kg NOX emissions of one truck during 20 days

TExT by LorrAInE JohnSon

A new approach to the protection and management of remaining natural areas in the Hamilton/Burlington region offers an exceptional example of collaboration for the greater good. Under the banner of the Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark System, a multi-agency alliance has formed to purchase and restore remaining green spaces and create corridors connecting Lake Ontario to the Niagara Escarpment. Discussions began in 2006, and a formal agreement (a Memorandum of Understanding) among the various partners was signed in 2013. According to Peter Kelly, coordinator of the project, no other alliance quite like it exists in eastern North America. What’s unique is that although the deed for each land purchase (or donation) may be held by one particular agency within the coalition, the money for the purchase may be jointly raised, with the understanding that the land will be protected and managed in perpetuity as part of the larger EcoPark System.

The alliance formed in response to development pressure in one of Canada’s most rapidly growing urban regions. Natural areas in this part of southern Ontario are severely fragmented, with a number of 400-series highways and rail lines flowing through—and bisecting—the landscape. According to David Galbraith, Head of Science at the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) in Hamilton who has been chair of the EcoPark System initiative from its earliest days, the project stemmed from two related questions: how best to manage Cootes Paradise, which the RBG owns, and how best to facilitate the ongoing remediation of Hamilton Harbour, which multiple agencies, including the RBG, are involved in.

“You can’t improve a harbour,” notes Galbraith, “if you don’t improve the watershed.” Hence, the natural heritage committee of the remediation project started exploring options to bring various conservation groups and agencies together to improve connectivity across the landscape. “We tend to manage natural areas on the basis of property lines,” says Galbraith. “But a Jefferson salamander doesn’t care who owns the land. What’s important are things like road risks, and permeability of the landscape, and habitat values.”

To date, nine partner groups have signed onto the formal agreement to expand conservation lands in the region, and to restore the properties: two conservation authorities (Conservation Halton and Hamilton Conservation Authority), three municipalities (City of Burlington, City of Hamilton, and Halton Re-

01/ Marsh, Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton IMAGE/ Peter Kelly 02/ Kerncliff Park boardwalk, wetland, and cliff

IMAGE/ Peter Kelly 03/ Smokey Hollow, Waterdown IMAGE/ Peter Kelly

gion), three non-profit organizations (Bruce Trail Conservancy, Hamilton Naturalists’ Club, and Royal Botanical Gardens), and one university (McMaster). Each of the partners has contributed funds, and decisions about acquisition and restoration are made by consensus. “Everyone has to be on board for decisions,” says Peter Kelly. And, so far, this model has worked well.

Properties are acquired by the partnership in three ways: by direct purchase; by donation; through conservation easements. “Individually, each group wouldn’t necessarily have the funds to buy strategically important corridors,” says Galbraith, “but together we’ve got clout and more resources.” In a highly unusual and altruistic approach to land ownership, the alliance doesn’t place much importance on which group actually has title to the land—the point is rather that the land is protected by a group sharing a bigger goal of conservation.

Beyond actual ownership for conservation purposes, one of the other tangible benefits of the arrangement is that the alliance meets regularly to address common concerns and land management issues collectively. “We’ve created a table where we can all get together,” as Galbraith puts it. Topics covered include the common problem of invasive species and issues related to managing urban wildlife such as coyotes, for example. Restoration plans for each property in the EcoPark System are developed jointly by committee and agreed to by all.

As of early 2017, a total of 5,000 acres of land are protected in the Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark System. The RBG has designated all 2,700 acres of its lands to the initiative—right down to the parking lots. Other partners have also contributed lands under their jurisdiction, and the alliance has added another 223 acres since the Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2013.

Both Kelly and Galbraith speak with enthusiasm of one particular success for the alliance: the protection of a wildlife corridor that connects a coastal wetland on the western end of Lake Ontario to the Niagara Escarpment. This is the last such connection that does not have a 400-series highway running through it. Now, it has pride of place in a new model of collaborative, connected conservation.

bIo/ LorrAInE JohnSon IS ThE AuThor of ThE rEcEnTLy PubLIShED rEvISED EDITIon of

GardENs AnD ThE EDITor of GrouNd. 05

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04/ Pollinator meadow planting, Clappison Woods, Waterdown IMAGE/ Peter Kelly 05/ Tire-removal work at Eileen and John Holland Nature Sanctuary in Burlington IMAGE/ Peter Kelly 06/ Egret, Hamilton IMAGE/ Peter Kelly

clara Maccallum fraser (cMf): In my first semester as a masters in planning student at Ryerson University, we had to do a planning law class assignment in which we did a site assessment, explaining all the details about one particular property and identifying the policies overlaid there. I decided that I wanted to learn more about planning on the reserve that my family has always gone to. As I scrolled to the reserve on the mapping tool we normally used, it went grey and said, “no information available.”

01/ Plan of parts of Ontario and Quebec showing lands affected by the Robinson treaty and treaty number 3, along with unsurrendered land, 1901 IMAGE/ Library and Archives Canada

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02/ A park in Brampton, Ontario IMAGE/ Rui Lopes 03/ The intersection of Native Landing and Whitewash Way in Brampton [Editor’s note: This intersection was brought to Ground’s attention in a public lecture by Pierre Bélanger.] IMAGE/ Rob Patterson

04/ Treaty money, 1930; for more information on treaty-making, see the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, published in 1996. IMAGE/ Library and Archives Canada 05/ Whitewash Way street sign IMAGE/ Rob Patterson That was my first introduction to the massive disconnect between what planners are doing—municipal planners, regional planners, planners working for government ministries, people who are dealing with management and use of the land—and Aboriginal and treaty rights.

I am now doing a Ph.D. at York University, continuing to look at the way in which urban planning intersects with Aboriginal and treaty rights. Planners are increasingly told that they need to take into account Indigenous interests, but they don’t have any training on this. There’s dialogue around these issues, but it’s largely framed by conflict and focused on problems. (The conflicts at Caledonia and Oka were sparked by planning decisions, for example.) The entryway for settlers into this discussion, discourse, and consultation with Indigenous peoples is laced with fear—a fear of the unknown. We’re told that we need to know about treaty rights, but that wasn’t part of our education growing up, so we’re not well informed.

Policy has changed, but practice hasn’t. In 2014, the Provincial Policy Statement, which guides what planners do, was updated to include reference to Indigenous peoples. Before that, there was nothing. Yet planners don’t know what to do with that. There’s a big grey area on how to translate this highlevel discourse around the duty to consult and accommodate Aboriginal peoples‘ treaty rights with everyday planning vernacular or with the processes that are a part of planners’ everyday work.

My Ph.D. dissertation will be asking a couple of questions. One, how has treatymaking shaped urban and regional planning processes in Canada? Conventional approaches to planning don’t consider the role and impact that Indigenous peoples have had in shaping our institutions today. I consider treaty-making as early planning. But often we‘re told that the early planning in Canada started around issues related to infrastructure, such as the need for clean water.

My second question is: how do Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing and values differ in relation to land management? I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the philosopher John Locke’s idea of how you make land valuable: you buy a plot of land and you mix the sweat of your brow and your blood with the soil. He’s talking about developing the land, and that’s what makes it valuable. You can see that in the conflicts that take place now—whether it’s development within cities or resource development— there’s a stark difference in how we see value. How does that differ from Indigenous understandings of values and land?

The third question I’m asking in my dissertation is: how can contemporary planning policy in Ontario, and Canada in general, evolve so that it’s informed by Indigenous principles, enabling the planning process to be a catalyst for genuine reconciliation? We talk about reconciliation but not in the context of planning. We talk about law and about social work—these are mentioned in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as areas that need to integrate knowledge of residential schools, for instance, into their education. But what about the people who are learning how to manage land? These are people who are making massive decisions about how we use and share the land, so I find it bizarre that reconciliation is not something that planners are talking about. The values we have around land—they’re just buried.

christine Migwans (cM): I want to talk about treaty consciousness, and of what collective memory and expression of treaties are for Indigenous peoples and their divergences from planning and other types of regulations of Indigenous identity—the relationship between spatial use and ideological apparatuses of colonialism, such as residential schools.

Manulany Mayer, a Hawaiian epistemologist I really respect, talks about Indigeneity in a way that really resonates with the way I also experience my Indigeneity. She talks about it as an enduring set of practices, those that have endured over time. The key word, number one, is enduring; number two is practice. If you look at what colonialism tried to do, it was to construct Indigenous peoples as a permanent absence. Permanent absence is the opposite of enduring Indigeneity. So colonialism made Indigenous people—tried to turn us into a people who were destined to vanish—this a radical divergence away from what was embodied and enacted on the lands by Indigenous nations.

I see Indigeneity as enduring presence. And you have to have a practice to be present. I see the land itself as conscious; it’s a sentient being you can communicate with through rigorous practice. And you can have rigorous practices of listening to and hearing the lands. So in that way it’s not like a metaphor or a cute romanticism. Our ceremonies and our ways of healing and our way of knowing are intrinsically embedded in a consciousness that was realized through our practice of ceremony.

Rigorous practice obviously tunes the senses. Rigorous spiritual practices calm the mind and help quell thoughts in order to have rigorous processes of listening and hearing. It’s not like a supernatural thing—that was part of colonialism, making these fictions about us, like we’re so romantic and so primitive, and we were just destined to vanish.

Indigenous knowledge is a rigorous practice that leads to spiritual insight, just like any other rigorous spiritual knowledge. The treaties are an invitation into consciousness, an invitation to share Indigenous concepts of nationhood. We were not relating through nation-states in the early part of treaty-making, so we’re understanding and invoking our nationhood through our sense of connection to the land. We’re seeing nationhood as something that is really connected to deep processes of inner knowing, and knowing truth and knowing consciousness. We practise our knowledge, it makes truth, and that creates collectivity. We have nationhood; we share nationhood with the plants, or with the thunderbirds. And we really interact with them. Basically, when we made those treaties, we were saying, this treaty is a peace and friendship treaty. Or, this treaty is going to be here for as long as the sun shines and the grass grows. We were basically extending radical relationality to the people who showed up here. We conveyed that by the highest expressions of consciousness. Because what is the highest truth of consciousness? That the sun shines and the grass grows. We extended the idea, we shared that with them. We said not only that we’ll embody that through wampum, but that we’ll embody that in the total sense. We’ll have a symbol of the relationship, which will be this wampum, but it really is embodied—your body senses what the land says and what the spirits say.

And that was okay for a little bit, until Canada formed and created the Indian Act. That was a radical departure because Canada formed itself and then said, in our laws you are illegal, our laws are extermination laws: you should be on a reserve and not be able to leave the reserve; you must have a pass to leave the reserve; your spirituality should be eradicated; and we will continue until there’s not a single Indian left. Canada tried to legislate Indigeneity out of existence through categories—status Indian and all these horrific types of Indian policy. Then treaty planning turned to a process of land surrender. It ruptured our sense of consciousness because it was basically trying to map unconsciousness onto Indigenous bodies and place, and make a new spatial consciousness, which is the spatial consciousness of the nation-state and the country. It mapped a very violent thing onto us forcibly—making all the children go to residential schools, and then torturing the children, and murdering the children. This reconstructed what we embodied literally, into the image of our colonizers.

They basically legislated the idea that no, you don’t exist, and you must internalize that you don’t exist, believe it, not only spatially but also ideologically. They attempted to eliminate the sense we ever existed as a people on the land.

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06/ Treaty signing at Windigo, Ontario, July 18, 1930 IMAGE/ Library and Archives Canada 07/ A park in Brampton, Ontario IMAGE/ Rui Lopes So if we’re talking about planning, we’re saying, well, what are we going to plan on the lands of the people whose children we killed?

I see the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a return to treaty-making, it’s the same process. That we engage the consciousness of the land, but we also have other types of work to do in restoring the relationship. So it can’t just be about land, what non-Indigenous peoples do on the land, and Indigenous people again as a permanent absence, just plugging them in somewhere. It’s not about that. It’s about really being seen. What does it mean if we again are seen, if we again are present? It means we rupture a landscape, and consciousness will emerge.

If we have rigorous spiritual practice together, then insight can emerge, and the way we should share land will emerge from practice. I believe Indigeneity can be invoked in every moment, that it can emerge, that it can rupture again by being able to practise mindfulness of colonialism. I can observe the colonialism, I’m conscious of it. I’m mindful of it. And we can have processes that draw us into collective consciousness. Insight comes from consciousness, and practice is pathways. What we practise will show our way forward.

So, is it fair to do planning that erases certain parts of violent experiences of Indigenous peoples? Is it ethical to live in a country that can’t recognize the way it came into being? We have to be able to recognize that this is where we live and this is what happened. For us to have reconciliation, we have to disentangle from colonialism; colonialism is the consciousness killer. I don’t think planning or land management is the issue. The paradigm is around the recovery of the relationship—the truth of our relationship to the land. Certain things are true for us—such as that you can just go ask thunderbirds in the land to help you, and that is the right thing to do. You should just do that, practise reconciliation, very simply by enacting consciousness.

We’re looking at two different types of spatial consciousness. What kind of spatial

consciousness is assumed in planning (its theories and its practices)? And what types of spatial consciousnesses are assumed or embodied when we talk about treaties? On paper, in the context of land surrender, it’s not like, well, it’s on paper, and it says you surrendered this land, so now we can plan on it because you surrendered it. That’s not what a treaty is, and those aren’t treaty ethics. Our treaty ethics extend everywhere. We have treaties with the spirits, treaties with each other, treaties with our land. We have radical treaties, and I see it as asserting our right to relationship, the right to right relationship. This is not a simplistic “going back”; it’s the idea that through realizing, enacting, and embodying new practice, insight will emerge.

cMf: Last year, I took a course with my supervisor, Deb McGregor, called Reshaping Research with Indigenous Peoples. It was a life-changing course. At a certain point in the middle of the semester, I reached a point that shifted the way I think about doing things. This shift was instigated by learning about Indigenous research methodologies, which differ depending on the community. But there are some common features, one of which is the process of reflexivity—spending a lot of time really looking inward to see what are the things that have shaped you, whether in your own life or in your own culture. Academics spend a lot of time trying to make things neutral (making sure that you’re aware of all your subjective biases, and trying to eliminate them), but Indigenous researchers talk about the objectivity bias— our insistence that we can be distant, and that we can be separate from what we’re talking about, when in fact it’s completely arrogant to assume that you came to these conclusions just on your own in isolation.

Christine was talking about practice, and it’s a spiritual practice that grounds her. Western culture dismisses rituals. We have a ton of our own rituals, but it dismisses rituals that are actually acknowledged. In this process of learning about Indigenous research methodologies, what occurred to me was the importance of ceremony and bringing people into this space of ceremony. Planners are always saying, what can I do? I want to do something, I want to make a change, I see that this is wrong, and I want to do something. But what actually needs to happen is self-reflection, a process that’s going to take place over generations. Education will play a role, and I’m really trying to push for planning education to include Indigenous issues (excuse the vagueness of that) in the accredited planning program, but it really has to start with every individual confronting their own prejudices and taking themselves to a place of discomfort.

cM: People who assert objective knowing have to have a lot of feelings about the validity of objective knowing. They have a lot of feelings that it’s a right way to see the world. So I’m, like, okay, how about you tell me about your feelings about objective knowing, and then we can go underneath your claim to objective knowing, where there is a bunch of other confusion, and disembodiments, which, of course, is what colonialism will do. It’s a process of disembodiment. It disembodies everybody, if everybody thinks in a colonial paradigm.

If you have an emotional integrity, you will get to that understanding. Which is precisely why if we create emotional geographies and look at moral landscapes, if we look at the landscape in a different way, then we can see that we have various outpouring of truths and emotions from all people who live here.

I think that’s what reconciliation is asking for: emotional integrity and moral integrity. And fostering inner knowing is the right thing to do for all people. Knowledge will emerge if we go to a space of integrity. We’ll find the knowledge about how to plan or how to do things.

It’s like we’re still failing the treaty, and we’re still doing colonialism. Because it puts Indigenous people in the place of dismantling colonialism; it forces Indigenous people into doing the work alone. And that’s not the premise of the treaty in any way.

People are connected to place, and there are very intense emotions people have with place, and the deeper we go into place, the more consciousness we can realize. If we really practise rigorously and work on embodiment instead of disembodiments, then it’ll be okay…

When people are honest and have honest, rigorous inner knowing, they will willingly step away from colonial processes. I really believe that. And they would have their moral imagination to see something else if they made the inner space to see and to know. Instead of just always doing colonial imagining.

cMf: For people who want to start undoing the narrative about this place that some of us call Canada, a good place to start is to read the report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, a massive report that was done in 1996. It was commissioned out of the conflict at Oka. You can read it in sections; it’s accessible, and compelling. You can learn about the treaty-making that happened before settlers arrived, the treaty-making that happened in Europe, and then the treatymaking that happened between.

Treaty-making is a part of all of our history, and we need to open our eyes and re-learn what should be our national narrative. And treaties should be a part of our narrative of this country and this space, however you understand it. And so I would urge you to read that. For a start.

[ThIS convErSATIon Took PLAcE on novEMbEr 30, 2016, AS PArT of ThE DIALoGuE SErIES InDIGEnIzE or DIE, curATED by kEvIn bEST, hELD In ToronTo. for MorE InforMATIon on ThE SErIES, vISIT WWW.unIfyToronTo.cA.]

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TExT by AnDrEW b. AnDErSon

Oman is a country we hear very little about. As a result, this ecologically diverse and stunningly beautiful country, perched on the edge of the western shores of the Indian Ocean, is one of the world’s best-kept secrets. While I generally like to keep it that way, the natural and cultural heritage of Oman is worth sharing.

With high mountains that rise more than 3,000 metres from the coastal plains, beguiling sand dunes, vast escarpments that expose the geological history of the planet, gravel plains that burst into bloom with the spring rains, lush green wadis (valleys), and one of the world’s most unusual ecosystems—the monsoon-influenced sub-tropical cloud forest of Dhofar—the seven terrestrial habitats of Oman are as varied as they are beautiful and scientifically significant. The country is home to nearly 1,400 native plant species, with very high numbers of endemic plants that grow nowhere else on earth. This quiet corner of Arabia is the living laboratory where the plants of Asia and the plants of Africa have mixed over the ages to create a native flora of global scientific value. In recognition of the ecological significance of the native plants of Oman and an ancient agricultural heritage that goes back uninterrupted to the very beginnings of domestication, the Sultan of Oman initiated the development of Oman Botanic Garden (OBG) by Royal Decree in 2005. Since then, a growing team of botanists, ecologists, ethnobotanists, horticulturists—and me, a landscape architect who joined the team in 2011—has been scouring the country, documenting the ecological conditions, discovering species new to science, and collecting seeds to grow, for the first time in cultivation, the native plants of the entire country. It’s a tall order.

Simultaneously, the OBG team has been working with a huge array of consultants to design the project. Working with landscape architects, architects, engineers of every description, interpretation designers, graphic designers, soil scientists, plant physiologists, irrigation designers, to name but a few, we have been hard at work designing what promises to be a scientific and cultural institution of international significance. With more than 10,000 construction drawings ready to be put to good use, the project is about to start construction. The concept for the Oman Botanic Garden has remained constant since the inception of the project: to present the native plants of Oman, along with the cultivated plants that tell their own story of human development, in a series of scientifically accurate, habitatbased displays. The seven terrestrial habitats of Oman will each be represented, with their unique plants and landscape features taking centre stage.

The botanic garden will be built in one of the hottest capital cities in the world: Muscat. Despite soaring summer temperatures and humidity levels in Muscat, the plants from five of the seven terrestrial habitats are naturally adapted to these harsh conditions and will be planted in outdoor gardens and in surrounding amenity areas. However, the plants from the southern mountains and from the northern mountains will require climate-controlled interior environments in order to survive the long, hot Muscat summers.

The plants of the northern mountains, including Mediterranean-inspired juniper and olive woodlands, will be housed in a glass biome that emulates the colder, drier montane conditions. The biome has been sited to minimize solar gain while providing the light levels that the plants require to flourish.

The plants of the southern mountains include some of the rarest and most exotic plants on earth. Naturally occurring in a narrow band of escarpments that faces the southern Arabia Sea, and inundated by the annual Indian Ocean monsoon, these are the plants that make up the mysterious cloud forest of Dhofar. Once the monsoon season has passed, the cloud forest—dripping wet and swirling with fog for three months of the year—reverts back to hyper-arid conditions.

In order to provide the plants of this habitat with the unique conditions they require to survive, one of the world’s technical marvels is about to come to fruition: the Oman Botanic Garden southern biome. The sweeping curves and undulating design of the biome are impressive in and of themselves, however the story of the design of this structure demonstrates how light and landscape can influence the design of buildings. The biome contains five distinct habitat zones, with each of those habitat zones sub-divided into scientifically accurate sub-habitat zones. With a public display area of more than 7,500m2—in addition