Random Access

“Life is just seems so full of connections. Most of the time we don’t even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces.” - Colin Neenan.
Ah, flat impervious surfaces and connections. There will be a lot of talk about those this week as Credit Valley Conservation (CVC) hosts a four-day program to publicize A Strategy for Sustainability, its updated version of the Credit River Water Management Strategy.
And yes, we see way too many flat surfaces in Mississauga and the Peel watershed. And we have a lot of trouble connecting those flat, hard surfaces in too many vast parking lots with the fast runoff that sweeps contaminants too quickly into our storm sewers which are connected to our watercourses, and send torrents of water rushing downstream to erode river banks and foul the water in Lake Ontario that we will soon enough be sipping on.
I know what you’re thinking. Here we go again. “Crisis on the Credit” headline number 10,053.
Well, it’s not alarmist if it’s true. The Credit has been in trouble for a long time, as a succession of reports have indicated.
The bottom line of A Strategy for Sustainability is that, if we just keep rolling along as if nothing’s wrong while we urbanize another 25 per cent of the watershed, as scheduled, we are going to have serious problems especially in the south end of the watershed. The potential disaster is told best in a single map in the report, Figure 2, Applying Current Planning and Development Practices (business as usual) for Future Growth.
In that scenario, which the CVC is too polite to label the “head in the sand” approach, the map is covered with bright red in Mississauga, indicating serious impairment. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that red just happens to be the universal symbol for stop.
A series of changes, some of them significant (strict enforcement of sediment control regulations when lands are stripped) but many of them relatively innocuous, could change the potential disaster of overtaxing development that is sapping our groundwater, raising water temperatures and killing aquatic creatures and fish and setting off a whole series of negative consequences that — guess what? — ultimately affect our own health.
In a session on strategies to sustain urban watersheds at the Mississauga Convention Centre yesterday Anne Kitchell of the Center for Watershed Protection in the U.S. made us look at our own community through fresh eyes. In a series of photos she and her colleagues snapped on a whirlwind tour, they showed us the folly of our ways, and some relatively painless remedies.
Streets too wide, houses too close together, rooftops gushing water directly into sewers instead of onto a natural area where the water can be absorbed.
In an instructive little piece she called, “101 ways to make a parking lot better” it became obvious once again, that doing things the right way is not only smarter but it often looks way better too. Instead of sticking 20 dumb little shallow boxes with tiny trees that are going to die of drought anyway in a parking lot, why not design attractive landscape strips that hold water, allow for attractive mini-gardens and perform a critical function in absorbing runoff?
Here’s another instructive conclusion in the CVC report that, not so long ago, would have prompted treason charges: “Regardless of urban form and stormwater management alternatives applied, there is a limit to growth if the goals and objectives for watershed health are to be realized.”
That will be a sobering conclusion for many to accept in the growth nirvana of Peel. This is supposed to be the land that knows no limits to growth. No more.
If we truly want to become the sustainable, healthy city that Mayor Hazel McCallion (who spoke Monday) and City council say we want, then the CVC report, coupled with the Province’s smart growth strategy unveiled here Friday, must get a ringing endorsement from City Hall.
One more flat reception could be deadly.