Christina Palassio - HTO: Torontos Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers and Low-flow Toilets

HTO

Torontos Water
from Lake Iroquois
to Lost Rivers
to Low-flow Toilets

edited by Wayne Reeves
and Christina Palassio

This collection copyright Coach House Books, 2008.
Individual essays copyright in the names of their authors, 2008.

First edition

This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 103 8.

Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

We have deliberately included a diversity of perspectives for this collection in order to reflect a multifaceted Toronto. The opinions expressed in these essays do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or Coach House Books.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

HTO : Torontos water from Lake Iroquois to lost rivers to low-flow toilets / edited by Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio.

ISBN 978-1-55245-208-0

1. WaterOntarioToronto. 2. Toronto (Ont.).
I. Reeves, Wayne, 1959- II. Palassio, Christina

TD227.T6H86 2008 553.709713*541 C2008-905637-X

Ed Freeman
Formed and shaped by water: Torontos early landscape

Nick Eyles
Ravines, lagoons, cliffs and spits: The ups and downs of Lake Ontario

Ronald F. Williamson & Robert I. MacDonald
A resource like no other: Understanding the 11,000-year relationship between people and water

Chris Hardwicke & Wayne Reeves
Shapeshifters: Torontos changing watersheds, streams and shorelines

Gary Miedema
When the rivers really ran: Water-powered industry in Toronto

Richard Anderson
The dustbins of history: Waste disposal in Torontos ravines and valleys

Chris Bilton
Storm warning: Hurricane Hazel and the evolution of flood control in Toronto

Mahesh Patel
The long haul: Integrating water, sewage, public health and city-building

Steven Mannell
A civic vision for water supply: The Toronto Water Works Extension Project

Michael McMahon
We all live downstream

Wayne Reeves
Addition and subtraction: The brook, the ravine and the waterworks

Shawn Micallef
Subterranean Toronto: Where the masquerading lakes lay

David A. Robertson & Andrew M. Stewart
The Garrison Creek mouth and the Queens Wharf: Digging up 200 years of shoreline development

Michael Harrison
The vanishing creeks of South Etobicoke

Murray Seymour
Streamscape: Rivers of life in the city

Liz Forsberg & Georgia Ydreos
Participation/precipitation: Can community-based arts help keep us afloat?

Maggie Helwig
Downward

Michael Cook
Water underground: Exploring Torontos sewers and drains

James Brown & Kim Storey
Buried alive: Garrison Creek as a rediscovered extended waterfront

{interview}
The living machine: An interview with Helen Mills of the Lost Rivers Project

John Lorinc
The big gulp: How Torontos Wet Weather Flow Management Master Plan (a name no one likes) will save the lake

Eduardo Sousa
Re-inhabiting Taddle Creek

Joanna Kidd
How the Toronto Bay Initiative reimagined Toronto Harbour

Mark Fram
A tale of two waterfronts

Jennifer Bonnell
Bringing back the Don: Sixty years of community action

Jane Schmidt & Frank Remiz
High Park waterways: Forward to the past

RiverSides
Bringing in the rain: Is rainwater harvesting the solution to Torontos energy and water needs?

Lorraine Johnson
Bogged down: Water-wise gardeners get the flush

Bert Archer
Eau de toilette, or how to behave when were flush

Its September 2008, and Toronto is towelling off from its wettest summer since record-keeping began at Pearson Airport seventy-one years ago. This rain-soaked summer came hard on the heels of the winter of 2007-08, when we found ourselves within a modest storm of an all-time record for snowfall. Before that, the summer of 2007 had been the driest since 1959, part of a ten-month drought that parched the Greater Toronto Area.

Conspicuous by its presence or absence, water makes us talk. Its not just idle chatter about the weather. Its bound up with concerns about bottled-water bans and broken water mains, flooded basements and flood-plain restoration, downspout disconnections and drugs in drinking water, beach postings and Bisphenol A, water-use reductions and rising water rates.

But while Canadians may take water for granted only Americans consume more per person than we do, and we pay the least for it were also at the forefront of thinking and writing about water issues. Whether the scale is national, continental or global, Canadians are renowned for tackling the big issues of water use, governance and management.

So, why focus only on Toronto?

The local matters. Yes, we need to keep an eye on the larger scene. This was the year, after all, that our federal government helped block the United Nations from recognizing access to water as a basic human right, that Ontario signed on to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement to control large-scale water diversions, that movement got underway to reopen the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, that the International Joint Commission made moves to decide how water levels and flows in Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River will be regulated. Most of these matters have implications for Toronto, as do national and provincial policies, programs, rules and regulations. But theyre not up for discussion here.

The local matters because its the place people truly care about, and where the action happens, for better or worse. Walkerton has become shorthand for systemic failure

FOUNDATIONS
Detail from Eldon Garnets Time: And A Clock, on the Queen Street East bridge over the Don. Built in 1911, this is the oldest truss roadway bridge spanning a waterway in Toronto.

in providing safe drinking water. With the opening of the Walkerton Clean Water Centre in 2005, it is now also a place where we can learn how to avoid repeating past mistakes. Local governments are spending $15 billion annually to protect and restore the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence suggesting that only at the local level can citizens affect real change.