We tumble through the tangled meadow community of Raspberry, Asters, Goldenrod, and grasses that have strengthened these damaged, polluted traintrack lands over time. Last year's growth has formed into a dry mat along the ground, offering shelter for the insects and small mammals that live here all through winter. Gall flies have lovingly laid their eggs inside Goldenrod stems so that as soon as their young hatch, they can start eating. Chemicals in the hungry grubs' saliva then trick the Goldenrod into growing a perfect, round belly in which the young flies can survive the winter freeze.
Low to the ground, we see a meadow vole hard at work designing elaborate tunnels beneath the matted grasses. In creating their homes, voles do good work of spreading the networks of fungus that are essential to the restoration of healthy land. While scurrying around, the tiny voles are also unknowingly distributing nutrients evenly over the land in convenient pellet packages. The value of this little community's accumulation of health seems huge in contrast to the destruction and poisoning of so much of the land around here.
As we continue further East, the type of neighbourhoods around us change. Here, this traintrack area is some of the only green-space close to these communities. Almost every time we're down here we find some young kids creating forts and playing pretend in the grasses. The neighbourhoods here are made of treeless streets interspersed with factories and junkyards, and the buildings cling to the roadsides leaving no space even for grass. There are no parks or jungle gyms or pretty waterfront trails to be found.
Skipping off the tracks at Wentworth Street and turning North, we're immediately confronted by the sight of a lake-front factory spewing smoke and fire into the sky. In the city's downtown, a very exclusive kind of progress combined with spiking rent prices is displacing a huge segment of people into these neighbourhoods further East. This area is disproportionally plagued by heavy pollution. There's no healthy forest nearby. Heck, there aren't even any grocery stores here anymore. We begin to realize that in order to fully understand the implications of the types of progress occurring in the downtown, we need to better understand the situation in the city's East.
Just one block North along Wentworth, we come to an overgrown set of tracks no longer used by trains. At the entrance there's an old wooden tv set with the screen smashed out and tiny plants growing inside of it. We take this as a welcoming sign and tiptoe around the piles of garbage to enter a jungle of vines and shrubs that twist around scrappy trees. There are many Trees of Heaven here, an invasive, fast growing plant that you can count on to grow on any site, no matter how devastated or poisioned. (We lovingly call them "junk trees"). A closer look reveals that the beat up thing acting as a giant flowerbox was once a boat.
A rabbit hops by us, pausing close to a tree we hadn't ever noticed here before. It's a young Honey Locust, a rare native tree that protects itself with thick thorns and is especially good at living in highly polluted areas. Their spines defend this wild community from the very real threat of humans intent on "cleaning up" these areas.
This scrappy stretch of land is part of a vital corridor linking forests in different parts of the city for raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and even coyotes, who are sometimes spotted out on the Dofasco pier.
We wander out of the overgrown tracks and go North along Sherman to catch the next set of tracks and return West. Passing a row of factories we observe strange metal barrels and 'dead spots' in the vegetation where chemicals have clearly been dumped. It's hard to see the benefit that those living nearest these industries get from them. Those who do profit live far away where it's safe to sleep with your window open. Who decides whose health is acceptable to poison? We stop to climb into the most giant of junk trees and are immediately covered in soot.
As we reflect again on the street festival, we remember how easy it was to get caught up in the happy myth of this downtown development creating healthy community. But who is included in that vision? Is deciding who is desireable in the core the same as deciding who will be subjected to industrial pollutants? Unhealthy land is a product of unhealthy societies. So what can we learn from these healing traintracks about creating a society that value all its members and contribute to healthy communities?
We can learn so much from the work of a tiny meadow vole—each being adds to the whole, and the health of wild spaces is synonymous with diversity of life. By allowing so many to be excluded from the downtown development, we are submitting to the same logic that would mow down the Honey Locusts in the name of tidiness.