When ecosystem ecologist Shelby Riskin examined disk-shaped samples of old soil from Toronto’s waterfront hoping to find trace evidence of destroyed wetland plants, she watched in astonishment through a microscope as a brown wormlike creature greedily munched through green algae as if more than 130 years hadn’t passed since its last meal, while water fleas, worms, plankton, and larvae danced around it, resurrected from their underground tomb. The extraordinary discoveries began three years earlier when a bulldozer excavating Toronto’s waterfront for a multibillion-dollar river re-naturalization project was halted by thick green shoots that turned out to be cattails and sedges that had been buried under nearly 25 feet of dirt and gravel for over a century, their seeds and plant scraps roaring back to life the moment they touched air again. Scientists carefully extracted 50 pancake-shaped soil samples that revealed even more treasures including pollen from the now-extinct American chestnut, a seed from the 1500s, and the remains of one of the region’s largest peat bogs.
The project to restore the Don River, which had been forced into a concrete “straitjacket” in the 1920s during heavy industrialization, has created three hectares of new coastal wetland and four hectares of wildlife habitat on what was once a post-industrial wasteland so barren it looked like the moon. Riskin explains that humans have historically been terrible at recreating wetlands because the complex feedback loops are poorly understood, but this soil was ready to turn on with microbes and nutrients primed to create a thriving ecosystem, proving that sometimes nature just needs an opportunity to resurrect itself. The replanting of native species has been followed by the return of beavers, muskrats, fish, turtles, snowy owls, and eagles to a space where children now play in parks along peaceful watersheds that were contaminated industrial zones just years ago. Anishinaabe elder Shelley Charles, who helped name the newly formed island Ookwemin Minising meaning “Place of the black cherry trees,” says the discoveries vindicate Indigenous knowledge about the interconnectedness of ecosystems and serve as a reminder of what’s possible when we trust that life finds a way to persist beneath layers of human destruction.
