2000 short list:
Special Places: The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region
Conrad Edmund Heidenreich
Betty I. Roots
Donald A. Chant
published by UBC Press
High Park, Scarborough Bluffs, the Humber Valley, the Port Lands. These are among the special places of Toronto. Each is a unique ecosystem within the busy urban region. Even though Torontonians think of their city as almost entirely built up, savannah or wetlands are only a subway ride away. Special Places explores the changing ecosystems of the Toronto area over the past century, looking at the surprising range of plants and animals you can still find in many of its natural spaces and showing how we influence our environment. A fascinating book about a fascinating landscape.
Conrad Edmund Heidenreich
Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936, he moved to Toronto in 1949. Through the novels of the late 19th century German author Karl May, he developed a life long interest in North American Natives. At the University of Toronto, he finally had the chance to follow these interests through a B.A. in geography (1961). After working for a Toronto planning firm, he earned his M.A. at the University of Toronto (1965) and completed his Ph.D. at McMaster University (1970). His thesis on the early 17th century Huron Indians of Ontario won the first Sainte-Marie Prize in History and was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1973.
In 1962 he became a teaching assistant at York University in the Geography department. In 1968, he received a permanent teaching appointment at York and has been with the university ever since, earning a full professorship in 1980.To date he has written or helped edit seven books and some fifty articles and chapters. Including the first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada: From the Beginning to 1800 published in 1997.
He received the Dean of Arts Award for Outstanding Teaching and has been active on the executive of The Champlain Society, of which my maternal great grandfather, Sir Edmund Walker, founded in 1905 and the Royal Canadian Institute, of which he was president in 1991.
He lives with his wife Nancy and has two sons Conrad and Robert.
Betty I. Roots
Professor Betty I. Roots was educated at University College, London (UK) and received her BSc, PhD and DSc degrees from the University of London (UK). In 1969 she was recruited from the University of California at San Diego to develop physiology at the then recently established Erindale College, University of Toronto. As well as overseeing the building and equipping of the physiology laboratories she also set up an electron microscope facility at the College. She served as Dean of Sciences at Erindale from 1976-80. In 1984 she became Chair of the Department of Zoology and served until 1990. She was instrumental in establishing the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Roots was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1989 and was Director of the Life Sciences Division of the Academy of Science in the Society from 1995-98. In 1990, the Canadian Association for Women in Science named her Woman of the Year. She also served as president of the Royal Canadian Institute in 1994, and is a member of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists.
Her writings include Nerve Membranes, (co-authored with a colleague, Dr. P.V. Johnston), was the co-editor of a two volume work, Neuron-glial Interrelationships During Phylogeny, and is
Editor-in-Chief of Special Places, the book prepared to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Institute.
She is preparing a book on Ontario wildflowers and lives in Toronto.
Donald A. Chant
Dr. Chant was born in Toronto in 1928, and moved to Vancouver in 1945, where he graduated in Zoology from UBC. He then lived in England from 1952-1956, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of London.
Returning to Canada in 1956, he was appointed a Research Officer with Canada Agriculture, eventually becoming Director of the Research Station at Vineland-St. Catherine's. From 1960-64, he was Chairman of the Department of Biological Control at the University of California, at Riverside. He returned to Toronto in 1967 as Chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, and was Provost of the University from 1975-1980. In 1980 he was appointed Chairman and President of the Ontario Waste Management Corporation by Premier Davis, and held this position until 1995.
He was an advisor to President Johnson's Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, D.C., and was Chair of the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council in Ottawa. He was also a co-founder of Pollution Probe in 1969, and was a founding member of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the Canadian Arctic Resources Council, and the Coalition on Acid Rain.
Dr. Chant was elected to the Council of the Royal Canadian Institute in 1994, and was appointed a co-editor of Special Places, and has written 130 research papers, and eight books.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1974, a Fellow of the Entomological Society of Canada in 1976, and appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1989.
Book excerpt
The special places of Toronto unfold their stories...
In 1819, John Goldie, on a botanical exploration of North America, stumbled onto what he called "as good a Botanical Spot as any that ever I was in" ...Near the Humber, the expansive dry sand plain was kept open by frequent ground fires started largely by lightning strikes. The only trees on the plain were small copses of sassafras, the occasional gnarled and stunted black oak, and white pine. Much more common were low shrubs of dryland blueberry and New Jersey tea intermixed with prairie grasses having such evocative names as Indian grass, big bluestem, and little bluestem. Throughout the growing season, the plain was ablaze with colourful wildflowers. In the early spring there were the yellows of prairie buttercup and star-grass and the blues of arrow-leaved violet, while in June the yellow frostweed, the orange wood lilly, and the blue wild lupine were everywhere. Flying in their midst were butterflies such as the karner blue, whose larvae fed on the lupines, and the spicebush swallowtail and scrub-oak hairstreak, which relied on the southern trees of sassafras and black oak.
By the 1940s the Don River had become very polluted. It could run all the colours of the rainbow, depending on what chemicals the paper plant upstream had released into the river. In the late 1940s people began to condemn the pollution in the valley and tried to do something about it. They believed that the valley's greenness and its wildlife should be preserved as an asset to the city. As this idea grew, so did the city's population. Residents needed new roads, new sewers. For many practical reasons the valley was the place to put these services, despite their conflict with the ideal of green space.
Today conservation groups are actively trying to create and restore habitats. They are scouring the valley for rubbish, cleaning up the river, planing wildflowers, building boardwalks in wet areas, and tracing the routes of long-forgotten Don creeks that have become underground sewers.
Published with permission, this excerpt is copyright protected.
