It has been a very strange year for us. We are located at the Grand Potager at 7000 Blvd Lasalle in Verdun and the land behind the Grand Potager. Our world turned upside down when we were allowed by Verdun on municipal land to grow a wildlife garden and to renature the côte-nord of the St. Laurent and on top of this, the Benny Library gave us permission to rewild their flower garden plots.
We want to show you some before-and-after pictures of our work, on the backyard garden, the canary grass, the phragmites and the Japanese knotweed:
Backyard garden, before: April 2024, just Kentucky blue grass and dogwood. After: summer 2024, over 60 species of wildflowers. We used about two tons of soil over eight days, total cost: about $500 for the soil.
Canary grass, burdock area before: late April 2024, after weeding. We cut several hundred of pounds of burdock, several tons of Canary grass, panic veldt grass, black mustard, Japanese stilt grass, etc., covering grounds with about three tons of soil. Total cost: about $700 for soil.
Before: phragmites summer 2024, after cutting down and removing over 20 tons of 12- feet high phragmites.
Before: Eight-feet tall Japanese knotweed, one of two patches each of about at least 1,500 lbs each. Plants cut down to the roots, which will be removed with pickaxes next spring after wildflowers take root to stabilize the soil so removal of knotweed roots won’t cause erosion.
The gardens are small in size but huge in potential. We started both very late as far as cold stratification goes. Native wildflowers seeds, unlike commercial food crops and commercial flowers, have a built-in germination inhibitor, so they do not grow over fall and freeze to death in winter. This inhibitor is destroyed slowly with cold and moisture. So, if you gather wildflower seeds in the fall, in winter, or in the spring, and keep them dry at room temperature, or in the refrigerator or freezer, they will not germinate. They are not stratified; the inhibitor is not destroyed, except with both cold and moisture. If you plant wildflower seeds in May 2025, they will not germinate until May 2026. They need both moisture and cold at the same time. You need to plant them in the fall, over winter or very early spring so they have a prolonged cold and wet period at the same time which destroys the germination inhibitor. This is stratification. If you want wildflowers in 2025 you need to plant outdoors in fall or winter 2024 or very early in 2025. But with the constraints imposed by time, season, seeds available, we managed to prove our point that rewilding was very feasible, dirt cheap, and that within five years Montreal will be the greenest city in North America.
The côte-nord we were authorized to rewild is about 3,000 square feet in size, about 0.7 acres, which is small, but almost ½ of it has a 50% slope, which is dangerous because, it has furrow, deep holes, and was covered with vegetation, making footing and sight (visibility) perilous. Therefore, we really had only one volunteer, someone about 40 years old who had hiked the entire length of the Appalachian trail and was in tip-top shape. So, if he fell, the danger of injury was minimal. Thus there were only two main workers, Oz, age 78, and Joan, age 74. Oz fell about four times. The first time he fell, it was in the Japanese knotweed patch after tripping on a hidden groundhog hole covered with canes accumulated over several years. He was on his back with his head at a level several feet lower than his feet. It took him about five minutes to turn from his back to prone and to stand up. We did not want to risk anyone getting hurt.
This spring 2025, the land has been cleared, the dangers are visible, and we will be working in trails parallel to the slope so the danger of falls and injuries will be minimal. If you or your family wants to weed and garden, you are always welcome.
The sudden change in the freezing temperatures at the beginning of December was always a surprise, but we managed to finish the outdoor work, just in the nick of time. We planted millions of native wildflower seeds of 40 species all over our patch of the cote nord. We accumulated many pounds of wildflower seeds from nature for free instead of paying thousands and thousands of dollars if we had bought them from specialized nurseries. Next spring we look forward to a long productive crop of wildflowers, butterflies, moths, toads, frogs, snakes, many new birds, who will enjoy the new plants, food and stay for the summer and winter.
We have switched from physical labour to intensive reading. It is something we both missed, but we were too busy weeding and sleeping to do much else. There is so much literature relevant to the environment and the sociology of Montreal. We have finished about 15 books so far this winter. But there are so many more excellent books to be read.
Among the best books we can recommend to you are:
- “Doughnut Economics” by Kate Raworth. It describes a new way of seeing how to change the world. It traces the history of neoliberalism, how our present economic system is destroying society and the environment. It is different from other critiques of neoliberalism by giving an honest, practical, constructive alternative.
- “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling. Hans Rosling was a medical doctor (he died in 2017) who worked in Mozambique doing medicine for the urban poor. He was an honest, of humble origins, decent Swedish man, who worked hard developing competency in solving local and worldwide problems. In any other country except Sweden at his birth time, his mother and grandmother would have died of poverty’s diseases, and he would have ended up at best a working-class drudge. His book is different from others in looking at problems with the latest research on global results and therefore exposes the misinformation and lies we have in our hearts and minds about what needs to be done and can be done. He wants the public to develop 10 instincts to change their views and figure out the truth. We disagree with his approach but applaud his insights and humanity. The measure of a man is how he sees himself and others, and how he treats himself and others and his understanding of the world. If a man has a false view of the world, he often hurts himself and the world.
Rosling’s view is true, pragmatic and realistic. We disagree, how to translate and teach this to the public. He is very optimistic in contrast to many in the environmental community, because he has worked hard to understand the underlying causes of problems and where solutions exist and should be exploited. We agree with the optimism. But we do not believe the average person will take the time to read up on and reason out false assumptions and information and the prejudices the world has. There are too many sources that deliberately spread lies. We believe the public needs to be confronted progressively and regularly with new facts by reliable sources. For example, for decades people worried about overpopulation and starvation. What has been observed is that over the last two generations, when the median income in a country rose over $1000 per family per year, the women themselves limited the birth rate to two or one births per female. Prior to this level of income, the infant death rate was so high, families had to have four or more children so that one child would survive to adulthood. When the income rose to $1000 per year per family, the infant survival rate rose to over 90% and now, too many children now causes economic hardship and the whole family going to bed hungry. Women individually and collectively, took birth control into their own hands because they loved their children and family. They did what is best for themselves, their children, their families, society. This happened no matter the religion, the government, the birth rate fell. Catholic Italy, Ireland, Quebec, like Protestant Ontario, or Buddhist Japan, or communist China, have low birth rates and are having problems having enough young people that will look after the elderly. People still in general, do not realize this and still worry about overpopulation and not a steep drop in the youth population. If you ask them to reason out this fact, you will be waiting too long. Just tell them the truth and let them reason for themselves the consequences and solutions. - “How I Learned To Understand The World” by Hans Rosling. This is a heart-warming biography of a very decent human being. He went from a dirt poor family to a degree in medicine to a full professor at Upsala University working for the United Nations on worldwide problems. There is so much to learn from decent people. We waste so much time reading and listening to misguided fools and charlatans.
- “The Serviceberry” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This is in a way a condensed version of her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Europeans are too quick to dismiss Indigenous wisdom and coarsen themselves, and to slowly, progressively impoverish themselves, their families, society and the environment. Robin’s grandparents were part of the “Trail of Tears”, she could have added trail of death.
- “The Invention of Nature” by Andrea Wulf. A Biography of Alexander Von Humboldt, who was a rockstar scientist of his time, the early and mid 1800s, known, respected and read by and spent time with Thomas Jefferson, Napolean, von Goethe. His works were beloved by Charles Darwin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and other poets and authors. His books were best sellers and sold thousands of copies. His lectures were attended by thousands. It is amazing how quickly the world forgets history and innovators.
- “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann. A respectful discussion of the work by naturalist William Vogt, a friend of Aldo Leopold and Roger Tory Peterson, and Norman Borlaug, a tireless biologist who bred wheat and rice varieties and won a Nobel Prize for his work. Both men wanted to save the world by feeding it. They worked after WWII, when millions were starving per year. From 1958 to 1962, the Chinese government hid the fact, and still does, that 36 million Chinese starved to death when the great leap forward turned to crop failures and starvation.
- “Rewilding” by Cain Blythe and Paul Jepson. A history of man and nature going back beyond the last Ice Age and the fact that the natural habitat is probably not climax forest but probably savannahs maintained by giant herbivores. Mankind killed off the giant herbivores and has a stake now in “planting trees.”
- “Dirt” by David Montgomery. A history of man’s systematic destruction of the environment with the intervention of agriculture after the last ice age 12,000 years ago.
- “Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History Of Neoliberalism” by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. Monbiot is the wild child of environmental work. He has been threatened, beaten unconscious, yet he still persists in working to save the environment he loves so much.
- “Feral” by George Monbiot. A history of some of his environmental work including protecting indigenous people being murdered in Brazil.
- “Light Eaters” by Zoe Schlanger. New insights into plants and their role in the environment.
- “Vanishing Treasures” by Katherine Rundell. Katherine Rundell, who has won for another book, the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Book of the year, and the Author of the year from the British Book Award (Nibbies). Kate Rundell in the introduction to the book states: “We are Noah’s Ark in reverse: it is as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water. Faced with such destruction at such pace, acquiescence becomes impossible. The time to fight with all our ingenuity and tenacity, and love and fury is now.” One is hard pressed to come up with a better turn of phrase for what is happening and a call to arms. The public, especially the poor, the young and the old should get to know Katherine Rundell as a friend.
- “Breaking Free of Neoliberalism: Canada’s Challenge” by Alex Himelfarb. A former Clerk of the Privy Council of Canada and Secretary to the Cabinet of three Canadian prime ministers.
- “A Healthy Nature Handbook, Illustrated Insights for Ecological Restoration from Volunteer Stewards Of Chicago Wilderness” by Justin Pepper and Don Parker. What groups that follow Elinor Ostrom’s recommendations look and act like.
- “The Wayfinders” by Wade Davis. This is the text of CBC Massey Lectures of 2009. One forgets and destroys by neglect. There were in 2009 were over 7,000 languages spoken on earth. Each 2 weeks a senior died and was the last indigenous speaker and the language died. The language died and the culture and the knowledge accumulated over centuries died. Robin Wall Kimmerer as a senior citizen finally learned her native Potawatomi language. She did it so her culture and the accumulated knowledge of her people and land and their world would matter, live on and be passed on to future generations. This is in rich Canada. In lands such as small pacific islands, dry lands in Africa, there are no rich people with the wealth and time to save their language and culture. The world is so rich in wealth and so poor in decency and fairness.
James Cook was the best navigator the British Navy ever produced. He mapped a few of the islands of the Pacific. In Tahiti, he met a priest, navigator Tupaia, who from memory drew a map in the sand of every known island in the Pacific except Hawaii and Aotearoa. Cook is well known and appreciated. The far greater Tupaia was never celebrated. He was not Caucasian. - “Not The End Of The World” by Hannah Ritchie. This is an optimistic book about where the world is heading. Our regret is that she is very intelligent but like too many academics and administrators is misled by Garrett Harding and his tragedy of the commons. She should do her homework and read up on the work by Elinor and Victor Ostrom, who in study after study showed Harding was wrong. If you need confirmation about how despicable Harding and his ideas were, read the article in Scientific American April 23, 2019 by Matto Mildenberger. He writes that Garret Harding was “ a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe – plus his argument was wrong.”
It goes without saying that works by the godfather of nature wilding in the U.S., Douglas Tallamy, and his British counterparts, Isabella Tree and Charles Burrows, should all be read. As well as books by Elinor Ostrom, the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Tallamy wrote:“Bringing Nature Home”, “Nature’s Best Hope”, “The Nature of Oaks”. Isabella Tree and Charles Burrow wrote: “Wilding”, “The Book Of Wilding”.
Elinor Ostrom wrote “Governing the Commons” and “The Future of the Commons”
Her Nobel prize acceptance speech is available for free on the Internet and is free. There is beautiful documentary on the life of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom called “Actual World, Possible Future” by a friend Barbara Allen. It is free to watch.
Quick reads
- “The Balance of Nature” by John Kricher. He believes we should think evolution rather than equilibrium states to explain the environment.
- “Every Living Thing” by Jason Roberts. The battle between Linnaeus and George Louis de Buffon to be recognized as the man who named and classified all creatures on earth.
- “Hidden Kingdom Of Fungi “by Keith Seifert. A Canadian text of understanding fungi .
- “Making Eden” by David Beerling. A text of the history of biology of life on earth.
Further reading
- “A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth” by Henry Gee. A Royal Society Science book of the year award winner. Very readable, and informative, going back to the beginning of life, 100 million years after the formation of our solar system, about amazingly 4.2 billion years ago.
- “Nature Fix” by Florence Williams. Why nature makes us healthier, happier and more creative.
- “Rooted” by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Natures tales. At age 10, she confessed to her priest she had a second Church. It was the church of the Frog. She would gradually collect her congregants very, very slowly, they would allow themselves to be lifted and put on her belly. She and they (about three frogs) would hum and pray together belly to belly. When her mother called and it was time to end service, she would whisper “go in peace” and prod one frog in the rear and the other would stir and go off into the woods. Frog church was done for the day.
The author is a very good writer but not an extremely gifted writer.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists and philosophers and theologians all thought animals did not suffer real pain or had “real consciousness”, i.e. had a soul. So a very popular entertainment for smart and rich people was vivisection of animals. The large amphitheaters would be packed. Apparently Charles Darwin was the first to dispute these lies about animals. The elite of the worthy to be read intellectuals like, William Vogt, E.O.Wilson, Rachel Carson, Lynn Margulis, Douglas Tallamy, Isabella Tree, Jane Goodall, etc all knew that animals felt emotions and had “consciousness” and had a soul. Even though their bodies and minds were worn down by the exigencies of day-to-day life and neoliberalism, they had kept a small piece of childhood in their hearts, and they knew and believed. So it wasn’t until, amazingly, according to Lyanda Lynn Haupt, that: ”In 2012, nearly 150 years after Darwin, that an international consortium of scientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, proclaiming that all animals from birds to apes to coyotes to fish to octopuses, possess consciousness worthy of ethical consideration.” - “Wild “by Jay Griffith. Journey through nature. She is a poet writing in prose about her adventures in voyages around the world.
- “A Country Called Childhood” by Jay Griffith. An iconoclastic look at childhood around the world. She explains why so many children in Euro-American cultures are so unhappy.
- “The Indigenous Paleolithic Of The Western Hemisphere” by Paulette F.C. Steeves, a very readable book by an indigenous author about the indigenous heritage.
One text we found amazing was “Small Things Like These “ by Claire Keegan. It was written in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Brooker Prize even though it was only 128 pages in length. The text is so spare and yet evocative, a masterpiece of the mot juste.
It is a Christmas story. It is about a middle class man, Willam Furlong, in a poor town in Ireland. In 1985, Furlong does the right thing to help a girl in one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries. What happened with the Magdalene Laundry evokes memories of the residential schools in Canada. There was incredible emotional and physical abuse and hundreds of secret, hidden and unmarked graves of Irish children and young women have been found. We want to fancy that if falling upon the truth, like William Furlong did, we would also do the right thing, even at great cost and peril, to help someone suffering physically, beaten down morally and feeling hopeless.
What we want to do now, is to change our website. We want it to be as clear and informative as possible. What Hans Rosling did with his book, “Factfulness,” we want to do, but to change the paradigm.
We want to take the latest information about the environment and to:
- Simplify the ideas into short readable introductions of basic knowledge and then invite the reader if they dare to read a more detailed description of the material. We will use drawings, photos, videos, and also graphics from other sources to entice and encourage the reader to persist through the long sections. Unseen is unknown and disregarded. Seen and known is an invitation to do the right thing.
- Will regularly update the material.
- Encourage collaborators to create similar materials.
- Invite feedback.
- Trust in the goodwill and courage of the general public to participate.
- We believe with this approach; things will not take decades to change but will evolve in days and weeks.
- We believe there are William Furlongs all over society who are kept in ignorance but given the right circumstances, will do the right thing.
The bird feeders and suet are up. So far, about four chickadees, about five downy woodpeckers, about seven goldfinches, about four white breasted nuthatches, one hairy woodpecker, one American tree sparrow, have visited.
A birding friend of ours, Gerard, lives in Verdun. He bikes the Fleuve St. Laurent almost every day with an electric bike. He found that there were no mayflies at all this year on the north shore. There were a few isolated patches on the south shore. According to Heritage Laurentien, there has been a crash in the yellow perch population of the St. Laurent. They think this is due to anoxia. At a garage sale, we met an old Scandinavian ice fisherman selling his equipment, giving up his hobby. He said when Jean Drapeau, who was actually, finally guilty of one of his many alleged atrocities, poisoned the St. Laurent with tons of insecticides so the tourists to Expo 67 would not have to see mayflies, the fisherman found that the yellow sturgeon population crashed. Official commissioned studies claim that other than the mayflies, there was no damage to the St. Laurent. We believe the old fisherman. This fall there were hundreds of Canada geese and a few mallards eating eel grass beside the greenhouse part of the St. Laurent. We asked a paddle boarder to gather some eel grass for us. We got about a pound of eel grass. Ninety-five per cent of the eel grass was a sickly yellow color. Only about 5% was green. One of the most majestic rivers in the world is being poisoned and destroyed. The media, academia, the governments just do not care. The public does not know. Visit our website, renaturemontreal.ca. Maybe together we can make a difference.
There is an academic paper, available for free on the Internet. It was published January 22, 2025 in Nature. It is called “Regional and institutional trends in assessment for academic promotion.” It analyses the hiring practices of universities for full professorships. It gives us hope for the future.
The paper was a huge study. It analysed 314 policies from 190 academic institutions and 218 policies from 58 government agencies.
It found, ”Quantitative metrics, particularly in the Global South, frequently underpin assessment frameworks, whereas high-income countries tend to prioritize qualitative attributes, such as visibility and engagement, to assess academic merit.”
There have been many calls for reform in hiring of tenured professors: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) launched the Latin American Forum for Research Assessment (FOLEC), InterAcademy Partnership, the Global Young Academy and the International Science Council, European Commission built a Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment have all been pushing for reform. Wide discontent with existing practices has also led to discourse at national levels about ways forwards with better approaches.
This tendency is heartily welcomed by us.
Take care,
Joan and Oz Obukuro. renaturemontreal, ob*********@ya***.com.
