Our Organisation

Renature Montreal

We want to be honest and open with you. We want you to know about Renature Montreal, what it stands for, what we hope it will accomplish and why. We want to be as clear and concise as possible. We do not want to bore you with details or be “too simple” and glib.

Please look at our garden on Verdun public land. On April 5, it was dogwood and Kentucky bluegrass. Six months later it is a native wildflower garden. Total cost was 250 bags of weedless soil = $500.

The goal of Renature Montreal is to help nature return to a reasonable level of health, both plants and animals. Everyone wants to help the 40% of the plants and the 2/3 bird species threatened with extinction.1 2

We have gone from 10 billion birds in North America over the last 50 years to now only 7 billion birds. 3 Decline in population size is the first step to extinction. Climate change makes the threat more ominous. The more biodiversity you have, the more resilient nature becomes to disasters. With climate change, disasters are becoming more and more frequent. 4You can think of a new vision, a new hope, a renatured Montreal as a green cathedral. You can build many different types of green cathedrals, but you need plans, short, medium, and long term. To build this new world we need to know what we are up against, what we want, why we want it, the constraints, the costs, the building codes.

In general all research is showing that mankind is as usual over exploiting the environment. Degrading it so much that we are basically starving nature. In the United State, Douglas and Cindy Tallamy, and in Britain, Isabella Tree and Charles Burrell and many authors throughout the world have replanted their land with native plants and shown that wildlife will unprecedently rebound back. We want a green and abundant Montreal. It takes some hard work and knowledge. But quickly, you will find that wildlife will seize the chance to reproduce and amaze. Come see the garden we planted on April 13, 2024. From seeds and a few transplanted wildflowers, Nature is showing its bounty. We can have the same result in everyone’s yard if Nature agrees. Each yard, each dream, each Green Cathedral will be different. Return to childhood and dream again and wake up next year with the new vision of a green world.

We want to help fauna and flora, because by doing so, we help society and all humans as well as our pets. Let us quote from Jane Goodall famous for her studies of chimpanzees:

“You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a rat,a bird, a horse, a pig, I don’t care, and not know that they have emotions similar to ours and that they have minds that can sometimes solve problems”

she told Vox in a 2021 interview.

“My favorite animal, altogether, is a dog,. Because dogs have taught me so much, and are so faithful and give unconditional love, and I don’t like to think of a world without dogs. We all know that [dogs] can be happy, sad, fearful and that they’re highly intelligent.

Jane Goodall in a 2015 video published by the Jane Goodall Institute.

Jane Goodall is 90 years old and has accumulated much wisdom over her lifetime. We are much younger. Joan is 73 and Oz is 78. We so far agree completely with her. We will let you know in 12 years if she was right. But what we can say is that what she knows to be true about dogs, we say the identical same things about birds.

Everyone looks out and thinks, we just need more biodiversity and more trees. But when you look at things realistically, perhaps you need the opposite. Montreal is filled with Gingko Biloba trees, buckthorn, Norway Maples, Amur Maples, Kentucky Coffee Bean Trees, Tree of Heaven, chervil, bachelor buttons, queen’s Anne’s lace, ox-eyed daisies. They are beautiful looking plants. They increase the biodiversity, and they reduce heat islands. But these are extremely invasive which means they outcompete and kill off native species. Native species are essential for feeding our wildlife and we will explain why in a moment. The sole exception is the Kentucky Coffee Bean tree which is native. So, in essence you can have the wrong kind of biodiversity and you can have too many of the wrong kind of trees.

We will try to be as concise and straightforward as possible and try not to bog you down with details. Forgive us if you find us too simplistic or pedantic. This is about our 40th version of our description of our goals, so believe us, we are trying. We are also writing a book which we hope will be more detailed and clearer. We will also shortly start up a website, renaturemontreal.ca, with photos, videos, podcasts, and other multimedia tools, which we hope will be more interesting and clearer. Please forgive us as we have been very busy doing research and physically planting the essential treasure, our living botanical collections, and building our seed inventory.

A. The first consideration is to understand nature. There are many problems in the world. We can give you many examples of fascinating problems facing, Australia, Scotland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia etc. They require completely different, complex solutions from that of Quebec. We, because we do not want to overload you with too much new material, will for the present, concentrate on Montreal, here, we know one of the main problems is, that we are STARVING WILDLIFE.

  1. Much of the new understanding of this dying and extinction of plants and animal has occurred in the Eastern United States. Douglas and Cindy Tallamy are the godfather and godmother of modern eco-restoration in the United States. Through hard work and studies with colleagues, they discovered a new paradigm, a new truth, a new way of seeing wildlife that is being accepted throughout the world for understanding and rehabilitating wildlife. We discuss widely, their new paradigm in chapter 1 of our book in progress. To have any chance of success, we believe the principles the Tallamys and their colleagues have discovered, need to be followed. Cindy rid a 10-acre former hay farm of non-native weeds and planted native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. They did something super simple. They got rid of all foreign weeds and planted native plants. That was all. No heavy machinery, no water works, no new domestic animals. Moth and butterfly caterpillars, in general can only eat native plants. Baby birds in general can only thrive on caterpillars. Just by getting rid of alien plants and planting native plants, they now have 57 different nesting bird species on their 10-acre farm. They changed their hay farm from a FOOD DESERT to a WILDLIFE OASIS, just by growing native plants, instead on invasive weeds. If a 10-acre park in Verdun had 57 different breeding bird species, it would be a tourist mecca for all of Canada. Montreal hotels would be filled with birders flocking to see and enjoy this miracle.

    Douglas Tallamy is the author of five books. We highly recommend Bringing Nature Home” and “Nature’ Best Hope”. Please listen to the many podcasts he has assisted on and please watched his taped videos about renaturing parks and his proposed “Home Grown National Park System”, these are free on the Internet.

B. …So you can see that environmental issues can be quite complex, but simple solutions like planting native plants can help to remediate decades of wanton destruction. Let us try to explain the science behind this simple miracle,

  1. There is a psychological phenomenon called the shifting baseline syndrome. It was first described in 1995, by Dr. Daniel Pauly to describe fisheries. It was also called environmental generational amnesia by P.H. Kahn in 2002. What this basically means is that each generation, looks around and believes deeply that their present world is normal, although it might have been a bit different in the past or might be a bit different in the future. The present world is the baseline, the norm to be modified if it is not too expensive. And radical modification will always be treated as much too expensive and foolhardy and unwise. An example of the shifting baseline is that in the Florida Everglades, wildlife may have decreased 30 % over the last 50 years, but over the last one hundred years, it has decreased 90%. Remember, not the polluted, depleted, sick, normal of today. Remember what it was 100 years ago and build your green cathedral from this healthy baseline. In Montreal, similarly, do not think of the baseline of today, think of 50 years ago or better still 100 years ago. Seventy years ago there was a partial clear cut and thinning of Mount Royal Park, which caused enormous harm to the park. When you want to rehabilitate the park, think at least to the baseline of 100 years ago.
  2. We highly recommend you read Douglas Tallamy’s books and watch his videos on renaturing and a homegrown national park. E.O Wilson, recommended that 50% of land be put aside for nature. The Tallamys, more realistically propose setting aside 30% of lawns for wild plants and thus create a HOMEGROWN NATIONAL PARK, which would be the largest national park in America.

    They and their colleagues such as Peter P. Marra of Georgetown University showed:
    • i) that 96% of birds except for seabirds, and raptors feed their young CATERPILLARS. Caterpillars are the larvae of butterflies and moths. They can feed adult insects to their young, but the young suffer if they do so. It takes about 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to feed one groups of nestlings to fledgeling stage.
  3. ii) caterpillars in general can only feed on native plants.
  4. iii) If less than 70% of your plants are native plants, the amount of caterpillars falls and the population of chickadees decreases.
  5. The percentage of native plants in Montreal is probably less than 20%. So, we have created a food desert for caterpillars and thus for birds. We are starving our birds. There is going to be a huge increase in incredibly beautiful warblers when we increase native wildflowers on street medians, parks, and peoples’ yards,
  6. Grass, Kentucky bluegrass which is European, is the main plant in Montreal. There is a new ECO-LAWN made up of native fescue grasses with deep roots, requiring less or no mowing or watering or maintenance. It is available at Urban Seedlings and CAUS coop in Verdun. Just by itself it will decrease gasoline pollution, water usage, flooding, herbicide, fungicide, and insecticide usages and it will increase the food supply for wildlife.
  7. The percentage of Norway Maples in Mount Royal Park is enormous, and it is slowly changing the mountain to a monoculture of Norway Maples. This is starving birds. The municipal governments have planted tens of thousands of Norway maples across the island. Recently Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, have made it illegal to plant Norway maples and over 17 other states have declared it an invasive plant. Much, much too often governments are forced to pass laws to prevent local governments, civil servants, nurseries and even homeowners from doing very foolish and dangerous things.
  1. 40% des plantes à risque d’extinction”,“40% of world’s plant species at risk of extinction” The Guardian Sept 29,2020. , Natural History Museum ↩︎
  2. National Audubon Society, Oct 10, 2019 ↩︎
  3. Decline Of North American Avifauna” Science Sep 2019 ↩︎
  4. NPR sept 7, 2021: Things will get more severe as climate change continues ↩︎