Little Forests Kingston

Workbees, collaborations, calendar, outreach

We’re cancelling the Saturday bi-weekly meetings as various smaller teams are working on aspects of Little Forests and meeting as needed. If you’d like to get involved in one of the teams let us know. Here’s the rough start of a calendar. We’re hoping to refine this and get it posted to the web, including listed forest walks and seed collecting expeditions.

• Stewarding Little Forests: Throughout the season forest stewards at each site are monitoring the Little Forests. First activity this spring was to remove the tree protection, pull mulch away from the base of the seedling, ensure the seedlings hadn’t suffered any frost heave, and apply deer spray. Looks like at all three sites the the bulk of the seedlings survived! Wolfe Island suffered some deer browse in the fall before the tree protection went on, but the seedlings are bottom sprouting so most should be fine. During the first workbees of the season, people at each site (including the grade 6 class from R.G. Sinclair) removed the tree protection. At HWY 15 and Wolfe Island, they also applied deer spray. R.G. Sinclair will be returning to Lakeside Tuesday at 10:00 to plant a PawPaw patch next to the Little Forest.

• Public Works Tree Equity collaboration: Public Works is increasing tree equity through their Neighbourhood Tree Planting program. We’ll be working with them to recruit people/sites in areas suffering tree equity. Here’s a draft of how we’ll collaborate with them. Have ideas (or want to help)? Let us know.

• Kingston Secondary School & NCRA Toolkit: KSS is piloting a revised version of the Neighbourhood Climate Resilience Assessment Toolkit in June. Joanne is working with teachers at KSS to revise the toolkit and integrate it into the curriculum.

• Cataraqui Kingston Rotary Club, who are keen on growing Forest Stewardship, recently partnered with the Senior’s Centre and want to recruit Tree Champions. Just imagine if even 10% of the Senior Centre’s 5000+ members start championing trees! The Centre would also make a great site for a Little Forest.

Policy work

While we don’t yet have a team working on policy, we’ve been active. In April, Little Foresters presented some wonderful delegations to the City’s EITP Committee, including these presentations by Noah & Robert which generated a lot of great questions from the Councillors.

A new motion by Lisa Osanic being presented to City Council on Tuesday offers another great chance to educate Councillors, City Staff, and influence policy. If you’d like to speak to this motion, you can register via the City Council Meeting page. There is a lot of interest in 3-30-300 tree equity, but the biggest hesitation around adopting this rule of thumb as policy seems to be the rule of 300 metres to a quality greenspace. For more on 3-30-300 rule of thumb, read this two pager by Cecil Konijnendijk.

If you’re keen on policy and want to start working on this issue, let me know.

Tree thinking

“Imagine if we had a planetary computer that could tell us exactly what we needed to do to protect planet earth — a system that was capable of providing us with information about every tree, every species, all of our natural resources: how could we use all that data to build a better world?”

NCX, America’s Forest Carbon Market. Microsoft, A Planetary Computer for Earth.

Shannon Mattern, in a fabulous article on Tree Thinking, challenges this technocratic vision.

“Just imagine! Wouldn’t that be grand? An algorithm that could calculate how many trees would atone for the historical and contemporary inequities of urban planning and environmental injustice, that could undo processes of deforestation wrought through centuries of colonial violence, that could heal a landscape destroyed by clear cutting? A dashboard that grants us datafied dominion over all of creation? A colossal computer that would model all living systems and allow us to turn some knobs and test the impact of design solutions: a windbreak here, a forest preserve there, a pollinator garden over yonder?”

So much of the conversation around trees focuses on their role as carbon sinks rather than as “'sites that sustain cultural narratives or indigenous cosmologies” and “systems and repositories of knowledge that resist algorithmization.”

Forest elders, oldest citizens

Here is a beautiful example of tree thinking shared by Dr. Jesse Popp, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Science at the University of Guelph, Principal Investigator of the WISE Lab and member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. “These giant Elders have towered watching humans for centuries. This particular Elder was standing tall decades before settlers arrived on Turtle Island!”

Robert, during his delegation to the EITP committee, spoke about trees as Kingston’s oldest citizens.

Listen to a forest

On Treefm you can listen to forests. If you visit this map you can listen to the sounds of forests in Ontario as well, but right now there are no recordings in our area. Anyone up for uploading some? And perhaps as one of our biodiversity trackers we should record a Little Forest each year on a specific day, listening for (and celebrating) the return of the languages of all our relations.

Book-shaped repositories called xylotheques 

In Mattern’s article on Tree Thinking, she shared this amazing example of book-shaped repositories of trees specimens called xylotheques. (from the Greek words xylos which means ‘wood’ and theque for ‘depository’). “Each “volume” in a xylotheque was a box made of a particular species of wood; its spine was covered with the corresponding bark, and its sides were composed of various tree cuts: horizontal slices of branches, cross-sections of truck, samples of sapwood, mature wood, heartwood. Within a box there would be an assortment of anatomical parts: seed capsules, roots, leaves, buds, flowers, and wax models of its fruit.”