teabowl

There’s an incredible feature of Toronto that I’m only discovering now: ravines. Before I moved to Toronto, this wasn’t even part of my vocabulary. A ravine is a small valley, often with an active stream, found in urban areas. Turns out the Toronto ravine system is quite extensive and provides beautiful pockets of green woodland in the middle of the city.

This weekend, a brisk, restorative walk through David A. Balfour Park and the “Vale of Avoca” ravine (who names these things? :) yielded these pictures. Sadly, I didn’t have my regular camera with me, so the contrast is pretty bad in these over-exposed phonecam pics. I want to go back and take detailed pictures of the graffiti everywhere.

As you can see, it’s a strange, almost mystical place, unexpected in the middle of the city bustle. On a misty day, you half expect to encounter fairies dressed in camo pants, or a group of trolls smoking weed near the riverbed.

There are multiple undocumented but reasonably well-maintained paths, some further up the slopes, some right down in the middle near the stream. What’s particularly delightful about this ravine is that it’s mostly empty, even on a beautiful, warm spring Sunday like yesterday. I think the ‘urban grit’ puts off many of the more middle class leisure walkers (who might prefer the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, a long linear trail of about 5km that occupies an old commuter train track from the 1890s). But it’s quiet (the city’s hum seems far away) and the air is good.

When I left the park, a bicycle cop was writing up two young men at the exit. One, a twenty-something with a red nose, bike messenger clothes, a bike and slurred speech advised me not to drink “down there” because he just got a ticket. I didn’t quite know what to say and mumbled something about “just walking.”

I think this blend of trees, trails, graffiti, concrete and urban decay is fantastic. Wear solid shoes.

The City of Toronto has launched a Zerofootprint co-branded CO2 calculator. Zerofootprint is a Canadian not-for-profit aiming to calculate and offset our individual and collective impact on the environment. Above is my own “quick calculator.” I don’t know if I’m supposed to be appalled or elated: being a vegetarian in a small apartment is obviously a good thing; flying around in air planes and driving a car are not.

Try it out at http://www.toronto.zerofootprint.net. Or read about Zerofootprint the organization here.

There’s a great article about a speech David Suzuki - environmentalist, scientist, activist - gave at McGill University in The McGill Daily.

He described speaking to children in Toronto who could not explain where water or food came from, only that it was supplied by the economy.

Our deep disconnection from the environment, and increasingly our inability to establish even theoretical connections between the soil, plants and animals in our food chain and ourselves, is maddening and sad. Especially urban children, in the developed and developing world, have no idea where food comes from.

Increasingly - as Michael Pollan elegantly argues - food also isn’t food anymore. Most items we buy from supermarkets are industrially assembled from component ingredients (most of which are based on corn), containing chemical compounds that we wouldn’t recognize as ‘food’ if we were to examine them individually.

So it’s understandable that children don’t understand where food comes from. Adults don’t either. We are deeply confused and uncertain about the world we live in:

Suzuki also underlined the interconnectedness of humans with their natural world – a point not often made by mainstream environment critics. “We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves,” he said.

I just saw an interesting piece on Deutsche Welle TV. Researchers at the Institute for the Foundations of Architecture at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have successfully built a rudimentary building using live trees and other materials. Dubbed ‘Baubotanik‘ (’Building Botany’), the idea is to exploit the natural characteristics (including growth) of living plants in conjunction with regular building materials in order to create a new kind of building.

So far, the group from Stuttgart has created a free standing bridge in 2005 (’Steg’), and a birding observation tower in 2007 (’Vogelguckhaus’). Pictures can be seen at their home page or on DW TV’s video on demand (German only).

I think this is very evocative and constitutes an interesting type of future construction, especially in areas where a low ecological footprint is required, such as nature reserves, zoos or botanical gardens. I was especially impressed by the idea that these would be ’self-repairing’ constructs - hurt trees can heal themselves, compensating for any harm by growing around it.