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Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto's Don River Valley , by Jennifer L. Bonnell

2015; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cjh.ach.50.3.rev24

2292-8502

Jason David Hall,

American Environmental and Regional History

Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto's Don River Valley, by Jennifer L. Bonnell. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014. xxx, 277 pp. $65.00 Cdn (cloth), $29.95 Cdn (paper). Jennifer Bonnell's Reclaiming the Don is a captivating history of a tiny river valley's intimate connection to the development of Toronto from the 1790s to the present. Organized around successive visions and plans for the Don, as well as the natural, political, and social forces that influenced them, the book explores the interplay of these different imagined futures as a dynamic process of historical change with profound consequences for the watershed and city. Bonnell's study reveals a key historical pattern. For elites, the river shifted from a central feature of a colonial town to a marginalized and disease-ridden industrial sewer and then to a celebrated corridor of metropolitan development and parkland. These pendulum swings between a landscape of opportunity and a waste space reveal the complexity of our material and cultural relationships with rivers over time and help to explain the intricately layered history of Canada's largest urban landscape and one of its most polluted waterways. Moreover, Bonnell's skillful investigation of how the Don has been many things to many people offers insight into the changing nature of urban pollution and shifting environmental values across two centuries. The book's first two chapters discuss the river as an Aboriginal portage route, a source of fertile soils, clay, and mechanical energy for settlers, as well as a waste sink and railbed for a rapidly industrializing city. Chapter three examines the Don Improvement Project, a large scale attempt to re-engineer the river with the competing goals of riverine flood control, harbour transportation, human health, and the expansion of urban space. Bonnell's fourth chapter explores the transient cultures and liminal spaces that emerged around the river in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The remaining three chapters focus on conservationist Charles Sauriol's efforts to preserve the Don and the theatrical protests of a burgeoning Canadian environmental movement; the development of a metropolitan parkway through the river valley; and the city's latest plan to redesign the Don's mouth. Throughout the book, Bonnell demonstrates her skill as a gifted storyteller by combining case studies of key events, social groups, and modernization projects, with biography and landscape analysis, in an engaging and cohesive narrative. Moreover, the maps, engineering plans, and photographs accompanying the text help readers visualize the Don's history and geography. The links Bonnell forges between marginal environments and social outcasts are an invaluable contribution to Canadian history. …