What if, in 2045, Kingston's forest was unique in the world?

“A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity. The environment is alive, a fluid changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other, flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Trees shape us as much as we shape trees. We’ve just forgotten how to see... Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak in frequencies too low for people to hear."
Richard Powers, The Overstory

I took this picture of my back yard last summer. Front left is a young Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), planted by a squirrel around 20 years ago. A squirrel who, in squirrel time, was probably a great great great great great ancestor of squirrels who today call this patch of Great Lakes - St. Lawrence Forest home. At the back, you can see White Oak (Quercus alba) and Red Oak (Q. rubra). I am deeply grateful for the presence of these Elder Oaks who, along with another Elder Oak and an Elder Sugar Maple, live at the back of my yard. I'm not sure of their age, but I suspect they're at least 100, present on this land from a time long before there were houses or a street.

These Elder Oaks survived the expansion of the City of Kingston onto their land due to their presence along the fenceline of a former farmer's field and the decision to preserve a piece of the former field for a park. Before the farmer's field, their ancestors probably flourished in a Oak-Maple-Hickory Forest. Over the past 100 years, they have witnessed wetlands drained, the channeling of Highgate Creek, the disappearance of Salmon from Highgate Creek, the disappearance of the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee, the decline of the Monarchs who once might have sheltered in them as they prepared for their journey south and the disappearance of the 27 Purple Martins colonies with whom they once shared the Land, Air and Water. As children, they may even have witnessed the last of the Passenger Pigeons stop to feast on Acorns from a Mother Tree. And, in their rings, they are telling the story of our changing climate.

In The Elders of the Forest: A Métis Dendroclimatologist's Perspective, Dr. Colin Laroque, Métis scholar, asks us to trust the words of trees who have lived longer than us. Red Oak and White Oak could live 400 or 500 years. So the Oaks at the back of my yard are probably only teenagers in Oak time.

Friday March 21 I celebrated the International Day of Forests, offering a prayer, a hug, my love and my hopes for their future and the future of their descendants. Here's an excerpt from the Land Acknowledgement of Little Forest Kingston's 2024 Annual Report:

"Trees remind us of our responsibilities as ancestors. They are our gifts to the future. We whisper a prayer of peace and love to each one, asking them to pass that message to the humans who will know these Trees as full grown and majestic. Planting Forests is an expression of love for our Earthly Kin who will step, fly, or crawl among them. We invite you to join us on this journey."

• More-than-human perspective and agency: What might Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee have to say? How about Chickadee, Oak or Firefly? Kawsak Sacha reminds us that a “metamorphosis will only be possible once we learn to listen to and dialogue with these other beings, who are part of a cosmic conversation that goes well beyond the dialogue […] until now carried out exclusively among us humans.”
• Ecological corridors: Each of our Earthly Kin have their own way of moving through landscape. How might we create connectivity to enable them to safely move through our city.
• 3-30-300 tree equity: Imagine a city where every child can see at least three trees from their window. Where they can walk, wheel or bike down tree lined streets serenaded by the songs of birds and insects. Where they can play, dance and experience the magic of a forest, meadow or wetland within 300 metres of their home.
• Watershed thinking: Reversing the drought, fire, flood watershed degenerative spiral by offering water spaces to slow down, nourish Photosynthesizers, and soak into the land.
• Forest-as-verb: Kinship is a verb. Forests are continually becoming, in relationship with Land, Water, Air, humans and our more-than-human Kin. How might thinking of forest as verb — foresting — inform our vision for Kingston in 2045? What if each each forest patch was a genetically diverse mother patch, ensuring high quality seed for birds, mammals and children to spread.
• Forest as food: Stewarding forests for food is the oldest form of agriculture. Imagine a city flourishing with food forests and forage forests in every park, along active transportation corridors and in every schoolyard.
• Flourishing forest understory of meadows, shrublands and thickets: Imagine if, instead of parks and yards of dotted with lonely trees in a sea of turfgrass (traps for migrating birds when they discover there's nothing to eat and traps for Lepidoptera who have no place to overwinter), turfgrass was replaced by multi-layer meadows, shrublands and thickets along forest edges and connecting forest patches.