Why our ravines are the city below Toronto

The Star launches our Ravine City series as Toronto develops a plan for the future of our unique and often mysterious system of rivers and forests.

TheStar.com
Aug. 7, 2016
By Donovan Vincent

It’s a scorching hot summer day and Jason Ramsay-Brown is standing atop an elevated lookout, peering at the expansive green valley, wildflower meadows and giant maples, oaks and pines that make up the Vista Trail in Toronto’s Rouge Park.

It’s the natural habitat for a man who built on childhood experiences to make himself one of the top ravine experts in the city.

The trail is just east of Meadowvale Rd., near the Toronto Zoo. Here the air is clean, and the only sounds are the warm breeze blowing through the leaves of towering trees, and the chirping of birds that are among the 1,700 species of plants and animals in the area.

As Ramsay-Brown walks along the 1.6-kilometre trail with a Toronto Star reporter and photographer, he points to the dog-strangling vine, an invasive plant that looks pleasant enough but can be deadly if you’re a caterpillar. Then the staghorn sumac, a flowering plant with a red cone.

“If you think about it, to have something like this within kilometres of the downtown core with this much biodiversity is pretty remarkable,” says Ramsay-Brown, 42, whose thick beard and greying ponytail give him a granola look akin to a younger Jerry Garcia, the late Grateful Dead guitarist.

The author of the book Toronto’s Ravines and Urban Forests: Their Natural Heritage and Local History, Ramsay-Brown also recently sat on a group that advised the City of Toronto’s on its ravine strategy, an ongoing effort to draw up a blueprint for how to manage, maintain, protect and fund the city’s vast network of ravines.

The final report on the strategy, due in spring, is intended as a guidepost “to balance the fine line between protection and (public) use in our ravines,” according to an early draft of the strategy.

Coinciding with the city’s efforts, the Star is running an ongoing series on our ravine system, looking particularly at the Humber, Don and Rouge rivers.

The series will explore topics such as the health of our ravines, recreational uses and the vital role ravines play in flood protection.

Another of the many ideas the city will study: accommodating future demand from the public by developing entry points, and improved signage and guideposts to allow better access. The city has begun “pop up” consultations with residents to get their input.

Toronto’s unique ravine system with its rivers, dramatic geography and forests defines the landscape. One forest ecologist, Sandy M. Smith, a University of Toronto professor in urban forestry, calls our ravines the “green veins of the city.”

Typically a street might curve in an odd way to go around a ravine. Often, the reason a bridge is where it is to allow access across a ravine, or a former ravine site.

Technically, a ravine is a trench within a valley system. Torontonians talk about ravines broadly, and the definitions may differ, but generally speaking a ravine is green space far below city streets. Ravines make up 17 per cent of Toronto’s total area.

Garth Armour, manager of horticulture for the city and co-lead on the ravine strategy, explains there are six watersheds in Toronto: Highland Creek, the Rouge Valley (and Rouge River), the Don River, the Humber River, Mimico Creek and Etobicoke Creek.

Dozens and dozens of ravines branch off from these watersheds, he says. They wind through residential, commercial and industrial areas, parks, trails, railways, golf courses, cemeteries, hydro corridors and former landfills.

But most days Torontonians drive, bike, walk and take transit alongside, over, or perhaps through ravines — and rarely think about them. The city wants to change that, and to celebrate what city staff working on the ravine strategy call “an amazing natural resource that is key to our identity.”

But striking that balance between accessibility and ecological health is key, says Michelle Holland, who chairs the city’s parks and environment committee.

“We need to get people interested, engaged, and get them to use ravines, but at the same time protect ravines,” she says in an interview.

Jane Welsh, project manager in Toronto’s planning department, and co-lead on the ravine strategy, points out that three pieces of legislation protect against development and the cutting down of trees in ravines: Toronto’s Official Plan, the city’s Ravine and Natural Feature Protection bylaws, and a regulation under Ontario’s Conservation Authorities Act.

“There are lot of layers of protection, but part of it (the ravine strategy) is conveying to users how they should be using the ravines in terms of respecting the natural environment,” Welsh says.

Ravines were once considered utterly disposable. Torontonians washed their cars in the Humber River in the 1920s, and the dumping of waste in the Don River was a massive problem for decades before recent “Clean up the Don” efforts. Dumping of garbage, major appliances, old car tires etc. continues to be a serious nuisance in ravines such as Rennie Park in Etobicoke.

“We used rivers and creeks for sewers,” Ramsay-Brown says. “We’ve filled in wetlands because they were inconvenient to build on. For example, the Portlands industrial district used to be one of the biggest wetlands on Lake Ontario. We dredged it and filled it in.

“But we’re starting to sober up.”

Ramsay-Brown, who owns a web development business with his wife, was born and raised in Toronto, and ravines have been a passion since his youth. As a boy he visited ravines as part of city-run day camps, or with his mother, who took him to creeks, where they would eat sandwiches. “And then as I got older . . . I’d go to ravines by myself,” Ramsay-Brown recalls. “Then in my 20s they became a constant experience. I’d use them to commute and unwind at the end of the day.

“So ravines were like an escape, a place to go to feel connected with nature,” he says, referring to the time he spent in Sunnybrook Park, Glendon Forest, Wilket Creek, Cedervale Ravine, Moore Park and the Don.

Ramsay-Brown has explored more than 100 ravines, urban forests and parks in Toronto over the last 15 years.

But it was an unexpected question from his young daughter years ago that inspired him to write his book about ravines.

Starting around age 11, Ramsay-Brown was out exploring in ravines on his own.

His parents separated before he was born and his mom was busy with her job. They lived near Avenue Rd. and Eglinton Ave., in a quadplex, renting a two-bedroom apartment.

“I walked myself to and from school, got a transit pass when I was very young, and had to take myself around to anything I needed to do,” he recalls. “I could walk to Rosedale ravine.”

In his teenage years, Moore Park ravine, near Mount Pleasant Rd., north of St. Clair Ave. E., was often called the “party ravine,” where young people went to escape the clutches of their parents. There were a lot of “shenanigans” going on in and around that area, Ramsay-Brown says.

But most of his recollections are of a different variety. “For me the memories are largely the isolation and solitude, the ability to sit and think.”.

A lasting memory for Ramsay-Brown is the first time he ever saw a Great Blue Heron, a large wading bird with bluish-grey plumage.

Ramsay-Brown was in the Don Valley, around age 11, when he saw the bird in the river, but he didn’t know what it was. Up to that time he could only name sparrows and pigeons.

“The bird looked like a completely alien thing,” he recalls thinking.

As an adult, Ramsay-Brown became interested in volunteer work around ravine and park stewardship. He got involved in tree plantings organized by the city, and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. He also joined community-based cleanup efforts targeting ravines.

“I started to feel more and more that I wanted to make a contribution. Certainly at that time, what these places were like is substantially different than what we’re seeing now. I can remember tons of shopping carts in the Don Valley, but even here (in the Rouge) it wasn’t uncommon to find used tires and abandoned tents.

“There was a disposable quality to these places. That sort of inspired me to think, ‘how can I give my time to make these places better, rather than just coming to visit them?’ I started to engage more in terms of the political realm, and activist realm.”His activism took him to groups like Pollution Probe, for whom he fundraised before he went to high school. In 1969 the environmental lobby group had famously held a “funeral” for the Don River, at one time considered the most polluted stream in Ontario. That story affected Ramsay-Brown when he learned about it years later from friends and family.

“I remember being so inspired that a small group of people found a way to wake people up to these kinds of issues.

Now he’s a member of the Todmorden Mills Wildflower Preserve stewardship team, the Beechwood Wetlands stewardship team, and will soon join the Toronto Field Naturalists, all volunteer organizations.

The push to write his 2015 book about Toronto-area ravines and urban forests was sparked by a question five years ago from his daughter Abbey, then 4, as they drove to school, along Pottery Rd. near Todmorden Mills.

She looked out the window and saw a different landscape below the bridge: a river, trees, plants. No road or traffic lights.

“She started asking questions. As a parent, when your kid shows any interest in something you’re passionate about it’s a real gift. So I promised her right then and there a summer of ravines. I took her out, sometimes two or three times a weekend, to various places.

“Everywhere, from the Etobicoke Creek, to Petticoat Creek (in Pickering), German Mills, Leslie Street Spit, everywhere I could think of that showed what nature is like in the city.”

Mostly self-taught when it comes to nature and ecology, he began to realize that on every ravine walk with his daughter there was always a question she asked that he couldn’t answer.

“That got me trying to find more and more information about these places. The information was fragmented. It was hard to find answers, and there was a surprisingly large amount of contradictory information. That’s what started me on the book.”

The book features 29 ravines that Ramsay-Brown believes are most rewarding to visitors, including Gates Gully in Scarborough, where you might spot an eastern red-backed salamander, or the Charles Sauriol conservation lands near the Don Valley Parkway, where citizens have helped grow native plants such as goldenrods and Michigan lilies.

“The book was an attempt to bring together the story of our ravines in a way that would make it meaningful to people for whom their exposure to ravines was seeing them passing by their car window, or looking out from the subway.”

The key issues

Some of the main issues affecting a potential ravine strategy:

The origins:

Ravines in Toronto were formed thousands of years ago, after glaciers compressed the land, and water later wore away the soil. The major ravines and river systems in the GTA flow from Oak Ridges Moraine into Lake Ontario.

Three hundred years ago, the land in and around Toronto was unspoiled wilderness. But when settlers started clearing land for farming, trees were felled and fields planted with crops, which transformed the natural environment. There was a period during the last 50 to 100 years — the dawn of our urbanity — where ravines and nature were viewed as places for our refuse.

The advantages:

The benefits of having these spaces as protected wilderness areas now are almost inexhaustible, and society has finally recognized that, experts say.

One major benefit is flood protection, which became evident after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. After that storm and flooding the province gave what is now the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) the power to acquire ravine lands and other greenspace for flood protection uses such as dams.

The key data:

Prof. Sandy M. Smith of the U of T’s faculty of forestry, says the city’s ravine strategy must include ongoing, evidence-based measurements of the “ecological integrity” of ravines.

“Right off you need to look at tree species,” Smith says, arguing that trees are the “underpinning” of ravines by keeping soil on slopes, and preventing soil from flooding into waterways. The key is gathering data on which trees are in ravines, and which ones should be there, Smith says.

The invaders:

Sandy M. Smith points to a 1977 report a student in her department recently tracked down about the Rosedale ravine system. The report shows that nearly 40 years ago, Norway maple made up 10 per cent of this ravine system. Now the tree is found in 40 per cent of that area.

“Norway isn’t native, but rather a new species that came here in the 1960s and 1970s,” Smith says. “At that time 10 per cent of the ravine sites had Norway maple, today it’s 40 per cent, and the number of native species are slipping away, like beeches and ash. So we know there are threats to the integrity of ravines, so we would want to measure that — which trees are native, which aren’t.” Smith says the city, TRCA, students and experts from fields like hers should play key roles in monitoring ravine health.

The average Joe:

Jason Ramsay-Brown, the author of the book on ravines, sees merit in average citizens playing a role in the ravine strategy. “There are already a host of opportunities for the public to become involved in preserving, protecting and enhancing ravines, whether through garbage cleanups, tree plantings, invasive weed pulls, and citizen science work such as water quality and soil sampling,” Ramsay-Brown says.

“There are tons of opportunities for people to help build the inventory of ecological information required to be able to measure progress, success and failure and say ‘how are we affecting these areas.”

The inequities:

L. Anders Sandberg, a professor in York University’s faculty of environmental studies, says any efforts stemming from the ravine strategy must be approached through the lens of equity. “I’m thinking of folks who helped restore (the Brick Works, near Rosedale). School kids and youngsters from different parts of the city, sometimes not so privileged areas, did volunteer work to restore it. Why isn’t money pumped into other areas?

“Look at the Black Creek watershed, which empties into the Humber. That particular watershed is probably the most degraded and polluted in the whole city of Toronto. At the same time (nearby) Jane and Finch is of course known as a very marginalized area. Is there a relationship here? Why is that?”