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I SHOULD BE FORTHRIGHT and explain here that I have some personal experience with chickens, myself. Three years ago, I was living on a modest permaculture plot in a small town. Our next door neighbours were conventional chicken farmers, and they raised what must have been several thousand chickens at a time in a concrete coop that is apparently considered to be the industry standard for housing fowl nowadays. From right up close, I could see that their living conditions were absolutely atrocious.

I DON’T WANT TO ENGAGE in provocative hyperbole, but it’s hard to not make the comparison between these cruel cages and genocidal concentration camps. Certainly, from the chickens’ own perspective, they would not be able to see many major differences between the two. True, chickens may not be capable of making calculations in advanced trigonometry. But you know what? Neither am I… And in their ability to experience physical and emotional pain, there is no measurable difference whatsoever between a chicken and your Great-Aunt Shirley.

I AM NOT GOING TO USE this forum to advocate for a vegan lifestyle. Certainly, there are a thousand and one industries that cruelly use animal products when non-living materials would clearly suffice. But there are so many competing philosophies around human food consumption, and it seems that almost every other week another doctor or dietician comes up with a new regimen that purports to grant its practitioners maximum human health. So I definitely won’t tell you not to eat animal products, but I definitely will ask of you, that if you do so, to try to do it ethically and morally.

UNFORTUNATELY, FROM MY OWN perspective, there are not really any store-bought ethical options in the City of Toronto. Now of course ethics and morals are purely subjective, and not everyone is going to agree on how other species should be treated. But the point is that the industry is dominated by only a couple of massive agrobusinesses, who grow their chickens in horrid conditions. And the laws that strictly regulate the industry are tailor-made for these faceless corporations, so even if you wanted to band together and create an eco-alternative, you can’t!

AND FROM THIS SAD STATE of affairs emerges the backyard chickens movement. Historically, city slickers have peacefully co-existed with non-human animals for as long as there have been cities. It is only in the last sixty years or so that a sanitized version of suburbia has been pre-packaged and sold to the North American people, one in which there is a complete disconnect from our food sources, and our kitchens bear no evidence as to the origins of the animals we eat. And so nowadays our children have come to believe that slabs of meat are born already stuck onto styrofoam and wrapped in plastic… (and if Biotech has their way, they soon will be)!

BUT I REMEMBER YEARS AGO when I was looking for a place to rent in downtown Toronto, I saw a first-floor apartment in Little Portugal. The landlord took me on a tour of the house, and I was startled to discover a chicken coop in the backyard, with real live chickens in it! Apparently, this was not an anomaly; lots of Italian immigrants came over to this country and maintained their traditions of raising chickens for fresh eggs. Many continue to do so till this day. It’s officially illegal, but as long as the neighbours don’t complain, it remains unreported and everyone is happy.

IN THIS CRAZY, MIXED-UP WORLD we live in where food prices are rising all the time and we can’t trust the household-name big businesses to provide us with healthy and ethical food, it’s starting to make more sense for more people to think about raising chickens on their properties. And this has not gone unnoticed by the bureaucrats at City Hall. In a couple of months, they will be rolling out a backyard chicken pilot program in a number of neighbourhoods, to see how people react to it. Just like city-wide recycling services and compost collection: if it’s a success on a small scale, then they’ll expand it to the entire city.

AND TORONTO IS NOT THE ONLY city in North America that is considering amending its by-laws to officially permit small-scale urban egg farming. Dozens of American cities have already given the green light to backyard chickens: from San Francisco to Phoenix, Portland to Pittsburgh, Seattle to St. Louis, Chicago to Boston, Atlanta to Miami, Denver to Dallas, Los Angeles to Las Vegas; even the biggest metropolis on the continent, New York City, has A-okayed raising chickens in residential neighbourhoods. Even closer to home, in Brampton to the north, Guelph to the west, and Niagara Falls to the south, town councils have spoken with one voice: Legalize it!

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? If you support the idea of legalizing backyard chickens, then please call you City Councillor and encourage them to co-sponsor a bill. If you’re open to the idea of raising chickens in your own backyard, then get educated, learn everything you need to know. And if you live in one of the neighbourhoods that gets the go-ahead to bring the chickens out from the underground, and if you’re ready to accept the responsibility and reap the rewards of having backyard chickens, then give us a call, and we’ll happily design and build you a backyard chicken coop!

For more information about raising chickens in Toronto,
check out TorontoChickens.com.

For more information about industrially-manufactured animal products, two excellent films are Fast Food Nation and Food Inc.

THE COVENANT HOUSE, a Catholic support center for street youth, recently renovated their roof at 20 Gerrard Street East in downtown Toronto, and we got to see it the day before last. It’s kind of weird to peer through the shrubbery and see a sign for “So You Think You Can Dance” several blocks away. Green roof with sign view is not nearly as good as green roof with no sign view, but it’s infinitely better than regular roof with sign view, so I won’t complain. Much!

TRULY, IT’S A LOVELY little escape from the smoggy street-level hustle and bustle. Great work!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcNHt8ID9EM

Angkor Temples, Cambodia

Angkor Temples, Cambodia

OF COURSE, NOT EVERY single species of plant matter is appropriate for inclusion in a green wall. Since there is little or no soil, only perennial plants that have a shallow root base should be installed in a wall. For outdoor green walls, drought-resistant plants should be used, since they can weather climactic extremes. For indoor green walls, tropical plants should be used, since they are accustomed to balmy twenty-plus Celsius degree temperatures all day long. But that still leaves us with a wide variety of plant families to choose from. The main factors that affect which will be included are budget and exposure to natural and artificial sources of light; for outdoor walls, micro-climactic factors are obviously important considerations, as well. Here below are photos of a few of the multitude of species that can be utilized in a green wall:

outdoor green wall plant possibilities

indoor green wall plant possibilities

WELL, AT GREEN APPLE, we mean to practice what we preach. So we are officially declaring our intentions to launch this new venture, offering green wall design and build services for our clients. And to put our money where our mouths are, starting today we are constructing a green wall in our new offices here in North York! On a personal level, I’ll be very happy to have some natural plants to look at, especially as fall sets in and it starts to get colder outside. With something lovely to look at, it may help me get my butt out of bed and out to work earlier than otherwise. And least that’s what all the stats say, that green walls decrease employee absenteeism and increase worker productivity! And I have a hunch that in the wake of this decision, more meetings are going to take place here, since clients and suppliers are going to want to come see the green wall for themselves!

WE MAY BE THE LATEST, but we certainly aren’t the first in the GTA to erect a green wall. In the meantime, you might want to check out two Toronto locations with vertical gardens, both built back in 2004: the Guelph Humber Building and the Robertson Building. The Guelph Humber Building is part of the Humber College North Campus in the west end at Finch and Highway 27, and can be reached by TTC from Finch Station with a 36B bus, or from Wilson Station on either 96A, 96B, or 96D. And the Robertson Building is located in downtown Toronto at 215 Spadina Avenue, between Dundas and Queen Streets; just take a 510 Spadina streetcar southbound from Spadina Station. We applaud these pioneers, soon to be peers, and look forward to the day when green walls will be so commonplace that they will barely require mentioning!

Guelph Humber Building, Toronto

Robertson Building, Toronto

I’LL END THIS MISSIVE about green walls with some thoughts for the future. It seems almost silly to discuss extreme possibilities when we’re just getting started with walls. But it’s also inspiring to contemplate where the leaders in the field are taking this technology. Patrick Blanc has pointed out that there are many examples in nature of plants actually growing downward from on high, and so he designed a human-made green ceiling! Check it out below. And outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, artist Jeff Koons installed a huge puppy dog that is covered in every crevice with vegetation, a real 3-D green experience. I think we’ll stick to the Y-axis for the time being, but continue to be invigorated by the prospects of putting the jungle back into concrete jungle!

Espace EDF Electra, Paris

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

ONCE THE LAW goes into effect on January 31, all new buildings — residential, educational, institutional, and commercial — with over 2000 square metres in gross floor area (which is equivalent to approximately six storeys or more) fall under the jurisdiction of the law. At 2000 square metres, 20% of the roof must be green; at 5000 square metres, 30% must be green, and for every additional 5000 square metres, another 10% of the roof must be green, up to a maximum mandatory minimum of 60%. Green roofs mean much more insulation, will translates into lower heating bills in the winter, and lower cooling bills in the summer. And of course, green roofs humanize the atmosphere by removing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and replacing them with oxygen-rich habitats for living beings.

IN 2005, CITY COUNCIL authorized an analytical study of green roofs. Conducted at Ryerson University, it came to the conclusion that 21% of Toronto is roofed, and that it could capably support 50 million square metres of greenery! They deduced that with this kind of investment in ecological infrastructure, the city would save over $300 million to start with, and an additional $37 million annually. The municipal government funds key commonwealth capital like roads and bridges — why not roofs, too? According to the NGO EcoJustice, between 2006 and 2007 over 2.7 billion litres of what Toronto flushes down its toilets was dumped into Lake Ontario; green roofs would have prevented this from occurring by retaining rainwater that overloads the sewage system.

THE RYERSON STUDY recommended mandating green roofs on all buildings with a multi-floor footprint of 350 square metres or more, but by the time the legislation came to council, building industry interest groups had rewritten the requirements, making 2000 square metres the cut-off point. Another loophole lets industrial buildings off the hook if only 10% of their roof area has been greened. And developers can outsource their ecological commitments by forking over funds for the retrofitting of older buildings. Ecological lobbyists Green Roofs for Healthy Cities are “very concerned that there’s been a watering down of the requirements, and we’re concerned it will set a negative precedent for cities elsewhere in North America.”

AND LIKE SO MUCH environmental protection legislation, the green roof bylaw isn’t backed up with nearly enough bite. If developers fail to meet these percentage requirements, they can be fined up to $100,000. But if ‘going green’ on a large project can mean increasing the cost of the roof by “hundreds of thousands of dollars… if not more”, as industry lobbyists BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) claim, then levying a mere $100,000 fee against the offenders would mean that they would have a greater incentive to break the law than to abide by it. In his June 27th article “Is green roof bylaw valid or a cash grab?”, New In Homes title page columnist Bob Aaron even suggests that the green roof bylaw is nothing more than a ploy by City Hall to squeeze more money out of virtuous developers.

ON THE PHONE, Aaron told me, “Green roofs are idiotic… they’re not cost-effective… and they’re ecologically insignificant.” When I asked him to substantiate his claim that green roofs are ecologically insignificant — would he also claim that green lawns are ecologically insignificant? Would he recommend that the bylaws requiring residences to include a certain percentage of green ground cover surrounding the house be repealed? — he admitted that he did not have any factual information to justify this assertion. I just didn’t understand why a reporter who has written a weekly Saturday column for the Toronto Star for the last decade would be so resistant to green roofs. That is, until is learned that in addition to his job as a journalist, he is also on the board of directors of the Tarion Warranty Corporation.

THE TARION WARRANTY CORPORATION is a privately-owned company that has been chartered since 2004 to mediate the legal relationship between disgruntled homeowners and derelict developers. A year ago, André Marin, the Ombudsman of Ontario, chastised the provincial government for misleading the voting public into assuming that it would protect their interests by overseeing the activities that they delegate to the Tarion corporation. Tarion’s own internal literature states: “Tarion’s mandate is unique in Canada. No other province or territory so completely transfers responsibility and liability for management of the home building industry to an independent organization.”

ALL NEW HOME BUYERS are required by law to pay Tarion between $700-800 to ‘protect their purchase’. Tarion has a state-protected monopoly on guaranteeing warranty coverage, and yet it is a private corporation, not a government agency, and therefore it is not accountable to anyone but its own board of directors. This year, Tarion held one public meeting that lasted less than an hour in the middle of the morning, when nearly no hard-working homeowners could have had their voices heard. It holds $100 million in equity, but consumer advocacy groups like Canadians for Properly Built Homes complain that it is a far cry from “the consumer protection organization it is intended to be”.

SIX MONTHS AGO, the CBC’s investigative report program Marketplace exposed Tarion’s practice of hampering home-owners’s efforts to receive fair restitution, even when they had obviously been defrauded by dishonest developers. Time after time, naïve home-buyers are being ripped off by unscrupulous home-builders, and then left with no choice but to seek legal representation, a course of action which is financially prohibitive for most. In the CBC piece, even Bob Aaron admitted: “The assumption is that [Tarion was] there to protect builders, who actually controlled the [warranty] program… the board is stacked with builders.” A few weeks after he made this statement, he was appointed to the Tarion board of directors himself.

IF A BUILDING DEVELOPER cuts corners and installs a sub-par green roof, there is a chance that it will leak. If that happens, home-owners have a right to demand that the developer return to repair the damage. But builders don’t want to do more work than they absolutely have to, because it cuts into their profit margin. So the government has entrusted Tarion with the task of protecting consumers’ interests. But Tarion corporate offices are stacked with building industry officials. And so one of these elite industry insiders, who just happens to have a public platform for promulgating his views, uses his position to contribute to a campaign of disinformation about this new and exciting aspect of ecological architecture, green roofs.

SO THE INK IS not even dry on this new piece of ecological legislation, and already the forces of big business are making moves to crush it before it can be put into effect. And the Toronto Star probably owes its readership a higher standard of journalism. But we would be remiss if we did not come clean about our own biases, as well. Here at Green Apple, we have our own vested interests in the implementation of this new bylaw: we are seriously considering entering the Toronto market to build green roofs on the tops of houses, in addition to the landscaping work we do around them. So we’ll try to use this blogging platform as a way to tell our side of the story: why we still think going green is the healthiest and happiest way to go, roofs included.

Thanks to Roger Frost for research.

Next Blog: The Green Roofs of Freidensreich Hundertwasser