If you’ve ever spent an entire spring clearing away armfuls of painful blackberry canes, nettles, and tiny saplings for a garden, only to have that garden overgrown again by autumn, you know that nature can be tenacious. Wild plants, insects, worms, and other untamed living things are constantly surprising us with their perseverance. The recent Don River waterfront restoration project being undertaken by the city of Toronto, Canada, is a perfect example of nature’s tenacity: century-old plants, insects, and microbes are springing back to life now that they’ve seen sunshine once again.
A Dead River
The city of Toronto was determined to tame its wild, waterfront life, as the Don River that flowed through the heart of the city was a problem to city developers. Its deep ravines made navigating the shores difficult, and the water was being treated as a dumping ground for the city’s waste. In fact, the river was so polluted that it caught fire multiple times in the late 19th century.
In the 1920s, city developers built a concrete canal to house and control this “problematic” river. They enclosed its banks in concrete, resulting in a sludgy industrial wasteland. In 1969, the Don was declared dead. Few mourned its passing.
A dead river is one with so much pollution that most biological life can’t survive. Oxygen levels are depleated, and the river is biologically incapable of supporting most aquatic life. But rivers are constantly changing, and when we change alongside them, beautiful things can happen.
Toronto is changing its attitude toward the Don, and thanks to that change, the river is coming back to life. While the canal still maintains the boundaries of the river, the concrete plugs that stagnated its flow were removed in 2024. Fresh waters are now able to move in and through the river, while along many of its banks, river preservationists are re-creating wetland areas. The changes are slow, but the results are promising.
Surprising Survivalists
The plan to revive the Don began in 2007 and is now almost complete — as far as human intervention goes. Seven and a half acres of coastal wetlands and almost ten acres of wildlife habitat have been added to the riverbank. This replenished habitat replaces what once was post-industrial wasteland.
Wild animals are slowly and cautiously returning to the area, willing to try to live alongside urban humans once again. In fact, this new acreage has been specially built in order to bring in wildlife.
But while Toronto is building up new habitats, they were also looking for evidence of what once was living along the river bank. Soil samples trapped beneath concrete for a century were brought back to a lab for analysis. Within those samples, tiny creatures were moving, eating, and growing.
As soon as the soil was released from its concrete prison, seeds burst into life that had been waiting for this opportunity for so long. Sedges, cattails, worms, plankton, and water fleas that had been dormant for 100 years shook off their long sleep and embraced the day. It’s a reminder of just how resilient these ecosystems are.
Resilience in the Face of Environmental Trauma
The 20th century was not an easy one for the natural world. The rise of industry and the determination to close in and control the natural world caused an unprecedented amount of trauma to ecosystems throughout the world. When humans finally stopped, looked around, and started to realize just how much damage we were doing, the restoration process was staggering.
Toronto’s Don River is the second-most polluted river in Canada. The soil around it had been encased in concrete for a century, yet life found a way to wait out the devastation and recover. The life discovered in the soil was only the most recent exciting discovery in this process.
As scientists and restoration specialists continued to work, they found more and more hidden treasures. For example, pollen from American Chestnut trees was found in the newly exposed soil. American chestnuts used to be common in Toronto, but are now extinct in the area. Toronto was affected by the chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) that destroyed billions of chestnut trees across the continent. Seeds over a century old were found, as well as seeds from the early 20th century. Many of these seeds have been planted, and their seedlings have successfully transplanted back into the area.
Even the remains of what once was the largest and most important peat bog in the area have been unearthed. Peat bogs are an environmental powerhouse, as they are diverse ecosystems supporting a wide variety of life. Peat bogs also store huge amounts of carbon, promoting a healthier climate. They’re stunningly beautiful wild spaces.
The remains of this, once huge, peat bog are being revived by the restoration of the Don River wetlands. And so far, it looks hopeful for the area.
Hope for the Future
Recreating wetlands once we’ve destroyed them isn’t something humans are particularly good at. Often, we miss the complexities at the heart of the ecosystem. Most of the time, when we try to remake a wetland, the restored space fails to function as a wild space.
But in the restoration of these wetlands, we have the hope — and help — of an ecosystem that was just waiting for an opportunity to revive. The recovery of plants, plankton, worms, and water fleas shows us that we have a lot to learn about what is going on in the hidden places. We may cover up the natural world, but we haven’t conquered it. Beneath our world of concrete, life is just waiting to spring back up. And that’s something we can all be grateful for. We need these ecosystems more than we’ve ever realized.
At the Don River, there was a whole world in the soil, just waiting for an opportunity to wake up. Because of that world, this river may follow in the footsteps of other once-dead waterways, like the Rouge in Detroit. It still has issues to address, but it may become a home for fish and other wildlife again. Canoeing and kayaking on the river could become a part of life in Toronto. Rivers are always changing, but change is slow. Fortunately for the Don River, it has a world of hidden life in the soil to help.
To learn more about this initiative, as well as other water initiatives in the Toronto region, feel free to visit the following websites:
The Don River Conservation Authority
Featured image by Erman Gunes, via Dreamstime.com