Abstract
Abstract
Critics have reproached conventional environmental justice research for a limited conceptualization of justice that discounts structural factors as a primary cause of environmental injustice. This article reiterates and strengthens the structural critique by focusing on the corollary of structural environmental injustice, instead exploring the confluences, difficulties, and uncertainties of achieving environmental justice amidst an indifferent political and social environment. Drawing on examination of historical, planning, and promotional documents combined with analysis of two semi-structured interviews, the article explores the contingencies, negotiations, and unexpected events that led to the partial achievement of environmental justice at the Beare Wetland in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada while noting the structural challenges to environmental justice that remain. The article ends with a discussion of the wider implications for social and environmental justice.
Introduction
E
Likewise, ecofeminist Karen Warren worries that a primary emphasis on the distributive impacts of environmental burden downplays the centrality of social structures and institutions for environmental injustice,4 while Pulido delinks oppression from intentionality and individual siting decisions to argue that environmental injustice is a socio-geographical set of relations that encompasses historical processes such as white flight, incorporation, zoning legislation, labor patterns, and overtly racist regulation.5 Environmental justice should therefore be viewed as an ever-ongoing progression that must constantly be negotiated, maintained, and upheld, influenced by both distributive and structural factors.6
This article supports and extends the structural critique of the environmental justice movement by outlining the contingencies necessarily involved in achieving some aspects of environmental justice through a wetland restoration in Southern Ontario, Canada. Such an analysis reiterates the engrained root causes of environmental injustice while foregrounding the instability of many current environmental justice achievements: if environmental injustice is primarily predicated on entrenched structural and institutional realities, environmental justice must be achieved outside of these structures by way of an uncertain process of continual negotiation that is often dependent on circumstance. The implications for policy, planning, and social movement strategy are wide-ranging, particularly in terms of which factors (or actors) scholars might incorporate into an environmental justice research agenda, which strategies environmental justice activists might adopt, and toward which policies and structures environmental justice advocates might turn their focus.
Methodology
So as to foreground the role of contingency for environmental justice, the article draws loosely on an actor-network approach. Actor-network theory is a post-structural methodology that emphasizes the role of negotiation, contingency, and even surprise in the achievement of a desired outcome. According to Latour,7 an actor is any human or non-human participant that alters a situation or changes another's action; a network constitutes a diverse and unstable grouping of actors who relate with and influence one another in often-surprising ways.8 An actor's desired outcome is achieved through the actor's “translation” or negotiation of other actors' interests into its own,9 as when a pulp and paper corporation convinces town residents that a polluted river is a necessary byproduct of economic sustainability, thus gaining continued community support;10 or, conversely, when environmental organizations seize upon existing protected species legislation to advocate for the closure or restoration of a large industrial operation after an endangered amphibian unexpectedly establishes habitat within.11 The humans behind the pulp and paper company and the environmental organization, are not, however, the only significant actors in these scenarios: proponents of actor-network theory extend agency to a variety of both conventionally powerful and seemingly incidental actors while recognizing both the instabilities and the contingencies involved in any given “outcome.” The river may eventually develop a particularly sickly hue and texture, such that the townspeople are no longer willing to accept the tradeoff between jobs and environment, while the amphibian species may quickly disappear or die out due to inadequate ecological conditions or an unforeseen weather event—in which case, the pulp and paper corporation and environmental organizations will have to devise new methods of reaching their respective goals, with varying degrees of success.
Actor-network theory has itself been criticized for lack of incisive critique, a reliance on a primarily descriptive methodology, and an inattention to existing power structures and class relations.12 It may then appear counter-intuitive to base, however loosely, a critical environmental justice analysis on an actor-network methodology. Nevertheless, when used in conjunction with other approaches, actor-network theory may foreground central dynamics of a case that a more traditionally structural analysis might downplay, and might even aid in revealing the processes by which certain structures or institutions emerge and solidify.13 Moreover, an actor-network approach appears particularly germane in a case in which structural factors or barriers may explain a lack of environmental justice, but cannot then necessarily explain the opposite achievement of environmental justice. In the case of the Beare Wetland restoration in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, actor-network theory therefore helps to demonstrate the process as well as the instability of an environmental justice outcome. At the same time, such an approach probes environmental justice research and practice toward a more explicit consideration of those often-ignored but sometimes-central human and non-human actors in the achievement, or lack thereof, of environmental justice.
An actor-network methodology for this article's analysis involved tracing the myriad factors, actors, and processes contributing to a partial environmental justice outcome at the Beare Wetland. Central questions revolved around who or what actors were active in the restoration, as well how these actors were ultimately able to reach their goal. Newspaper coverage and organizational and promotional material provided a cursory loose timeline of the case and identified key, or at least prevalent, actors. Semi-structured interviews with some of these (human) actors both confirmed the role of significant actors and noted the existence of other actors central to the restoration, both explicitly purveyed and more subtly implied. Additional documentary research then explored the trajectory and role of these newly identified actors, noting their own history at the Beare Wetland. The how of the case depended on close textual attention to the details of the back-and-forth negotiations within and between human and non-human actors, garnered from each of the interview and documentary sources. The article's final account is not exhaustive; the Beare Wetland restoration undoubtedly included a myriad variety of actors not mentioned here. However, the analysis provides an outline of at least several of the central actors, processes, and negotiations implicated in the restoration.
Contingent Factors for Environmental Justice at The Beare Wetland, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
Environmental justice at the Beare Wetland
From 1965 to 1985, the Beare Road landfill in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada received approximately 10 million tons of garbage from the neighboring and now-amalgamated City of Toronto. Nearby deposits of sand and gravel were extracted by the city to cover the waste, eventually creating the Beare Pit.14 Recently, with the leadership of members of non-profit organization Friends of the Rouge Watershed (FRW) and the help of hundreds of volunteers, the pit was restored to a wetland ecosystem containing approximately 40 ponds. FRW originally planned to restore the site as a forest ecosystem, but soon found that the pit's poor subsoil and drainage made it unsuitable for forestation. A local naturalist suggested wetland restoration instead, and several small trial ponds were dug. The trial ponds retained water and quickly began to attract several species; the larger ponds were completed between 2003 and 2006 as volunteers worked to plant thousands of native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers on the site. The Beare Wetland celebrated its official opening on June 3, 2006, a focal point of the urban nature park, Rouge Park, within which it sits.15
The wetland and portions of the park are located in the district of Scarborough in the city of Toronto. Though Scarborough's reputation as a crime-ridden hotbed of gang activity and ethnic violence is primarily undeserved,16 the district's infrastructure has largely failed to keep pace with rapidly changing demographics. The result is that Scarborough's diverse, high-density, and often-racialized immigrant populations are faced with a lack of necessary public transit and public space. At the same time, Scarborough's individual and household income continues to fall below the Toronto average, a disparity that has markedly widened since the 1980s.17 Specific to the case study area, four years after the original Beare Road landfill closed in 1985, Metro Toronto proposed another disposal site in the vicinity as a short-term solution to the city's impending garbage crisis.18 Though the plan was eventually rejected, residents were vocal in their opposition. While their resistance may be attributed to simple NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard), underlying the concern is a potentially broader pattern of siting decisions in the Scarborough ward generally and particularly the region bordering the Beare landfill and pit. A letter-writer to the Toronto Star newspaper notes that area residents have “endured” the Beare landfill and its associated environmental impacts for many years, along with radioactive waste dumping and the expropriation of land for a potential airport,19 and wonders, “How can you allow this to happen to us again?”20 Other residents complain,
We have been living with the Beare landfill, which faces our home, for 17 years. We lived with the stench and rodents and environmental problems without relief, knowing that one day it would end and we would finally be left to live in peace. However, we have only had two summers of peace and even that has been marred by the constant smell of burning methane gas…We all pay taxes and this area is already home for five dumps in existence now or in the past. It must be someone else's turn.21
Rather than perpetuate environmental injustice through an exclusionary restoration project, citizen organizers at the Beare Wetland placed a strong emphasis on the focal practice and public engagement that ostensibly leads to community empowerment and an ultimately sustainable ecological restoration.22 The result was a restoration and park agenda that encompassed at least some central aspects of environmentally just practice, particularly in terms of procedure. FRW members emphasize the integrated ecological and human health dimensions of the Rouge River watershed and count public involvement as a key directive in their organization's mission. Hundreds of volunteer schoolchildren thus participated in the eight-year rehabilitation process not only through the physical work of tree-planting but concurrent educational and nature programming, therein incorporated into FRW's wider discourse of environmental and community stewardship. Presently, members of FRW utilize the physical form of the closed landfill in the organization's environmental education curriculum, leading school groups up the hill to a view of a nearby nuclear station and windmill.23 The ultimate stated goal of this and other FRW activities is to foster “ecologically literate” and empowered citizens who can one day hold their elected leaders accountable.24 With the restoration providing a base, organizers hope that all citizens might someday possess the knowledge and support to become willing and informed participants in the democratic sphere.
Why and why not environmental justice at the Beare Wetland?
The Beare Wetland restoration represents an important if unfinished starting point in the achievement of environmental justice at the Rouge Park. However, it is important to ask just why a proximate environmental justice outcome was realized in this place and at this time, if it is a phenomenon that can be replicated, and if environmental justice can be furthered and sustained given the current status and potential future shifts in the Rouge Park's management structure.
Systemic barriers to environmental justice existed from the beginning. The wetland restoration is necessarily set within the wider context of the Rouge Park, itself set within a broader provincial and global trend toward neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is generally, though not uniformly, characterized by decreased state responsibility and a corresponding increase in the role of market actors and privatized regulatory measures, and is not typically amenable to either social or environmental justice; critics, however, note that on the global level, varying levels of government are increasingly adopting a neoliberal approach to social, economic, and environmental governance.25 In Ontario, and particularly after the 1995 election of Mike Harris' Progressive Conservative government, neoliberalism has materialized in the form of deep cuts to welfare, public education, and environmental protection programs; the amalgamation of several metropolitan regions in the name of bureaucratic efficiency; and the downloading of provincial responsibility to lower levels of government or civil society.26
It is perhaps then not surprising that the trend of neoliberalism also extends to the traditional management structure of the Rouge Park.27 The park gained focused political support in 1994, at the same time that the then-New Democratic government faced both an election and a worldwide recession and framed by a prolonged period of budgetary cutbacks, rising taxes and unemployment, and widespread charges of fiscal mismanagement. The federal government's initial $10-million allocation for park management and implementation was helpful but insufficient, and so the Rouge Park Alliance was established as a temporary alternative to a more costly permanent management agency.28 With a board of directors comprised of members from federal, provincial, and municipal agencies as well as representatives from Save the Rouge Valley System (SRVS), the prominent local organization formed in response to development pressures in the Rouge Valley, the Alliance acts as an informal administrator and provides funding for various organizations performing restoration work within the park. As set against a more centralized management body, the Alliance is reliant, and in fact heavily dependent, on the work of outside individuals and groups for the implementation of park operations, in effect downplaying and decreasing the government's responsibility to provide sustained ecological and social services. This situation was only cemented by the 1995 election of Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives. Macaraig points out that the original Rouge Park Management Plan plainly espouses some of the values of neoliberalism, explicitly stating:
With respect to park development and operations, it is not intended that the park management entity would necessarily employ sufficient staff to conduct all such operations by itself. Substantial emphasis in doing such work should be placed on involving other agencies, partner groups and volunteers. Some specific functions could be contracted out to private or public sector entities.29
The park's unique management structure in turn presented an interesting dilemma for the civil society groups such as SRVS who felt personally invested in the Rouge's ecology and accessibility. Though the Rouge Park Alliance's administrative character allowed these groups to take on a prominent and welcome role in park management, it also gave way to several significant obstacles. The Alliance lacks formal legal authority and defined responsibilities, and commonly encounters jurisdictional gaps in terms of both day-to-day park operations and land acquisition. In addition, the Board's volunteer members find it difficult to locate and procure a sufficiently wide-ranging level of the multi-disciplinary expertise required for continued and effective park management. Restoration and monitoring activities are therefore made difficult. Finally, the organizations and volunteers expected to carry out park operations note the challenges associated with the funding system: the available funding is not sufficient for the level of work and expertise necessary to successfully manage, monitor, and implement park activities, and the required yearly application process hinders long-term vision.30
It was against this backdrop that members of FRW initiated and implemented the Beare Wetland restoration. The devolution of park management responsibilities allowed the organization a substantial, if vulnerable, role in the restoration and similar activities. Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, however, FRW's members received little systemic or government support as they worked through and under a volunteer board lacking both legal authority and a significant funding base. Why and how, then, did the Beare Wetland restoration take the form it did?
Proponents of actor-network theory suggest that the often-contingent interactions between certain human and non-human actors are central in the achievement of any outcome. At the Beare Pit, a seeming community-centered restoration resulted from a combination of people, politics, and location with additional help from non-human actors such as turtles and the unique ecology of the pit itself. Much of the Beare Pit restoration's inclusive character and outcome may first of all be attributed to the personalities or the human actors involved. Area activist Lois James, FRW General Manager Jim Robb, and prominent now-Toronto councilor Glenn De Baeremaeker became involved on Rouge conservation issues during the 1970s and 1980s after it became clear that the regional conservation authority was not taking a leadership role.31 James was active in political and social justice issues in Scarborough as early as the 1970s, inspiring Robb's involvement in SVRS, while acting as mentor to him and other activists. De Baeremaeker was and remains an effective and outspoken environmental advocate with an aptitude for strategy.32 All three had early ties to the Rouge, and a working relationship with the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, where James' husband taught, provided SRVS a space to store resources and hold meetings.33 When asked about the participatory nature of FRW's restoration work in the Rouge Park and at the wetland, James stated that it largely depends on the leadership at any one time. If not for Robb, she explained, the Beare restoration may have been driven by city engineers not attuned to the necessity of community engagement34—or, it should be added, citizens, politicians, and/or activists not attuned to the necessity of community engagement. With a background in science and forestry, Robb in particular accepts the ecological dimensions of restoration and reiterates the importance of science-based practice. However, he specifically distances himself from a narrowly construed technical definition, instead foregrounding the role of community stewardship and education:
[M]y idea of ecological restoration is … bringing back natural habitat, and the productivity of natural habitat … so that you can … increase and sustain biological diversity. And involving people in that, reaches out to the community that has to be custodians and stewards of that. And particularly the young people.35
Likewise, when asked if there is a connection between FRW's restoration work and social or environmental justice, Lois James states, “I don't know any other way.”36 Robb is modest about his own function: “Hopefully, if there hadn't been someone like me, someone else would've stepped forward.” He goes on to acknowledge the role of contingency, however, noting, “But you never know in these kind of things. It's a magical combination of a group of people.”37
An actor-network approach also foregrounds the role of active strategy and negotiation in the achievement of actors' goals. In the case of the Beare Wetland restoration, set within the wider context of an urban nature park, members of SRVS and FRW needed to harness political and non-political as well as human and non-human forces to ensure their vision was accomplished. Protected area status for the Rouge Park needed both federal and provincial support. As a member of Parliament and parliamentary secretary, local park proponent Pauline Browes introduced federal support in the form of a private member's bill to create a park and secured $10 million of funding, which in turn enticed the previously reticent provincial government to move forward with plans for the park. Browes, however, leveraged the $10 million, halting tentative plans for housing developments and a landfill site in the area;38 in order to receive the funding, the Ontario government had no choice but to align its own interests with those of SRVS.
Conversely, the success of FRW's Beare restoration as a wetland and teaching tool was largely driven by negotiation with ecological (f)actors. FRW members' original restoration plan for a forest ecosystem was quickly replaced with a wetland concept after it became clear that the site's soil was unsuitable for reforestation. Small trial ponds immediately drew wildlife and confirmed the suitability of a wetland ecosystem, ultimately leading to the restoration's current form and, arguably, its representative status as an accessible public focal point of the Rouge Park. The physical shape of the landfill itself, a towering overgrown hill adjacent a view of both the wetland and a nearby windmill and nuclear station, allows members of FRW to exercise the environmental empowerment aims in their stated mandate as they teach diverse groups of schoolchildren about different forms of energy generation and their ecological consequences.39
A second non-human actor for environmental justice comes in the form of the turtle. Beyond the fact that the turtle is a crowd-pleasing reptile which will ostensibly draw a wide range of visitors to the park and wetland, the species is an important focus of scientific study because its existence as both land and water dweller provides an overall indicator of ecosystem health.40 Especially in a rapidly changing urban environment such as in the Greater Toronto Area, scientists are eager for information on turtle health, adaptability, and reproduction to aid in critical species conservation.
From the beginning, turtles thrived at the Beare Wetland, quickly and unexpectedly attracted to the site's trial ponds. In addition to many common types of turtle, a provincially rare Blanding's turtle has hibernated at the wetland for the past several years, in turn attracting the interest and ongoing support of the Toronto Zoo, which has set up several tracking and monitoring studies in the wetland.41 This type of stable long-term partnership bodes well in terms of resources, information, and implementation of wildlife and habitat programs for both FRW and the Beare Wetland, helping to feed FRW's mandate of community involvement and empowerment. Alternatively, the existence of so many turtles at the site, as well as their precocious status in an urban environment, may someday mean activities at the site take a less participatory turn. Turtles' long generation times and wandering nature means long-term management is complex, and certain suggested protection measures may limit or even deny public access to habitat and nesting grounds, in which case turtles may be both a help and constraint to access and involvement with portions of the wetland and park.
The social and ecological future of the Rouge Park and the Beare Wetland is currently uncertain. In 2011, Canada's federal government confirmed plans to make the Rouge a national park, fulfilling a long-held goal of many Rouge Valley activists and organizers. With national park status, the majority of park responsibilities and management will likely fall under federal jurisdiction. Robb is hopeful that additional resources and policy expertise from the federal level will ultimately benefit the park and circumvent the limitations of the Rouge Park Alliance,42 though he has recently expressed concerns about the quality of environmental protection under national park legislation.43 Lois James, working on social and environmental justice issues in the Rouge Valley for several years, is less optimistic, comparing the uploading of responsibilities to the operation of a wastewater management system: “[W]hat I have found, with water, with sewage, all these things is the bigger the system, the more complex it is, the higher the impacts … I find the further they ship the wastewater, the more costly it gets, the more complex it gets, and the less you feel you can really keep them under the thumb.”
Pursuant to James' concern, the potential loss of local or grassroots control may affect FRW's restoration and environmental education programming in the Rouge Park. While the Rouge Park's traditional management structure itself presented several significant systemic barriers to environmental justice, the veneer of a national park may only aid in obscuring the federal government's own role in the steady dismantling of Canada's social and ecological infrastructure. The neoliberalization of conservation that necessitated FRW's primary role, leadership, and fundraising capabilities thus potentially takes a different turn through the auspices of a federal government that is itself fully committed to neoliberal practice. The contingencies and negotiations that led to a partial environmental justice outcome at the Beare Wetland in the Rouge Park may then just as quickly be reversed.
Conclusions
A proximate environmental justice outcome at the Beare restoration was achieved through a combination of people, politics, location, and negotiation as SRVS and FRW worked extensively for first the Rouge Park and later the Beare Wetland, in the process buoyed by sometimes-unexpected human and non-human actors. Though the Beare Wetland project incorporated some aspects of environmental justice, however, an actor-network approach suggests that the very factors that helped lead to this achievement are contingent, unstable, and currently subject to change. While not altogether circumstantial—SRVS and FRW organizers plotted strategy and leveraged opportunities—environmental justice at the Beare Wetland was highly dependent on circumstance; in the absence of formal legal and political mechanisms or more fundamental structural change, social and environmental justice often primarily depends on a combination of the right people leveraging the right resources at an opportune time in the face of certain systemic obstacles or barriers. Viewed through the lens of actor-network theory, a methodological framework that itself foregrounds the role of process, negotiation, and instability in the achievement of a given outcome, the Beare Wetland case study thus clearly illustrates and reiterates both the structural dimensions of environmental (in)justice and the always-processual dimensions of environmental justice. Here, as in countless other cases, there is a need for fundamental political, social, and socio-economic change to ensure that environmental justice becomes a consistent achievement regardless of circumstances—in short, to ensure that environmental justice, and not simply environmental injustice, is tied to political, economic, and social structure.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author thanks L. Anders Sandberg and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on an earlier version of the article. Responsibility for error remains the author's own.
Author Disclosure Statement
This work was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
1
For an overview of the environmental justice movement, see Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 19–33.
2
See David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Erik Swyngedouw and Nik Heynen, “Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale,” Antipode 35 (2003): 898–918; and Erik Swyngedouw, “The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (2009): 615.
3
Swyngedouw, 605.
4
Karen Warren, “Environmental Justice: Some Ecofeminist Worries about a Distributive Model,” Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 149–161.
5
Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000): 12–40.
6
See Christopher G. Boone, “Environmental Justice as Process and New Avenues for Research,” Environmental Justice 1 (2008): 149–153.
7
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71.
8
Michel Callon, “Variety and Irreversibility in Networks of Technique Conception and Adoption,” in Dominique Foray and Christopher Freeman, eds., Technology and the Wealth of Nations: The Dynamics of Constructed Advantage (London: Pinter Publishers, 1993), 263.
9
See Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 196–223; Bruno Latour, “The Powers of Association,” in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 264–280.
10
See Jarmo Kortelainen, “The River as an Actor-Network: The Finnish Forest Industry Utilization of Lake and River Systems,” Geoforum 30 (1999): 235–247.
11
For a similar example, see L. Anders Sandberg, “Environmental Gentrification in a Post-Industrial Landscape: The Case of the Limhamn Quarry, Malmö, Sweden,” Local Environment, in press.
12
Noel Castree, “False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature and Actor-Networks,” Antipode 34 (2002): 111–146; Swyngedouw and Heynen.
13
Ryan Holifield, “Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology,” in Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter, and Gordon Walker, eds., Spaces of Environmental Justice (Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 47–69.
14
Colin O'Neill, “Rouge Beare Pit Transformed,” West Rouge Community Association, n.d., <
15
Colin O'Neill. “Beare Wetland Grand Reopening,” Rouge Reporter, 1 (2006): 1, 4, and 6. Located on the eastern edge of Toronto in the Rouge River Valley, the 10,000-acre Rouge Park follows the Rouge River from its headwaters in the Oak Ridges Moraine to its drainage point in the Rouge Marshes. The site was long recognized for its ecological and cultural heritage, though the call for a park only really gained prominence during the 1980s, when local citizens responded to development pressures by forming Save the Rouge Valley System (SRVS). The group's efforts were eventually rewarded with provincial and federal political support, and the Rouge Park officially opened in 1995.
16
Brenden Pinto, “Scarborough's Bad Rap,” Eye Weekly [Toronto, Canada], November 28, 2007.
17
City of Toronto, “City of Toronto Community Council Profiles: Scarborough,” City of Toronto, 2008, <
18
Tony Wong, “Metro Plan for Old Dump Site Angers Residents,” Toronto Star, April 28, 1988, A6.
19
See Land Over Landings, “History,” Land Over Landings, 2011, <
20
Marilynne Pitcher, “Dumpsite Plans Horrible Idea,” Toronto Star, May 3, 1988, E4.
21
Richard Dare, Muriel Dare, Julia Dare, and Ryan Dare, “Family Can't Bear Another Dump,” Toronto Star, July 12, 1988, E4.
22
Eric Higgs, Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
23
Friends of the Rouge Watershed, “Climate Change Program,” Friends of the Rouge Watershed, n.d., <
24
Jim Robb, interview with author, May 18, 2011.
25
See Noel Castree, “Neoliberalising Nature: The Logics of Deregulation and Regulation,” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 131–152.
26
On neoliberalism in Toronto, see, for example, Douglas Young and Roger Keil, “Re-regulating the Urban Water Regime in Neoliberal Toronto,” in Nik Heynen, James McCarthy, Scott Prudham, and Paul Robbins, eds., Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007), 139–159.
27
See J. Marvin R. Macaraig, “Nature's Keepers: Civil Society Actors and the Neoliberalisation of Conservation in the Rouge Park,” Local Environment 16 (2011); Ibid, “Urban Greenspace, Civil Society and Science: The Creation and Management of the Rouge Park, Ontario, Canada,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2013), 189–218.
28
Macaraig, “Nature's Keepers,” 363; Robb interview, May 18, 2011.
29
Rouge Park Management Plan quoted in Macaraig, “Urban Greenspace, Civil Society and Science,” 193.
30
Macaraig, “Urban Greenspace, Civil Society and Science,” 198–204.
31
Lois James, interview with author, June 3, 2011.
32
Jim Robb quoted in Peter Gorrie, “Greening of a Champion,” Toronto Star, February 10, 2007, B1.
33
James interview, June 3, 2011.
34
Ibid.
35
Robb interview, May 18, 2011.
36
James interview, June 3, 2011.
37
Robb interview, May 18, 2011.
38
S. Josey, “Victory is Sweet for Supporters of Rouge Valley,” Toronto Star, September 27, 1988, E1.
39
Friends of the Rouge Watershed, “Climate Change Program.”
40
See A. Alonso Aguirre and Gary M. Tabor, “Introduction: Marine Vertebrates as Sentinels of Marine Ecosystem Health,” EcoHealth 1 (2004): 236–238.
41
Toronto Zoo, “Conserving Turtles in the Rouge Valley,” Toronto Zoo, n.d., <
42
Robb interview, May 18, 2011; see also StrategyCorp—Hemson Consulting, Governance, Organization and Finance Review of the Rouge Park Alliance (Toronto: Rouge Park Alliance, 2010), 42–45.
43
Jim Robb quoted in Marco Chown Oved, “Rouge National Park: A Place for Nature—And Farmers?” Toronto Star, November 25, 2012.