Knowing the Land is Resistance is a project based in the remaining Carolinian forest around Lake Ontario. Our goal is to explore the ways that a deeper connection to wild spaces around us can advise our work as activists. For more articles, check out our website: knowingtheland.wordpress.com
Kitchener-Waterloo is a rapidly growing double city on the banks of the Grand River. After biking from downtown kitchener, we’re stopped to catch our breath at the intersection of Erb St W and Ira Needles Blvd in the city’s west end. With wide eyes, we take in the landscape of a newly developing shopping centre and its sprawling parking lots— all in the place of the abandoned farmers fields and healing meadows here just last spring. It is being built by Voisin Developments Ltd, responsible for another twelve similar malls across the province.
The centre will be called The Boardwalk, a name that is grimly appropriate, considering that it is built on top of what was recently part of a wetland. Friends who have brought us out here for a walk in the adjacent woods are stunned to see the fast transformation of the earth as far as the eye can see. They question the continued development of this land. This mall and the surrounding neighbourhoods of houses are built on an unstable moraine system, and many of the new houses are sinking, their basements chronically flooded.
We cross the parking lots to the mall’s South end, where at least twenty heavy machines are scattered over the more than one million square foot area newly flattened. The land here is not yet paved, but has been graded, with the topsoil scraped away and stacked up in a huge pile near the back of the site. A patch of grasses and wildflowers have precariously sprouted from the top of the mound of precious soil. Some of the machines are working now to move dirt from the pile into large concrete flower beds around the parking lot.
Nearby, a rectangular, sod-lined pond has been created in an attempt to divert the meadow’s waterflow and deal with the flooding that comes with covering the land in pavement. A shallow, stagnant pool is forming. Water that was once enriching and valuable to this land is treated as waste, a potential hazard to be managed. We wonder how the watershed in the lands surrounding this is responding to these changes.
As we explore, we get a clearer picture of how the story of this sort of suburbs-n-malls model of development goes. All land is interchangeable, it says. Whatever the local features of the ecosystem, they are to be destroyed and the land standardized using grading and fill to create that prefabricated product we see emerging in countless city suburbs these days.
One friend tells us of spending time in this meadow earlier this year. There used to be lots of birds here. We see many goose droppings and tracks on the dry flat earth. Geese who have been stopping in these grassy meadows for generations, will this year find a parking lot instead. This South end of the mall will be home to a Wal-Mart, and as we walk away from the machines, we see the barren hills of the city dump close by – it seems appropriate that those two things be together.
Around the perimeter of the construction site are sediment barriers that are intended to prevent runoff from entering the intact wetlands beyond. But the barrier is covered in a dried layer of sediment up to the top, suggesting that it has overflowed recently. We eagerly step beyond it too, continuing South towards the marshy lands, glad for a hint of what this whole area once was.
