Chaudiere's significance has many layers
Randy Boswell
Published on: October 5, 2014, Last Updated: October 5, 2014 12:47 PM EDT
The rezoning plan tentatively approved Thursday for Windmill’s redevelopment of the Chaudière islands was billed, in part, as a project that will “celebrate the industrial, aboriginal and natural heritage” of this historic site in the heart of Ottawa-Gatineau.
That’s as it should be. These islands really were critically important components of what would become the National Capital Region.
But there is also, in this ambitious and long overdue redevelopment scheme, an unacknowledged and unresolved tension between the industrial legacy of the site and its symbolic importance as part of a sacred space for First Nations and as a nationally significant place in the history of the Canadian conservation movement.
The conflict between aboriginal territorial and spiritual rights and the industrial-era entombment of the once-wondrous Chaudière Falls is well known. But we tend to forget the fact that the J.R. Booth sawmill operation on Chaudière Island and the other lumber factories on the river were also the villains in Canada’s first major industrial pollution controversy.
Given the enormously positive impact the lumber industry had on the economy of the entire Ottawa Valley in the 19th century, it’s little wonder the tremendous costs to the environment were largely overlooked at the time and subsequently muted by local historians.
Booth, Bronson, Eddy and the other timber tycoons who employed thousands of Ottawa-Hull residents would leave their names, bathed in glory, on city streets. But there was some political fallout, even in their day, and the earliest inklings in Canada of an emerging environmental consciousness in response to the lumber barons’ relentless dumping of sawdust and chunks of logs into the Ottawa River between the 1850s and early 1900s.
On multiple occasions in the post-Confederation era, the Parliament Buildings (their walls and ceilings framed with Booth’s lumber) echoed with debate over whether the ruination of the Ottawa, the destruction of its fish habitat, the impairment to navigation and the fouling of the capital’s main water supply was worth allowing the unchecked discarding of all this sawmill “offal” into the river.
The conclusion, over and over again, was yes, such “nuisances” would be tolerated to help sustain such an important industry. But the debates did eventually yield restrictions and established a template for future Canadian environmental regulations.
Still, there is some irony in the fact that the planned Windmill project at 3 and 4 Booth St. is intended to be a model of sustainable development — including ecologically sensitive building and landscape designs that promote “green” living — when the “industrial heritage” that will also be celebrated there recalls an industry that turned the Ottawa River, for more than 50 years, into the 19th-century equivalent of a toxic tailings pond.
In 1897, gases built up from sawdust deposits exploded and upturned the boat of a local farmer, killing him. Engineers building the Alexandra Bridge around 1900 remarked on how challenging that project was because of the massive layer of sunken sawdust — 10 metres thick in certain places — covering the bed of a river that once teemed with fish.
Booth, of course, will be additionally honoured in various ways as his former mill on Chaudière Island is elegantly repurposed for condos or offices. But the men and women who spent years complaining about and trying to stop the pollution drifting daily from Booth’s operations into the river, including an early Ottawa medical officer of health and naturalist, Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt, are all but forgotten.
Environmentally conscious Windmill has an opportunity here. It should, somewhere in its redevelopment plans, create a home and provide seed funding for a National Ecology Centre (in a spirit similar to the planned National Aboriginal Centre on Victoria Island) to promote research and advocacy around freshwater protection issues, sustainable forestry, Canadian environmental history and other aspects of conservation, each of which subjects are intimately connected to the multi-layered (and not always triumphant) story of the Chaudière Islands.
Former Citizen writer Randy Boswell is a professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. He recently presented a paper titled The ‘Sawdust Question’ and the River Doctor at a P.E.I. conference sponsored by NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...as-many-layers
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