Toronto’s trees are water deprived, stressed out, bug infested and old. If we don’t stop killing them, they might just kill us.
The summer of 2007 was not a good one for Toronto’s trees. It was one of the driest periods on record since the dust bowl of the 1930s, and the city was hammered by vicious windstorms. The urban forestry department logged 7,700 storm-related calls before the end of August alone. Branches down, roads blocked, cars totalled.
In the middle of June, a fully grown Norway maple near Coxwell and Danforth was uprooted, crushing a two-storey home. An elderly man who was inside at the time narrowly escaped injury. In late August, a group of friends attending a party near the Scarborough Bluffs weren’t so lucky. Roasting marshmallows in the backyard, the seniors, members of the Scarborough Singles Social Club, heard several loud cracks from a 60‑foot willow nearby. The tree began to sway. The party-goers ran for the house, but they couldn’t move quickly enough. The tree fell across the yard, and three people were injured, one of them rushed to Sunnybrook in critical condition. A 70‑year-old grandmother died on the spot.
If the problems of the city’s urban forest were a whisper before, the deadly Scarborough willow was an ear-splitting shriek. There are 6.5 million trees in Toronto, and a quarter of them, according to the urban forestry department, are in need of maintenance. Our tree canopy declined six per cent between 1994 and 2002, the result of budget cuts and increased stress from climate change, development, pollution and invasive species. Plus, many of the trees that lend such downtown neighbourhoods as Riverdale and the Annex their character are dying; planted around the same time, they’re reaching the end of their lifespans together, too.
It’s a bitter kind of paradox that the depth of the trouble with the city’s existing tree canopy is becoming clear at a time when trees and the environmental and health benefits they offer are starting to seem like the only thing separating us from a wholesale slide into a polar bear–less, smog-choked, drought-stricken desert. The slogans are everywhere: plant a tree, cool the globe; a tree a day keeps the carbon at bay. Talking about what trees “give back” has become commonplace for everyone from environmentalists to real estate agents. In property-mad Toronto, trees are said to increase house values by up to 25 per cent. Planted as a windbreak, they can reduce heating costs by five to 15 per cent. Used for shade, they act like a giant parasol, cutting down air conditioning use by 20 to 40 per cent. And recent research showed that schoolchildren were better able to concentrate and control their impulses with merely a view of trees or other plants.
It’s not overstating it to say that trees make it easier to breathe. A stand of 40 maples absorbs as much carbon dioxide in a year as is produced by a car travelling 20,000 kilometres. And that same stand produces enough oxygen every day to sustain more than 150 people. The leaves of Toronto’s trees also remove 997 metric tonnes of air pollution—nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide, among other pollutants—every year. The urban forest even cuts down on water pollution, since trees absorb and filter rainwater.
It’s enough to bring out the tree hugger in anyone. And it has. Last summer, 59-year-old Ken Wood chained himself to one of nine 40-foot linden trees across the street from his Lansdowne Avenue home in order to stop a city forestry crew from cutting them down. In Dufferin Grove Park, residents rallied against a proposed replacement of a wading pool because it risked damaging the large Norway maples that shade it. And at Yonge and Eglinton, a group of women tried to pressure the school board and a private developer into saving eight mature silver maples from destruction on the grounds of North Toronto Collegiate. They posed for media photos (futilely, it turned out) to show their opposition, hands dramatically clasped together around the base of one of the trees.
We’re finally realizing how much we all have riding on the branches of a bunch of aging, water-deprived, salt-licked, stressed-out, soil-hungry plants. But what if it’s too late?
The concept of a forest within the city limits is a relatively new one. When the first European settlers arrived on the shores of what would become Toronto, they were confronted by dense stands of willow, poplar and cedar and, a little further north, butternut, beech, ash, oak, elm, maple and the towering white pines for which the Don Valley would become known. But within 100 years, much of the indigenous forest was cut down. By the mid- to late 19th century, with the population ballooning and sawmills churning out wood for the settlers’ many needs, native trees had been largely beaten back into marshes, ravines, woodlots and hedgerows—replaced by horse chestnuts and other species more familiar to the newcomers.
Source: Andrea Curtis for Torontolife.com
