermen), phosphorus enrichment (a byproduct of cottage septic systems and lawn runoff) and climate change, which has shortened the ice-covered season.

York has collaborated with scientists at the Ontario government’s Dorset Environmental Science Centre (DESC) on a study of eight small lakes and 20 streams that have now been monitored for more than 30 years. The lakes being studied vary in type, says Molot. “Some have no development, while others have up to 100 cottages with lawns right down to the shoreline – not a good idea, by the way.”

The good news is that the development around most lakes in central Ontario has not yet had a negative impact. Molot says that although cottagers’ introduction of more phosphorus into lakes has not yet caused problems, there are signs that increasing numbers of lakes are being affected. Phosphorus causes blooms of blue-green algae that can, but do not always, produce liver and nerve toxins. “The need for controlled cottage development is still important if we’re going to protect water quality and property values.”

One body of water that has not fared as well as neighbouring smaller lakes is Lake Simcoe. “There are multiple stresses affecting Simcoe,” says Molot, citing invasive species (zebra mussels), climate change stressors (such as long-term changes in air temperature and seasonal precipitation patterns) and more urbanization in its watershed. “The annual warming trend near Lake Simcoe has been about 1.5 degrees C in the past 30 years.” 

Luckily, there is now a comprehensive long-term plan to protect and restore Lake Simcoe’s ecological health. How will other, smaller lakes fare in the long run? “It all depends on the type of lake – for example, deep versus shallow – and the magnitude of the threat,” says Molot. “And there isn’t just one threat, there are multiple ones. Our lakes’ health is something that has to be managed on all fronts.” ■