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MOVING MOUNTAINS

As our cities grow warmer, it’s time to rethink what and where nature is. Montreal is doing that by planting ecological corridors, Caitlin Stall-Paquet writes

Caitlin Stall-Paquet is a Montreal-based writer and editor. ■ OPINION

During one of the hottest falls in Montreal’s history, I take the metro to the University of Montreal stop on the blue line. The trees surrounding the university are bursting with flaming red and orange as I meet up with biologist Alexandre Beaudoin and a group of retired professors there to walk through his project-inthe-making: the Darlington Corridor. This future greenbelt is starting to cut through the Côtedes-Neiges neighbourhood in the form of pockets of plant life its creator calls “urban acupuncture,” following the path of a riverbed that flows below street level.

Inspired by the southeastern Quebec land-conservation organization Appalachian Corridor and its partners that protect over 13,500 hectares, Mr. Beaudoin launched the project in 2012 on the school grounds that abut the city’s Parc du Mont-Royal, commonly called “the mountain.”

The majority of global populations live in cities, where a proliferation of concrete can cause heat-island effects and even more extreme temperatures. Conservation projects in urban environments are becoming increasingly important in step. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report released on March 20 details that we are likely to reach or surpass 1.5 degrees of warming by 2040.

And if Canada wants to hit its goals of 30-per-cent conservation of land and oceans by 2030, protection can’t just be reserved for vast open spaces, it needs to be a part of our cities – and the everyday lives of more people – too.

To reap the greatest benefits of these interventions, native-species planting is ideal. Mr. Beaudoin essentially replicated the surrounding forests by planting onto the campus a mix of species that grow on the mountain, including maple, oak, serviceberry bushes and black walnut. What started as a 300-tree project expanded to 3,500 on the territory covered by the corridor, with the idea of rethinking urban expansion and letting the mountain take back some of its rightful land.

Though it’s no Everest, Montreal’s 233-metre-high crown jewel is a biodiverse part of the Monteregian Hills. In 1876, it was inaugurated as a gigantic park with a 10-square-kilometre base by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect best known for designing Central Park. Buildings in the city are forbidden from exceeding the height of the mountain. However, the area of the park only covers 3 per cent of what the formation once was, before the surroundings turned into a cityscape. Now concrete and steel clearly define its once-porous borders.

One of Mr. Beaudoin’s goals is to start reversing that percentage: “We’re going to pivot toward the opposite direction,” he says. He wants to feel that nature is “attacking” the city: “There was sort of that guerrilla motivation on my end.” From the campus, Mr. Beaudoin and his team spread outward, creating a corridor by bringing perennials and indigenous plants to a closed-off section of the adjacent Louis-Colin Street, installing 44 planter boxes along Darlington Avenue, planting trees and fruit bushes at Darlington Place, turning drab inclines surrounding the Châteaufort community garden into blooming pollinator-friendly prairies and creating flowering walkways outside the Gingras-Lindsay-de-Montréal rehabilitation institute, all the while teaching residents about rewilding.

In the 1950s, mayor Jean Drapeau, concerned that people were having sex and drinking in Mont-Royal’s hidden underbrush, ordered a number of trees – no one is sure of the exact number, but one estimate puts it at 30,000 – be chopped down in what was called “la coupe de la moralité” – the morality cut. Vegetation was so annihilated that the mountain earned the name Mont Chauve (Bald Mountain) in the early 1960s. Along with causing erosion and choking wet zones via sedimentary runoff, the cut also paved the way for invasive species to creep in and get comfortable. Mr. Drapeau then ordered 60,000 trees be planted, but they were mostly Norway maples and buckthorns, non-native species.

The aim of the corridor is to connect the well of biodiversity that is the mountain to what Mr. Beaudoin calls a nearby biodiversity highway: the train tracks a couple kilometres north of Mont-Royal. Trains are vectors of habitat change since species can hitch a ride from one town to the next, while the tracks themselves become cleared migration routes. This is one of the ways the corridor’s mascot, the red fox, kept finding its way here even after urbanization. I once crossed paths with one of these shy creatures at night while looking out at the city from beside the giant illuminated cross at the summit – we both stopped to assess risk in the dark before silently continuing on our way. The mammal disappeared from these forests in the late 2000s, primarily because of sarcoptic mange. One of the corridor’s goals is to bring the fox back to the mountain using a passive approach by recreating safe habitats.

Rewilding is starting to work, with increased sightings of the canid in recent years, but the fox isn’t the be-all and end-all of the project. It’s rather a way to personify the corridor, to give it a face residents can root for.

Another symbol for the corridor’s ambitions is the native trillium plant, Ontario’s emblematic three-petaled white flower. It blooms in thick May carpets here when left undisturbed by rogue walkers, mountain bikers or kids who forgot to get a bouquet on Mother’s Day. In Montreal, the mountain is in pole position to help with the propagation of this sort of plant species since, after a few bumpy decades, it was designated a Historic and Natural District in 2005.

Mont-Royal is what Ariane Bernier, a biologist at the conservation organization Les Amis de la Montagne, calls a laboratory for invasive species, since it’s a natural space with plenty of population pressure, seeing as it’s visited by five million to eight million people a year. These species flourish without natural predators (in the case of plants, that’s pathogens or animals that consume them) and are opportunists, like the buckthorn bush that enjoyed a burst of growth after Quebec’s destructive 1998 ice storm made plenty of holes in the canopy. The emerald ash borer, an insect originally from southern Asia, has devastated its preferred wood source, leading to over 80,000 trees being cut

down throughout Montreal to stop its spread, while more wait for chainsaws as they die from the outside in. This highlights the importance of diversity, and why Mr. Beaudoin decided to plant about 300 types of plants, alongside 25 tree species, throughout his corridor.

Though Montreal is an urban environment, it’s crisscrossed with green and faces many of the same challenges as places we have an easier time calling natural. In cities, we tend to see spaces as staunchly well-defined, nature neatly contained in concrete quadrants. But if you look closely, you’ll see vegetation cracking its way through pavement, lone flowers sprouting in the slivers where sidewalks meet walls, reclaiming their place under the sun, impossible to keep back. Mr. Beaudoin and other urban naturalists want to align themselves with these rogue plants, breaking up poured concrete more intentionally to let flourish what lies beneath, in a process called demineralization – the word originally referred to the process of removing minerals from water, but has come to mean helping nature reconquer concrete. The word strikes a taut chord with me after a scorching summer during which the parking lot behind my apartment building held heat like a volcano. The idea of demineralization also makes me think of the public square next to my place that I hate for its lack of exposed ground, next to a section of sidewalk constantly flooded by a laundromat, a leak desperate for a natural sponge.

Last November, Mayor Valérie Plante announced increased protection for pollinators throughout the city, a plan that’s perfectly aligned with what Mr. Beaudoin has been developing for a decade. Though he’s making outdoor spaces greener and more livable – which is light years away from often-contested, socalled eyesore endeavours such as wind farms – Mr. Beaudoin has faced a hefty amount of NIMBYism. After two master’s degrees, he’s taken on an interdisciplinary PhD in urban planning that addresses public perceptions of projects like Darlington. He hopes to figure out how to better present this sort of undertaking to locals who resist its growth. Though his project favours fauna commuting through urban areas, Mr. Beaudoin points out that it also has many benefits for residents – from rainwater absorption to heat reduction and food security through urban agriculture. These human gains become a way to present his initiative to reluctant locals, alongside pleas for the solitary fox.

Mr. Beaudoin tells me that a decade of working on this project has also broadened his understanding of the unique ecosystems of cities, requiring him to rethink the traditional dichotomy of “good native plants” and “bad invasive plants.” Mr. Beaudoin says that landscape architects opened his eyes to this issue through the idea of novel ecosystems, which is when new equilibriums are created between indigenous and alien species. He points to the Jean Milot woods in the Hochelaga neighbourhood, where he identified species with a class of biology students, as an example of nature taking over with a cacophonous mix of plants that had become a healthy habitat for birds and small mammals.

“The species that are controlled on Mont-Royal will continue to be controlled, but when they’re in a mineralized urban context, [these invasive plants] aren’t in a natural environment … so I have to change my own work method,” Mr. Beaudoin says. His reassessment makes me question what nature is too. Standing in the middle of the mountain’s woods with Jérôme Bernier (another biologist at Les Amis de la Montagne), it’s hard to deny that this is it – nature – though I’m within spitting distance of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, one of the most densely populated boroughs in the country. Dr. Bernier notes that many people think of nature as being defined by its isolation. In the city, even though there are natural wetlands, different species and ecosystems, the land is considered to be an urban park.

As we walk toward the only permanent wetland left on the mountain – no longer home to frogs and toads since a 1987 deluge brought excessive sediment to the zone – Dr. Bernier spots a class of kids on a treasure hunt tromping through the woods, off the path. He doesn’t chide their teachers, but rather tries to make them realize the potential future impact of these behaviours.

Biologist Ariane Bernier explains how in 2018, they took a turn toward teaching rather than acting as the mountain’s police guardians: “We don’t want to tell people, ‘This is bad behaviour.’ Instead, we want to educate them.” In the winter, she says, they will tell snowshoers or skiers, “Look, there’s a rabbit trail here or small mammals that live underneath the snow cover.”

This tactic became especially important during the pandemic when gyms were closed, travel between regions was discouraged and Montrealers rallied to the natural haven to get a breath of fresh air. The organization has since seen a rise in the popularity of its volunteer program for activities such as planting trees in the fall and controlling invasive species, forming a new class of more independent and experienced volunteers who take a degree of ownership over the work. As of this year, Les Amis de la Montagne also made a stronger turn toward science by installing weather probes throughout the mountain, finally starting to gather data about this habitat where the trees alone sequester an estimated 1.52 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide annually. “The mission here in the 1800s was to provide access to a sound environment, and we can’t lose sight of that,” states Jérôme Bernier, who tells me Montreal temperatures are predicted to rise between 3 and 4 C by 2070.

Though it’s under way with its green steps, the Darlington Corridor may never have an end point. “Once we have forest cover in the city around main streets like Côte-Sainte-Catherine […] we’ll definitely start working on the next space over and branch out,” Mr. Beaudoin says. Les Amis de la Montagne sees further than their current borders too: “We’d like to move beyond the mountain’s base. Parks that used to be a part of the mountain are home to the same plants, like trillium, bloodroot and snow lilies,” Jérôme Bernier says. “Eventually, when we’ll look at it on a macro level, it will look like a bigger ecological corridor.”

Long a sign of progress and what we’ve defined as civilization, concrete has indeed built us up, but maybe we should rethink that shorthand and start seeing its destruction as the true sign of progress. For that to happen, we need to be the municipal-level squeaky wheels our representatives want to pander to: “Elected officials will do it if citizens are behind them, if citizens ask for it,” Mr. Beaudoin says.

Many of us feel despair and anger as the list of natural disasters gets longer each year, but there are places we can turn to as potential bedrocks for hope. We can look at demolished concrete as a sign of building rather than destroying something, as these areas will sprout plants that suck carbon dioxide from the air and help us keep cool. We can revel in this destruction as a physical manifestation of our shared anger, we can push it along by pushing our municipalities to green our spaces. When the streets of my city bloom white in ever-earlier springs with soft carpets of tri-petalled trillium where hard pavement used to lie, I’ll find shade in the demineralized square next to my apartment and finally be able to breathe deeply while admiring our progress.

If Canada wants to hit its goals of 30-per-cent conservation of land and oceans by 2030, protection can’t just be reserved for vast open spaces, it needs to be a part of our cities – and the everyday lives of more people – too.

CONSERVATION

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2023-03-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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