Conserving Environmental Quality

“Conserve” is a deceptively comfortable verb, evoking images of quiet museum corners or secluded country retreats. The Concise Oxford Dictionary’s definition of “conserve” is: store up; keep from harm or damage, especially for later use. It’s one thing to be conserving artefacts of a former era – there’s an easy charm in that. It’s quite another thing to conserve fundamentals essential to our daily life and to our very survival – and none are more fundamental than air quality and water quality.

We have every good intention to conserve air and water quality, but since we share these gifts in common with millions of others, and since we have virtually free use of them, other priorities take over, and our good intentions remain just that. The following part of the Annual Report describes some of Ontario’s challenges in conserving air quality, water quality and natural heritage lands. Far too often conservation alone is not adequate, because air and water quality are already significantly degraded. Clean-ups are called for, and sometimes those clean-ups appear to have an overwhelming scale.

This part of the Annual Report does, however, have a hopeful thread running throughout. It outlines real opportunities to restore our Great Lakes to “great” status by improving the quality of municipal wastewater effluents. It also highlights the admirable example of Guelph, showing that a wastewater plant (and the group of professionals running it) can respond with intelligence and innovation to ecosystem limits set by the receiving waterway. This is the conservation ethos at work. Regarding air quality, this part describes ongoing efforts by the Ministry of the Environment to regulate industrial air emissions. It describes some of the pitfalls of basing emission limits on the business constraints of industrial sectors rather than on health and environmental risks. It also points to the need for a stronger focus on traffic-related emissions, and illustrates the proactive work of some municipalities in assessing their local air quality issues and incorporating that knowledge in land use planning.

The ambitious plan to protect and restore the Lake Simcoe watershed is also reviewed in this part of the Annual Report, including some cautions on the many exemptions allowing continued development activities. The last piece in this part is a cautionary tale of Ontario laws and policies operating at cross-purposes, with the result that provincially significant wetlands are being drained rather than conserved.

• 4.1 Sewage Treatment: Not Good Enough
• 4.1.1 Ottawa’s Overflow Woes
• 4.1.2 Success Story: Guelph Optimizes its Sewage Treatment
• 4.1.3 When Bigger Isn’t Better: Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Systems
• 4.2 Moving From End-of-Pipe to Front-End Toxics Reduction in Ontario
• 4.3 Not Airtight: Amendments to Ontario’s Air Quality Regulation
• 4.4 How’s the Air on Your Street?
• 4.5 A Watershed Moment? Ontario Introduces the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan
• 4.6 The Drainage Act: Drying up Ontario’s Wetlands