The autumn morning of September 10th, 2023 was crisp and dewy as we arrived onsite at the Calgary Centre for Spiritual Living (CCSL) in the Manchester Industrial area.  The morning sun rose over the eastern horizon while the two Heathers (Morigeau and Addy) of the Steering Committee carried boxes of sorted seedlings from the safety of inside the Centre, which was a music-filled sanctuary, to the grass outside, glistening with morning dew. The day before, volunteer Team Leads came together for site preparation, to plot out the forest area into smaller zones and organize seedlings into boxes for each of their respective zones. 

A three-person band inside the sanctuary rehearsed “Big Yellow Taxi” and the beautiful melody floated out onto the area where a new forest would soon be planted.

They took all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum.
And charged the people a dollar and a half to see them.
No no no. 

Don’t it always seem to go,
That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Lance Rath, the CCSL operations manager, mentioned that the Spiritual Director, Dr Pat Campbell, had a special service planned on the importance of trees and forests, in celebration of the forest planting event. He invited us to join and I felt a quiet inner wish that I could just sit quietly in the seats of the sanctuary and hear the spiritual teachings of the Trees. 

However, on that day my teachings were outside the sanctuary, upon the earth and with Mother Earth’s rhythmic heartbeat. The millions of seen and unseen forces that ensured the survival of the seedlings were coming together at this unique moment in time, when we as humans were wanting to set right our relationships with the Earth and plant this forest for the benefit of future generations. 

The quiet hours of the morning shifted to increasingly busier moments of organizing boxes, buckets, tents, hoses, and paints into a system designed to make the whole process go smoothly for everyone.  The slopes of the hill to the north loomed over us as the morning sunlight stretched over its south-facing slope, a perfect spot for growing a little forest. 

As I looked upon the steep and mulch covered slope, I was reminded of a teaching from my Permaculture Design Certificate course with Kym Chi of Giggling Chi Tree, any slope over 15% grade should be planted with trees to ensure the stability of the soil and reduce erosion from the elements.

On site-prep day, the volunteer Team Leads used biodegradable flagging tape to divide the steep hillside into a grid of 27 zones, each one was 2 meters by 4 meters. Each of these spaces would be the permanent home to 32 native plant species as recommended by the Miyawaki forest planting method, which uses 4 plants per square meter to encourage rapid growth due to biodiversity that creates both supportive and competitive conditions between plants.

Trees were, and still are, systemically removed from these lands and replaced with the urban centres where the planting of new trees isn’t shared equally amongst all communities. These lands were once called Mohkinstsis by the Blackfoot Nation, Wîchispa Oyade by Stoney Nakota, Otoskwunee by the Cree Nation, Guts-ists’i by the Tsuu’tina, and ʔaknuqtap¢ik by the Ktunaxa Nation. 

Once upon a time, in the days of small wooden shacks without running water, settlers believed clearing forests ensured the relative safety of the citizens from the abundance of wildlife that lived there and relied on the forest’s abundance of food. Land was also cleared to support agriculture activities. Today, with the migration to cities and the added environmental impacts from generations coming after the industrial revolution, the benefits of forests far outweigh their risks and the harvesting of trees causes more harm than our current technologies can remedy. The best solution is to return the lands to the conditions that existed prior to the emergence of cities and the paving of paradise.

On forest-planting day, we finally realized months of planning to establish a tiny 250 square meter forest on light-industrial land inside the metropolitan city of Calgary. Everyone from a population of 1.6 million citizens benefits from community tree planting initiatives. With an average annual increase in population of 2.72% over the past 10 years, Calgary can expect the population to increase to over 2 million within the next 10 years. How many trees does it take to sustain 2 million people?

According to sciencefocus.com, it takes, “roughly, seven or eight trees,” to produce a year’s supply of oxygen for one person. For a city of 2 million people, about 14 million trees would contribute to a healthy supply of oxygen. But there are many other physical and mental health benefits provided by those trees. Of the 860 seedlings that were planted at CCSL, 220 were tiny trees that will someday produce enough oxygen and other benefits for dozens of people. It’s a small step, but many steps make a journey.

Around noon, the service finished and the congregation started coming outside, gathering in a crowd under the warm sunlight tempered by a consistent breeze. They were joined by volunteers from the Calgary Climate Hub, which bolstered the numbers to around 70 people. 

Heather Addy began the Land Acknowledgement by not only acknowledging the land we occupy, but acknowledging the First People who cared for this land tens of thousands of years before Europeans found their way to Turtle Island’s shores by boat. She acknowledged the treaties that were signed, which held responsibilities for the Crown, governments that would be established here, and the settlers from Europe coming in search of a better life. 

These newcomers had treaty responsibilities to the Original Inhabitants of the land, now called “Indigenous Peoples”. Promises were not kept while acts of deception and intentional harms were committed against Indigenous Peoples. These harms cannot be repaired by one proclamation before an event, but it is my hope that those words spoken at each event will be heard by the attendees and they will accept the call for an acknowledgment of past harms as well as ongoing responsibilities. With time, our world will begin to shift, the way the seasons shift from a cold and seemingly endless winter towards a gently thawing spring of hope, regeneration and new life. 

Elder Marilyn Shingoose of the Saulteaux Nation, Cote Band, shared teachings with everyone there on how the Smudge Ceremony can bring cleansing and prepare our hands for the task ahead.  She reminded us to pause as we touched the earth and try to connect with Mother Earth as we undertook this restorative work. The curls of sage smoke fill the air with a scent that reminded me that we were doing important work in this space and that we were doing it in a Good Way. 

To demonstrate the planting process Rob Miller, Heather Addy, Lindsay Dandridge and Tom Schlodder gathered on a patch of ground to walk through the planting process. Lindsay dug her shovel in the ground and moved the thick layer of mulch and soil to expose a small hole that would become home to a tiny seedling. Heather lifted a plastic bag of soil to show the onlooking crowd. Heather had carefully acquired this soil from a well-established forest near Calgary to be used as an inoculant, providing native fungi and nutrients. 

Thoughtfully, she placed a handful of soil into the tiny hole in the earth, transporting millions of microorganisms that would ensure the successful growth of a forest, giving each plant a community of the unseen support it needs to thrive. Tom carried water to the hole. “Water is life” echoed through my mind as I tried to narrate the process. As Rob passed a seedling to Lindsay for planting and she lowered it into the hole, overhead the cry of a mated pair of Swainson’s Hawks drew everyone’s attention skyward.  I observed their wingspan, easily a meter wide, as they paused above us, hovering for a moment from their birdseye view. After pausing in acknowledgement, they travelled back to their nest with a magpie limp within one of their talons. They would soon be nourishing their family as we would be nourishing the Earth with new life. I placed my hand to my heart as I saw the hawks flying overhead, for what we were creating here was important not only to us, but to them as well. This is their home. 

I originally designed the layout of the forest with a stylized hawk in mind, but the artistic concept was abandoned for a simpler layout with maximum use of space. In the end, the forest design wasn’t as important as the habitat we were creating for the Swainson hawks and other creatures of the Earth, our relations, the ones that walk, crawl, fly and swim.

Earth Healing Ceremony

O Great Creator, I come before you in a humble manner and offer you this sacred pipe. With tears in my eyes and an ancient song from my heart I pray. To the four powers of Creation, To the Grandfather Sun, To the Grandmother Moon, To the Mother Earth, And to my ancestors. I pray for my relations in Nature, All those who walk, crawl, fly, and swim, Seen and unseen, To the good spirits that exist in every part of Creation. I ask that you bless our elders and children, families, and friends, and the brothers and sisters who are in prison. I pray for the ones who are sick on drugs and alcohol and for those who are now homeless and forlorn. I also pray for peace among the four races of humankind.

May there be good health and healing for this Earth,
May there be Beauty above me, May there be Beauty below me,
May there be Beauty in me, May there be Beauty all around me.
I ask that this world be filled with Peace, Love, and Beauty.

… by Medicine Grizzly Bear Spokane, Washington, 1990
… from http://www.starstuffs.com/prayers/prays2.htm

After the Elder Shingoose’s teaching, a safety briefing by Karen Chow, and other formalities, people joined their Team Leads and ventured up the hill with their boxes of tender seedlings. Bit by bit the forest took shape as holes were dug, to be filled with rich soil and mycorrhizal fungi. Each tree sapling was marked by a red flag.  Many thanks to Team Leads Rob, Heather, Tom, Lindsay, Karen, Kevin, Andrea, Sasha, Fran and Lance who worked with their groups of 3-8 volunteers, all excited to join into the process and figure it out as they went along. 

Under the shade tent a table had been set up for painting stones for the forest, this task was taken on by the elders and youth of the Calgary Centre for Spiritual Living. It’s also an important task to bring beautiful art into the forest, and a way for those who cannot bend or climb the hill to capture the energy and joy of the day in their own special ways. 

By the time lunch was served two and a half hours later, over half the forest had been planted. We were honoured to hear Motunrayo Amore share her Nigerian experiences of listening to songs being sung to the trees while being planted in her home country.. 

If a single person had been doing all this work over 6-hour days, it would have taken 38 days to complete. This is the power of community! This is the power of coming together with a common goal of rebuilding the urban forest of Calgary for the benefit of all citizens. 

A small forest will sequester carbon with a single mature tree absorbing about 10 kilograms of carbon per year. Once grown, the 220 trees alone will remove approximately 2.2 tonnes of carbon per year. These trees will clean wildfire smoke and car-smog from the air, improving our respiratory health and giving us fresher air to breath. The trees and soil regenerated by the forest will absorb rainfall more quickly than grass lawns can, which reduces run-off and flooding and can restore the underground water table reserves. 

The shade from the tree canopy will reduce the heat of the field and provide a place of refuge from the intense summer sunlight. Shade near a building can also reduce air conditioning costs. In the winter months, trees block the wind and decrease the cost of heating nearby buildings. 

These trees will provide habitat for birds, beneficial insects and wildlife, and a more stable ecosystem will reduce the need for petrochemical herbicides and pesticides. As the leaves fall and compost into their soil, this will rebuild the nutrients into depleted topsoil and eliminate the need for fertilizers. This may be a small forest, but its impact has wide reaching implications not only to the people in the immediate area, who will benefit from this beautiful forest space, but for all things living in Calgary, including the Swanson’s hawks.

None of this would’ve been possible without bringing together a team of people who can see within their mind’s eye a vision of the future that is better than the one we are in today. With conviction, motivation and tools in hands, they restore to Mother Earth that which we have taken from her. Trees taken for buildings and paper products and cleared for urban sprawl.  

We are grateful for what Mother Earth gives to us so generously, we are grateful for the abundance of this planet Earth we call home. By acting with gratitude, we become aware of our responsibilities to return as much as we take, to give in reciprocal relationships with the Earth and all her creatures, between us and those who are All our Relations.