Episode 1 transcript: Wild at heart
The first in a four-part podcast exploring the natural heritage woven into the university’s urban environment.
Hosted by Maya Lach-Aidelbaum, a master's student in the Department of Communication Studies.
This is episode 1: Wild at heart
Maya Lach-Aidelbaum: From a young age, we're able to recognize hundreds of corporate logos. Yet, how many of us can name the native plants on our own block?
I invite you to close your eyes for a moment. Think about the trees you can see from your kitchen window. Can you recognize the different species? Are there even any trees to see?
You know, cities — most of the time — aren't places we associate with nature. Our streets are designed for cars, shopping and work. It's a maze of concrete, glass and flashing lights. If there are trees, you might only notice them when they're providing shade on a hot summer day.
But what if we connected to the wild in the city? What if we pay closer attention to the trees and the other species that surround them and us? This podcast walking tour is an invitation to do just that. Together, we'll explore our relationship with urban nature, how it affects our sense of well-being and place in the world.
We're recording this podcast in Tiohtià:ke — also known as Montreal — on unceded Indigenous land. Tiohtià:ke means "broken in two" in the Kanienkéha:ka language, describing how the St. Lawrence River splits around the island.
The Kanienkéha:ka nation are the stewards of this land. For thousands of years, they have gathered, lived and cared for these spaces — long before these streets were paved or buildings were built. Their knowledge and relationship with the land continue today.
I hope you'll take a moment to notice not just the trees and the life they support, but also to reflect on the history of the land where they grow. The reason we're doing this podcast now is because Concordia recently planted over 1,700 new trees and shrubs on campus. This was a big project, and we couldn't have done it without the support of Soverdi, a local not-for-profit dedicated to greening the city.
We'll also highlight some of the work being done to create a more biologically diverse campus. We hope that this will inspire members of our community to visit these spaces and dream up projects of their own — or simply take a break and enjoy the space.
My name is Maya Lach-Aidelbaum, and I'm a master's student in media studies at Concordia. As part of my studies, I'm exploring our relationship to urban spaces and the environment, with a focus on liberatory, decolonial practices.
In this first episode, we'll hear from Concordia's urban agriculture and biodiversity coordinator to investigate the role of wild spaces in urban environments, how they're vital to our mental and physical well-being, and how they can help us reimagine our connection to the natural world.
Let's get started.
On site with Jackie Martin: “And then, over here again right beside the parking lot, we have what we'll call a wildlife tree. It's a maple that is mostly dead but still standing. What we'll do is we'll take off any limbs that have the potential to fall, but we'll leave the main trunk of it standing because we know that there's quite a few woodpeckers who come around and visit this space. This is a particular habitat that they ...”
In studio with Jackie Martin: I'm Jackie Martin, urban agriculture and biodiversity coordinator at Concordia's Office of Sustainability.
On site with Jackie Martin: “There are a couple of different biodiversity initiatives happening ...”
In studio with Jackie Martin: Previous to us planting all those trees there, it looked like any other part of the campus or any other part of a city park. It had grass — mowed grass, — some trees with lots of space in between them, like the edge of a park basically.
Now, we planted over 300 new trees and shrubs in that area, and they stretch all along the border. Right now, they're pretty young. The tallest one is probably three metres and looks like a stick in the winter, but it'll bloom in the spring.
The planting — the spacing of them — is pretty close together, a lot closer than you'd see in a park. Underneath it, we're going to encourage an understory to grow up, which is this is when it's going to start to really transform to look like something that's not a park — that's going to look wild.
The species that are in there were selected to represent all of the different functional groups of trees. There's five of them in this area, so they're all pretty much equally represented, except for the coniferous trees. We've overrepresented coniferous trees. If you had coniferous trees growing all along your sidewalks, you would lose your sidewalks because coniferous trees would take over the space. That's one of the reasons they're underrepresented in the city. Because this isn't a place with sidewalks — this is a place that's supposed to be more wild — we've overrepresented them here.
Another reason for overrepresenting them is they are really excellent winter habitat for a lot of our creatures — like a lot of our birds and animals.
On site with Jackie Martin: “But you also try to instantly fly in a forest. Forests have different phases of succession. They have pioneering trees who come in and grow up really tall, really fast. Then they die down and make room for the smaller growing ones, and they create the habitat. Here, what we've done is some of the larger trees are more of the pioneers ...”
In studio with Jackie Martin: From my perspective, I really wanted to have these wild spaces because I know how connected people become to that. It's just such an easy opportunity to get into a kind of wild nature space in your everyday life.
Most of us are going to walk down a sidewalk to the metro, get on the metro, go underground — not see anything — pop up, hopefully close to where you're going, take another sidewalk and go indoors. There's not going to be opportunities for wild spaces.
For me, that's a big thing. To bring that in, that's the human aspect of it. And the other aspect of it is we need habitat, we need biological diversity in order to be resilient in the face of climate change. If we only have spaces that don't have long grass or don't have different types of flowers or don't have different types of trees, then we're not inviting all the insects, all the soil organisms, all the birds, all the mammals that live off of that. And as we continue to urbanize, we're taking that space away from them. If we can find little pockets in urban spaces to give that back to the rest of the creatures who we inhabit this space with, we should do it.
On site with Jackie Martin: “And then as time goes on, and this will give us a little bit of data to see like, okay, we just planted 1,700 trees. Did that impact the other creatures? Are we getting more birds, are we getting more butterflies? That's one of the things that we're doing to make sure ...”
In studio with Jackie Martin: We hear a lot about the benefits of forest bathing and access to wild spaces and what it does to our central nervous system — it calms us down, we breathe cleaner air, we relax. But they're intimidating if you're not used to them. If you take somebody who hasn't spent a lot of time in nature and drop them in the middle of Mont-Tremblant on a trail, they're not necessarily just instantly going to feel comfortable there.
Putting these things in here gives people an opportunity to become comfortable in these spaces. And my hope is that, with increasing comfort, becomes increasing affection, understanding and desire to protect and expand these types of spaces.
When you're in wild spaces, you're the foreigner. If you're living in an urban environment, it's an environment that was built and tailored to a bipedal human to get around with her little dog. But when you go out into a wild space, there's so many different other creatures there. The environment is made for all of us to be there together, and that we each play a role.
But I think a lot of the times we think of ourselves as separate from nature, as separate from the trees, as separate from all of the creatures — and it's really to our detriment.
On site with Jackie Martin: “Now that we're merging from behind the JR Residence into the parking lot, we planted a lot of trees here as well. But this area our focus was different than in the place that we just visited. Here, what our main selection criteria was we wanted big trees — trees that are going to grow up and provide a lot of shade. This is a parking lot, this is a miny heat island in the summer. But it's also ...”
In studio with Jackie Martin: Mini forest planting in Canada is pretty new — there's not a heck of a lot of them. It's a research site, but it needs to be joined with other research sites. I hope in the future what we learn from this helps us to bring more wild spaces to more places, and it takes away the fears surrounding it.
It's a new thing for city planners, it's a new thing for parks managers, it's a new thing for neighbours. I hope that in 10 to 20 years, this space is one of the spaces that gives us the tools to replicate it in the future.
Maya Lach-Aidelbaum: And that's it for this first episode of our four-part walking podcast tour. Thank you for joining us to explore how we can bring the wild into the city. I hope you're inspired to take a closer look at the trees around you — they might just surprise you.
Be sure to head over to our next stop where biology professor Rebecca Tittler will help us identify tree species and see trees in a whole new way.
