Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley by Jennifer Bonnell (review)

At first glance, the Don River seems a parable of a misspent life – a New World rake’s progress. Springing to life in bucolic surroundings, it descends into the city and bad company, until, imprisoned by concrete and the Keating Canal, it is cast into Toronto Harbour. However, as Jennifer Bonnell explains in her interesting and well-researched study, there is much more to the story of Toronto’s river. It is a history of not just a river but also of a relationship: between the Don, its valley, and the city that grew to surround and transform both.

The river recapitulates several themes in the environmental history of southern Ontario. By the early colonial era, traces of Aboriginal settlements had been swept away, as Torontonians began transforming the wilderness into an orderly garden in Europe’s image. The Don served the growing city, providing power for early mills, timber, bricks, and easy waste disposal. But city and river soon turned against each other; floods and swamps were poor neighbours for all but distilleries, packing plants, and other noxious industries. Engineering had lasting impacts. In the 1880s, the Don Improvement Project straightened the lower river in an attempt to “solve” its problematic habit of clogging the harbour with silt. The project’s unintended consequences illustrated the difficulties involved in controlling nature. The valley has also been a refuge for people marginalized by the city: the Roma, the unemployed, and outlaws. More recently, it has become a traffic conduit for commuters: today, most Torontonians know the valley only through their windshield, as they swoop down the Don Valley Parkway. However, tomorrow, the derelict port at its mouth may become downtown’s next address. As Bonnell explains, these varied vocations illustrate how the Don has shifted over two centuries from a significant, to a peripheral, and, once again, to a central place in the minds of Torontonians.

Several themes in this history relate both to the Don and to wider concerns in environmental history. As have other urban rivers, the Don has played several roles in the city that surrounds it, both enabling and constraining development. Changing attitudes toward the Don illustrate the evolving place of pollution in the modern city. By the mid-1800s, many perceived the river as a place of illness, endangering anyone unfortunate enough to live nearby, illustrating the historical links between perceptions of the health of landscapes and of humans, as discussed elsewhere by Conevery Valencius, Linda Nash, and Gregg Mitman. Similarly, the recent history of environmentalism in the Don illustrates how certain ideas can take root in a place and how that place can, in turn, influence the development of those ideas, particularly, in this case, because of Toronto’s status as a centre of environmental thought and action. The river also exemplifies, through its tendency to flood, erode, and deposit materials, the need to consider the dynamics of the natural environment when writing the history of a landscape. Thus, the Don has been a mirror – albeit a rather stained one – reflecting key moments in the environmental and cultural history of North America. Bonnell tells the stories of these moments, using a wide range of source materials as well as careful geographical analysis (which she has also explored online in considerable detail, using geographic information systems tools).

Many cities have grown alongside rivers, and the Don presents opportunities for comparison with other urban rivers. Of course, as Bonnell notes, this must be done carefully, given that the Don is a relatively small river, more easily transformed than, say, Vancouver’s Fraser, Montreal’s St Lawrence, or even Calgary’s Bow. However, it shares some of their features. One is the constant interplay between the river environment – water, soil and geological conditions, forest and other land cover – and human perceptions and actions. This has been equally evident in Toronto’s early industrial history...