A New Don

Around the corner from where I grew up in the middle of Toronto, a cedar-lined path between a pair of lawns leads down to a small ravine. At the bottom, pinched between steep hillsides, shrouded in summer by a high, leafy canopy, there is often flowing water. If you cross a couple of busy streets and cut through a condo complex, you can follow the channels and culverts of Burke Brook all the way to the west branch of the Don River and, ultimately, to the cool blue of Lake Ontario.

I didn’t venture that far on foot when I was a kid, content to explore the neighbourhood creek, dropping sticks into the current and excavating rocks to assemble dams. Ravines may be “the heart of the city’s emotional geography,” as Robert Fulford observed, yet locals tend to look at this network in fragments and neglect to see it whole. My friends and I certainly didn’t think of our stomping grounds as part of an aquatic ecosystem that has played — and continues to play — a leading role in the evolution of Toronto. Home to 1.4 million people, this relatively compact watershed is one of the most developed in the country. On a per kilometre basis, the stretch of the Don that veins the urban core may have had a more profound ecological, economic, and cultural impact than any other river in Canada.

The second edition of Jennifer Bonnell’s Reclaiming the Don furthers the case that present-day Toronto has inexorably shaped and been shaped by the river. It has long embodied and reflected the city’s “imagined futures,” the York University historian asserts. Which helps explain why she has decided, just a decade after the first edition of her chronicle, “a very short time in the life of a river,” to pick up the story again.

Work is now well under way on the billion-dollar-plus, 125-hectare Port Lands Flood Protection Project where the Don empties into the lake — one of the most ambitious plans in a succession of grand transformations. Formerly tainted industrial land is being re-engineered into green, residential, and mixed-use commercial space, coupled with flood management infrastructure and a renaturalized delta that frees the mouth of the waterway from the concrete walls that had constrained it for 150 years. Pollution remains a problem, however, as it has been since settlers began to build a town here at the end of the eighteenth century. And conflicting visions of the valley’s utility endure, from transportation corridor and convenient sewer to shelter for all manner of flora and fauna.

Amid “calls to consider the diversity of Torontonians’ needs,” new pages dedicated to the Port Lands are no mere addendum to the original book. Bonnell considers the project an attempt to “reconnect people with the waterfront in ways that prioritize ecological health and climate adaptation.” By emphasizing affordable housing and equitable access to nature, by resuscitating wetlands and rejecting a “tendency to champion human productivity at all costs,” the plan represents nothing less, says a long-time activist, than an opportunity to kindle “an in-depth conversation about the sustainability of urban systems.” Bonnell lauds the recognition of the “regenerative productivity of the wider living world.”

That’s just about the opposite of the view of the colonists who exploited the Don as a source of lumber, clay, and other raw materials (never mind its fish and game). Tanneries, foundries, and oil refineries took root on the lower reaches of the river beginning in the mid-1800s, as did the country’s first large-scale pork packing plant. The toxins they spewed —sewage, gasoline, lye — were accepted as an inevitable by-product of growth, health consequences be damned. Unsurprisingly, the “Don problem” emerged: not only pollution but flooding, silt accumulation, and outbreaks of typhoid and other water‑borne diseases. Various schemes were concocted to tame what one ship captain deemed a “monster of ingratitude,” but the valley’s identity was shifting into that of a peripheral zone, eventually harbouring Roma encampments, a Depression-era “hobo jungle,” and the occasional gang of outlaws. It became a barrier to movement across a city that was spreading to the east and the west.

Bonnell’s deeply engaging, incisive narrative brings the environmental awakening about the Don to life through the eyes of Charles Sauriol, who owned a cottage at a fork on the river north of O’Connor Drive. In 1947, Sauriol co-founded the Don Valley Conservation Association, which drew attention to the city’s backyard wilderness and spawned activist groups such as Pollution Probe, which organized, in November 1969, a theatrical funeral for the Don, complete with a hearse. “We await the resurrection,” one of the mourners announced.

Long before the eventual rebirth, the valley was pulled back into the crosshairs of Toronto’s leaders. The need to upgrade sewer infrastructure, reduce the risk of catastrophic flooding, mitigate traffic congestion, and fuel suburban growth was one of the catalysts for the formation, in 1953, of North America’s first metropolitan government. An integrated approach to the valley was required. The Don Valley Parkway was built, with its first section opening in 1961, harking back to the romantic ideal of scenic byways. It allowed people to view the beautiful landscape through their windshields while introducing noise and automotive contaminants (and immediately causing traffic jams).

As promising as today’s Port Lands project is, there are potential downsides to the pendulum swinging back toward stewardship for all living things. Green gentrification can occur when parks make once neglected areas desirable to affluent residents. Capitalism “continually produces new strategies of accumulation,” Bonnell writes, as well as new landscapes “to replace those that have become obsolete.” But healthy natural ecosystems are the most resilient buffer in the battle against climate change, and innovation can advance the cause, as with a pilot soil recycling facility near the mouth of the river.

We’ll need a little more time to know where this meandering journey will take us next. But although I now live elsewhere, I’ve become much more attentive to the valley over the past decade, embarking on long walks while visiting Toronto, including one from Burke Brook, in my old neighbourhood, all the way to Lake Ontario. From the chattering of robins and sparrows in shaded parklands to the hum of traffic along the parkway, from luxurious urban backyards to a tent encampment near the harbour, the fragments are morphing into a whole.