Planes, Heroes, Smoke and Trees
By Mike Hurley, Executive Director, TFL
I don’t often make personal contributions to our newsletter, but a recent experience was just too powerful to keep to myself. Last month, in mid-July, I boarded a flight to Edmonton in great anticipation of an event that had been months in the making. The event was celebrating the incredible partnership that we share with the City of Edmonton and its Root for Trees program. We were to celebrate the planting of nearly 20,000 trees in the city as a thank-you to their local healthcare heroes. It would be one of the first Trees for Heroes collaborations of this magnitude, outside of Ontario.
The site: Tawa Park, located next to Grey Nuns Community Hospital, one of four major hospitals in Edmonton. It was lined up and ready to go – volunteers from the community, healthcare heroes from Covenant Health and the local hospitals, volunteers from TD Bank, one of our top corporate partners, several dignitaries, the City of Edmonton staff, and more. The final preparations were in place and everyone involved was beyond excited to see months of hard work come to an exciting conclusion.
But Mother Nature had other plans. The moment the plane doors opened, what I was expecting to be a breath of fresh, prairie air, didn’t happen. Instead, I was hit with a wall of hazy smoke. Sadly, this is something that is all too familiar right across the country including the Greater Toronto Area, and something I had never experienced before. I could see and smell it in the air and feel it at the back of my throat. And all of it due to wildfires and a shift in wind direction. I had a sinking feeling that the months of hard work were going to be for not. While traveling from the airport to my hotel, my worst fears were realized via email – we had to cancel our event due to a poor air quality index.
I felt a mix of emotions, none of them were good. Our team takes great pride in managing the smallest of details to ensure a successful event, but this was something simply out of our control. I could not help but note the irony that we were ready to plant trees for healthcare heroes, which over their lifetime would provide a myriad of health benefits to the community, yet we had to cancel the event to protect the health of the participants.
This challenge serves to remind us of two very important reasons to keep planting trees where we live, work, and play. One, as much as we live in a country where there are vast expanses of forests and trees, we continue to lose many of them every year to development and wildfires. 2023 has been by far the worst year on record and it’s scary to think that record could be passed in future years. Two, the fires that have been previously out of sight and therefore out of mind, are now in plain sight in many of our major cities, or at least the effects of them are. The fragility of our air quality is much more apparent. We now know that fires that burn hundreds of kilometers from where we live can affect the air in our biggest cities.
The simplest and easiest solution to reverse the loss of trees and improve our urban air quality is to plant more trees in our communities. While it was disappointing to postpone the event, I came home with more passion and a stronger resolve to do everything possible to help Trees for Life grow by supporting the planting of more trees across our great country.
The upside: The event wasn’t canceled, just delayed until the fall. We’ll be back in Edmonton on October 5th to give this collaboration (and the heroes it honours), the celebration they so deserve.
If you’d like to participate and happen to be in the Edmonton area or know someone who is, you can find more information on the event by clicking here. (will provide link)
The second is that I had the opportunity to visit the site of another planting project Trees for Life supported this year, at the Nutrien Ltd. headquarters in Fort Saskatchewan. Nutrien, one of Canada’s premier fertilizer producers has started a fascinating project with Trees for Life planting partner, Project Forest, in which industrial lands previously used for mining the raw materials needed for fertilizer are being reclaimed through the process of afforestation. Not only are tens of thousands of trees being added to otherwise barren land, but those trees are contributing numerous other benefits to the environment. I was able to see the results of their work at the site: newly planted trees, just weeks prior and forests planted two years and 6 years ago. To my delight, the trees were thriving and had created homes for birds and wildlife including a herd of deer! It was energizing to see the success of this project and I’m excited about the potential for it to inspire others just like it. You can learn more in our Partner Spotlight in this issue.
It was energizing to know that the work we do is more important than ever and that the partnerships we are securing and with your continued support, we are growing across Canada.
Mike Hurley
Executive Director, Canadian Trees For Life
www.treesforlife.ca