Toronto S Ravines

No matter where you are in Toronto, you are close to a ravine. In these often-hidden places you can find an astonishing diversity of birds, flowers, and trees. Jason Ramsay-Brown has spent twenty years exploring the more than one hundred ravines, parks, and urban forests within Toronto's boundaries. For this book he has selected the thirty natural areas most rewarding to visitors, and provided accounts of what you will encounter there — and what you can learn of the city's history as well. The variety of flora and fauna is astonishing. In one park alone, the Leslie Street Spit, more than three hundred species of birds have been identified since the turn of the millennium. The increasingly scarce butternut tree can be found in Warden Woods, and wildlife such as deer, beaver, foxes, and coyotes are often spotted along many ravine trails. Jason tells the story of ongoing efforts of ecological restoration and stewardship to protect these habitats and ecosystems, such as the wetlands of Taylor Creek Park and the old-growth forest within Glendon Forest. The ravines also contain many landmarks of local history: rumours of buried British gold in Scarborough's Gates Gully, large First Nations encampments near L'Amoureaux Park, and early industries like Todmorden Mills. With extensive visuals illustrating all thirty ravines and forests from across the city, this book offers something for every Torontonian and every visitor.

Toronto is a flat city. That is, unless you discover its secret. Running through the downtown and suburban megacity is a hidden world of ravines. In these 34 walks, urban readers will discover the wilds within their midst -- cliffs and overgrown fields, red fox and red-tailed hawk, whitewater and white pine. All walks are accessible by public transport, and each is presented with abundant information for seasoned hikers, weekend walkers, explorers, birders, amateur naturalists, families, and, in a few cases, young lovers. Author's note: The person who finishes any one of these walks in the shortest amount of time has missed the whole point, and a lot of other good stuff!

With the same eye for character, anecdote and circumstance that made Peter Ackroyd’s London and Colin Jones’s Paris so successful, Levine’s captivating prose integrates the sights, sounds and feel of Toronto with a broad historical perspective, linking the city’s present with its past through themes such as politics, transportation, public health, ethnic diversity and sports. Toronto invites readers to discover the city’s lively spirit over four centuries and to wander purposefully through the city’s many unique neighborhoods, where they can encounter the striking and peculiar characters who have inhabited them: the powerful and powerless, the entrepreneurs and the entertainers, and the moral and the corrupt, all of whom have contributed to Toronto’s collective identity.

Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the "greening" of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And any vision of a sustainable urban future must place its focus squarely on nature, on the presence, conservation, and celebration of the actual green features and natural life forms. A biophilic city is more than simply a biodiverse city, says Beatley. It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans in conjunction with nature. A biophilic city cherishes the natural features that already exist but also works to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded. In Biophilic Cities Beatley not only outlines the essential elements of a biophilic city, but provides examples and stories about cities that have successfully integrated biophilic elements--from the building to the regional level--around the world. From urban ecological networks and connected systems of urban greenspace, to green rooftops and green walls and sidewalk gardens, Beatley reviews the emerging practice of biophilic urban design and planning, and tells many compelling stories of individuals and groups working hard to transform cities from grey and lifeless to green and biodiverse.

One morning in Don Mills, Phil and his brother Jay agree to let their friend Norman Kitchen tag along on an adventure down into a ravine — and what happens there at the hands of two pitiless teenagers changes all their lives forever. Years later the horrifying details are still unclear, smothered in layers of deliberate forgetting. Phil doesn’t even remember the names: Ted and Terry? Tom and Tony? It’s only when he descends into a crisis of his own that he comes to realize that perhaps, as he drunkenly tells a crisis line counsellor, “I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.” The Ravine is Phil’s book — we read it as he types it, in the basement apartment he’s called home since his wife kicked him out for having an affair with a make-up girl. As he writes, and then corrects what he’s written, we hear how he went from promising young playwright to successful, self-hating TV producer. We listen in on his disastrous late-night phone calls, and watch his brother (once a brilliant classical pianist) weep to himself as he plays Ravel and Waltzing Matilda in a desolate bar. The Ravine tells us all about the influence of The Twilight Zone on Phil’s work and his life — how it helped him meet his wife Veronica and then lose her, and how it led to the bizarre death of his friend, TV star Edward Milligan. Sometimes, when Phil’s drunk, a friend will look at what he’s written so far and call him on it — like when Jay tells Phil that he’s remembered it all wrong: that he was just as good as Phil at tying knots back when they were in the cubs. Phil’s “ravine” is his attempt to make sense of things, to try to understand how everything went so wrong just as it seemed to be going so right. But The Ravine is also a Paul Quarrington novel, meaning that it’s hilarious and ingenious, quietly working its magic until the reader is at once heartbroken and hopeful. A darkly funny story about loss and redemption, The Ravine is also about how stories are made — how they can pull us out of disasters that seem too much for anyone to bear — and about how, sometimes, what we need to forgive ourselves for is not what we think it is at all.

Exploring Toronto’s history through tantalizing true tales of romance, marriage, and lust. Toronto’s past is filled with passion and heartache. The Toronto Book of Love brings the history of the city to life with fascinating true tales of romance, marriage, and lust: from the scandalous love affairs of the city’s early settlers to the prime minister’s wife partying with rock stars on her anniversary; from ancient First Nations wedding ceremonies to a pastor wearing a bulletproof vest to perform one of Canada’s first same-sex marriage ceremonies. Home to adulterous movie stars, faithful rebels, and heartbroken spies, Toronto has been shaped by crushes, jealousies, and flirtations. The Toronto Book of Love explores the evolution of the city from a remote colonial outpost to a booming modern metropolis through the stories of those who have fallen in love among its ravines, church spires, and skyscrapers.

In Imagining Toronto, Amy Lavender Harris ventures deep into the imagined city Ñ the Toronto of fiction, poetry, and essays Ñ where she dowses for meaning in the literature of the city on the lake as its inhabitants understand, remember, and dream it. By tracing Toronto's literary genealogies from their origins in First Nations stories to today's graphic novels, Harris delineates a great city's portrayal in its literature, where the place of dwelling is coloured by the joy and the suffering, the love and the sorrows, of the people who have played out their lives on the written page. Through tales of the city's neighbourhoods and towers, its ravines and wild places, its role as a multicultural city, as a place of work and leisure, Harris reminds us that the reality of Toronto has been captured by its writers with a depth and complexity that go far beyond the reductive clichZs of Toronto as either a provincial 'Hogtown' or a pretentious 'world class' city. Michael Ondaatje once noted that 'before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined.' Imagining Toronto shows just how richly and completely it has been, if only we would look.