Cities in the Time of Climate Change: Green is the Colour of Resilience

I currently live in Toronto, Canada, a city of three million people and 13 percent green space (with 2.8 hectares of city-owned or operated parkland per 1,000 people). Known for its conservative politics, Toronto—like many North American cities—is in a headlong collision course with change. I’m talking about climate change. Climate change will change everything. Toronto is going to get “hotter, wetter, and wilder,” says Blair Feltmate of the University of Waterloo. The liberal community of Vancouver, where I raised my family, can expect more of what it already gets: dry summers and wet winters. Just more.

What does it mean to us?

Over 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, disconnected from the natural world that makes up over 90 percent of our country. Mixed boreal forest occupies over 40 percent of Canada’s diverse wilderness and a third of the world’s boreal forest. But we don’t live there. For eighty percent of us, our ecosystem is urban height and sprawl. When we encounter urban trees or small parks, we aren’t experiencing anything remotely natural.

We don’t understand or appreciate what the natural world is or does (for us) by simply being: the life-giving flow of water vapour, tree aerosols and gases that we breathe in with every beat of our hearts; the communication and vibration of pure wildness that contributes to our physical and mental health—from smell to sight to touch and sound; the recursive oscillation of polarities that spark all life—from lightening to the soil beneath our feet; or the natural succession—from colonization to expansion to death and regeneration—that invigorates and defines all that ever and will live.

North American boreal zone

Why would we? We’re not ecologists, scientists, or activists. That’s someone else.

Ecology is the study of environmental relationships. We didn’t learn it or experience it in our homes, locked within a dense row of houses or on the tenth floor of an apartment building from where we commute to and from work. With the exception of some indigenous schools (which teach respect for the spirit of wildness), we certainly didn’t learn it in our schools.

We have no idea what the natural environment is.

And if we can’t even recognize it, how can we understand its functional role in the intricate well-being of this entire precious planet?

Bramble Cay melomys

It is no wonder then that most Canadians—though we may intellectually accept climate change and its effects on this planet (because we’re smarter than some)—likely do not viscerally understand or appreciate why and how it will drastically change our lives. For most of us, climate change—as with Nature—is something that is happening to someone else, somewhere else. From those far away calamities to the quiet struggles no one talks about. We hear and lament over the flooding in Bangladesh or the Maldives. Or the wildfires in northern British Columbia. Or the bomb cyclones of the eastern seaboard. 

Meanwhile, the polar bear struggles quietly with disappearing sea ice in the Canadian arctic. The koala copes quietly with the disappearing eucalyptus. Coral reefs quietly disappear in an acidifying ocean. Antarctic penguins silently starve with disappearing krill due to ice retreat. And while jellyfish invade the Mediterranean, UK seas and northeast Atlantic, the humble Bramble Cay melomys slips quietly into extinction—the first mammal casualty of climate change.

So, those of us who are enlightened speak of climate resilience and adaptation. We arm our cities with words like green infrastructure, stormwater management, urban runoff control, flood mitigation. Ecological literacy. But what are these things to us? They are tools, yes. Good tools to combat and adapt to the effects of climate change. But will they create resilience? I think not.

Resilience comes from within and through a genuine connection with our environment. Tools, no matter how proficient, are only as good as how they are used based on intention from a deep understanding. It isn’t enough to achieve the How of things; we must embrace the Why of things. And that comes from the heart. We must feel it in our hearts. Or it won’t work. And we quite simply won’t survive.

Marq de Villiers wrote in his book Water that water has become imperilled “not through the deliberate actions of evil men, the corporate rapists of ecological fantasy, but through the small doings of many—far too many—ordinary people, doing things in the way they have always done them. That’s where the real danger lies.”

Greenpeace blames Coca Cola and Nestle for the plastic garbage islands littering our oceans; but how did those plastic islands get there? who bought them and then threw them out without a second thought where they were going?

The answer lies with us, the ordinary people. With the choices we make every day. With the language we use. With the respect we give. With our heartfelt gratitude for this beautiful and still bountiful country we live in that gives us the water we drink and the food we eat.

Canadians celebrate our multi-cultural heritage. We pride ourselves in our tolerance and welcoming nature. Our national anthem speaks of our land. Our national symbols embrace nature with the maple, beaver, caribou and loon. Yet who of us knows the habitat of the loon—now at risk, by the way (climate change will impact much of its breeding grounds). Who knows what the boreal forest—which makes up over half of our country—is? How it functions to keep this entire planet healthy, and what that ecosystem needs, in turn, to keep doing this? Who understands that we all live in a watershed with an associated water cycle and what consequences water diversion, removal, squandering or pollution will have on it?

Rosedale Ravine, Toronto

Ecology isn’t rocket science. Ecology is common sense. Ecology is about relationship and discovery.

Open yourself to discovery. Go find Nature, even if it is in the city. Connect with something natural, green and wild. Find the wonder of it.

Find something to love.

When you do, you will find yourself. And that is where you will find resilience.

Are All Canadians Fringe Dwellers?

When I agreed to participate in a study of Romanian writers by the University of Bucharest, I didn’t expect that it would lead to meeting another Canadian writer. That is how fate works…and serendipity. I was talking about seeing life through a different lens in an earlier post, written while still sleep deprived: viewing the world turned upside down or careering on its side. WOOEE!

Then PhD student, Marilena Dracea, at the University of Bucharest who was studying my written works introduced me to a fellow Canadian writer. That in itself is a wondrous thing—that someone half across the world would introduce me to someone in my own country. His name is Shane Joseph. Joseph has written several books. One is entitled Fringe Dwellers. It’s a collection of short stories about the marginalized people in society, those who for some reason or another have suffered some kind of prejudice or treatment as lesser individuals: widows, divorcees, immigrants, unemployed executives, the aged, the young, the poor, those with a perceived mental or physical “infirmity”. He writes about people who once may have led a normal life until a twist in the road—an epiphany, decision, stroke of fate—sent them into the fringes of society.

I would add: or until a collision with an unsavory or unconscionable force or unfair societal condition sent them spinning off the well-beaton path, injured but "enriched". And what of those who have always been perceived this way?

Joseph describes the scenario of a woman who was expelled from her family because she decided to leave the fundamentalist religious organization she was born into. He wrote about a man who is a war hero ... and a bum. Then there was the priest of a dying congregation in a booming suburb. Who are the marginalized and what does that mean? These are people who have a different viewpoint than the current one popular in their culture or region. These are people who may look different, act different, think and speak different, even smell different from the rest. They are generally looked upon askance or overlooked entirely; they are avoided or ridiculed or slandered for being different. They are misunderstood, perhaps even perceived as threatening (to the status quo or precious traditions and rules) just for being who they are.

What is it to be different and how did they get there? Most of the time it isn't an overt choice. Most people don't say to themselves, "I'm going to be different." However, it usually arises from having made some kind of decision (usually from the heart) that ends up setting them apart and making them different, or at least perceived as different (I guess that's the same thing in the end). The view is the opposite of the "mob mentality", which is driven by fear and the need to be the same. To "blend in".

Our society tends to view "fringe dwellers" as "broken" somehow, requiring subduing, in need of alteration (through drugs or some other rehabilitation technique to help them conform); social mores compell us to use our compassion, even our pity on these "wayward" unconventional souls. Instead, society could learn from them. For, like the scattered pieces of a broken mirror (that an ordered society would cast away as inconsequential or "messy") fringe dwellers offer diverse and fresh perspectives on all things important. They are the heralds of change and provide the scaffolding of a more plastic, flowing society that embraces its own evolution.

In a blog post entitled, “Are We All Fringe Dwellers?” Joseph shared that while doing his Canadian book tour, typical middle-class and apparently comfortably off Canadians shared perceptions of their own “marginalization”. This suggested to him that he had “tapped into the [Canadian] zeitgeist quite accidentally”.

Canada has long held international acclaim for its success as a multicultural society and for its ability to celebrate diversity through a federal constitution. In 1971 the Liberal Party government of Pierre Trudeau announced an unprecedented "Implementation of Policy of Multiculturalism within Bilingual Framework" in the House of Commons, the precursor of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of the Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservative government in 1988. This made Canada the first country in the world to declare multiculturalism as official state policy. Canada's cultural mosaic is described by some as pluralistic, which views each culture or subculture in a society as contributing unique and valuable cultural aspects to the whole culture. In a 2002 interview with the Globe and Mail, the 49th Imam of the Ismaili Muslims described Canada as "the most successful pluralist society on the face of our globe", citing it as "a model for the world."

Perhaps, it is because we are all Fringe Dwellers…

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.