Sudbury regreening efforts 'halfway' there, professor says

Sudbury has another generation to go before its landscape is completely reclaimed after years of deforestation, a Laurentian professor says.

Peter Beckett, professor emeritus of ecological restoration at Laurentian University, said although regreening efforts by the community – including schools, businesses and the government – have been impressive, he estimates it will take another decade at least to return it to a healthy state.

"The nice, lush green systems which are out there are not yet completely functioning ecosystems," Beckett said. "Some of the decomposers, some of the animals, some of the plants are still missing."

"Also, if you go over the hills into the back forty, there's lots of areas still not done."

Beckett said it was a Liberal policy in the early days of regreening efforts to improve the landscape in more visible areas and around certain lakes. 

Although noticeable, and an improvement over the barren Sudbury landscape of the 1970s and 80s, only about 30,000 hectares have been reclaimed. Beckett estimates that's about half the amount of land needed to be considered a healthy ecosystem.

"If we go to the soil itself, which actually is one of the main thrusts of the ecological decade, is to improve soil quality," Beckett said. "In a single teaspoon of soil, we may have as many as a million different kinds of organisms, not just the soil animals, but bacteria and fungi."

"And we need to get all those back to have a really healthy ecosystem."

"In the Sudbury area, we have the legacy of metals in the soil. So we have to make them potentially less toxic by introducing limestone," he said. "One is going to have to introduce nutrients, either with fertilizers or perhaps organic fertilizers or waste organic materials which contain nutrients such as compost, such as people do in their gardens."

"The importance of organic material is essential because this holds onto the moisture, it holds onto the nutrients, it provides the material for the bacteria and the fungi to feed on."

Despite the long wait for the landscape to become green again, Beckett said he is still impressed with how far Sudbury – which once stood in for a moonscape during NASA geological studies – has come.

"I'm always amazed every time I go out," he said. "I don't think I had any idea of what it would look like now, this lush, healthy landscape...people out there in the pandemic using the trails,  using the woods for recreation."

"Whoever thought when we first started doing the regreening that we were actually doing something which was going to be essential in the pandemic?"