Restoring wide swaths of nature is critical for the health of the planet. But do we have the seeds we need?

A quarter of Canada’s trees are at risk, and upwards of a million species around the world face extinction in the decades to come. Restoring nature is essential to survival — it can make communities more resilient to climate change, it can regrow areas destroyed by increasingly intense wildfires and it can help reduce atmospheric carbon. But repairing ecosystems is not as simple as planting seeds. In this special episode, experts weigh in on restoration efforts, the global seed shortage and the problem with planting too many trees.

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Narration: When I think of nature, the first thing I imagine is a quiet, soothing environment, a place to relax and to calm my mind. But scientists argue that a healthy ecosystem is actually a noisy one.

[sound of birds chirping]

Narration: More sounds means more species, and more species means greater diversity. Greater diversity means a more resilient, stable planet. Unfortunately, too much of the planet is becoming disturbingly quiet. Biologists tell us when they listen back to audio recordings of ecosystems, it’s unsettling. The sounds of nature are falling silent.

If we’re going to slow down, or better yet, reverse the silencing of nature, we need to move quickly. We need to restore ecosystems, plant trees — billions of them — and not just trees, all kinds of native plants. And as many experts say, to get this right, we have to start at the beginning where all of life originates: the humble seed.

I’m Manjula Selvarajah, and this is Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World.

Seeds are generally small, of course, but they’re not simple. Each one carries vital genetic information, and how we collect and store them is crucial, not just for preserving biodiversity, but for helping us adapt to a changing climate.

Martina Albert: My name is Martina Albert. My given name, or traditional name, is The One Who Helps Care for the People. I work for the National Tree Seed Centre based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but I specifically work on the Indigenous Seed Collection Program.

Narration: You may have heard of seed banks around the world, intended for storing food crops, but this one at the National Tree Seed Centre is dedicated to trees and shrubs.

Martina Albert: I do see it as this living library because the seeds themselves, of course, are, you know,alive. They’re respirating, there’s a lot of cellular, you know, things happening on a molecular level.

Narration: It’s the only national seed bank in Canada created to conserve the genetic material of our forests. The oldest seed lot in its collection is from 1947.

Martina Albert: When I walk in there, I feel like, if I close my eyes, it’s not hearing just the buzz of the freezer, I can hear them. You know, there’s life in there.

Narration: Today’s forests, though, are increasingly under threat from invasive pests, pathogens and climate change.

Martina Albert: That seed that’s stored can be stored for generations and potentially used for restoration efforts, any type of conservation effort after a natural disaster, but also to be used for research across the country or even internationally.

Narration: Martina invited us into the inner sanctum of the seed bank, where she walked us through a couple of the steps involved in processing seed for long-term storage.

[sound of freezers humming]

Martina Albert: We are inside one of our freezers. Science has shown that between minus 18 to minus 20 is kind of the sweet spot for storing seed effectively long term.

[Sound of Martina processing seeds]

Martina Albert: So we are processing some white spruce cones. These were collected locally here in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

[Sound of Martina sifting through spruce cones]

Martina Albert: That’s going to go right to the bottom, and the seed is going to stay on that top layer.

Narration: The seed gets separated for two reasons. One, a seed is much smaller than a cone, so it takes up less room, which makes a difference, given their objective to collect all the species from all the ecodistricts in Canada. And the other reason is that it reduces the amount of moisture, which can cause mold. Moisture is the enemy of the seed bank.

Martina Albert: Because the water will expand if you try to freeze them, and it will kill all cellular activity.

Narration: At the heart of this work is the idea of collecting enough seed to represent genetic diversity. Take a tree from Southern Ontario. It might look just like the one in New Brunswick — same species, same shape, same smell — like siblings in a family. But if one of those siblings has developed a natural resistance to a disease, that could be really important for conservation.

Martina Albert: And we don’t know the things that we don’t know. If we’re going out and ensuring that we’re getting good quality collections and a representation of each species from a very specific area, a very niche area, then somewhere along the line, if that becomes really important, knowing the difference in the genetic makeup of that species, well then it’s there, right?

Narration: You can think of it as a kind of insurance policy for the future.

Martina Albert: In the basements of Fredericton, New Brunswick, we’re helping others to solve huge questions around climate change — you know, disease resistance, pest resistance, that kind of thing.

Narration: For Martina, working with seeds and repairing nature is also about acknowledging her identity and position as a rightful, original caretaker of the land.

Martina Albert: As an Indigenous person, I find a lot of meaning in nerding out about seeds with people, because I feel like I’m honouring my ancestors, and I want them to stand with me in the work that I do. And I want to honour life, because I’m supposed to be thinking of seven generations ahead, which is a long time.

Narration: If you haven’t heard of the seventh generation principle before, it’s a key part of Haudenosaunee philosophy that we have a responsibility to the people that come after us.

Martina Albert: And so thinking for those future generations, I want to be able to honour life now, so that seven generations down the line, maybe some seeds that I helped harvest are there for somebody else to use, and that care and love is in those seeds.

Narration: Martina and the National Tree Seed Centre are working to protect species and ensure we have the seeds we need for the future. But with ecosystems under stress and time running out, how do we align science and industry to meet the scale of the challenge? In early April, I caught up with two people who thought a lot about these questions: Blaine Pearson, the founder and CEO of Seedark, a Toronto-based company on a mission to build a digital database of seeds needed for restoration. And Faisal Moola, a professor of geography at the University of Guelph and an expert in conservation management.

Manjula Selvarajah: The UN has declared 2021 to 2030 the decade of restoration. Why is ecosystem restoration so urgent right now?

Blaine Pearson: I think ecological restoration is absolutely critical at this point. So you think about only 3 percent of the Earth’s ecosystems or terrestrial landscapes as being sort of intact. It’s a pretty striking number.

Manjula Selvarajah: It is, yeah.

Blaine Pearson: And then you think about ecosystem services and, of course, carbon sequestration. So the ability to restore ecosystems is really intertwined with our own survival on this planet.

Manjula Selvarajah: Faisal, I’m going to pull you in. Go ahead.

Faisal Moola: Sure. Yeah, no, I totally agree with Blaine. And what I would add to that is that, you know, nature is incredibly resilient. You know, most of the biomes that Blaine has described that are now degraded have embedded resiliency within them. They’ve evolved the capacity to respond to shocks. I’ll take an example that the boreal forest biome, which is the largest forest on the planet, it is found all the way from Newfoundland as far west as the Yukon, and is in every single province and territory, with the exception of Prince Edward Island. This forest is naturally able to recover from forest fire.

But the types of fires that are happening now are different. They are far more frequent, they are far more severe, and they are burning over a much greater area. So for the first time ever, we’ve now seen boreal forests that are not recovering after forest fires. So as a consequence, we as people are going to have to restore that ecosystem, either through tree planting or other types of efforts. So I think this is what really scares me as an ecologist, is that, you know, the things that we were able to rely upon in the past, the assumption that nature is relatively resilient, those are all breaking down in the face of new, emerging threats that are just overwhelming the natural systems across the planet.

Manjula Selvarajah: You’ve identified this key thing that is important to restoration. It’s a key barrier: seed shortages. Do we have a seed problem?

Blaine Pearson: We absolutely do have a seed problem. There is a global shortage of seed for restoration, and more than that, we simply don’t have the systems in place to enable us to do that work of increasing the supply effectively. We really need to be addressing and looking at ecosystems as complete and dynamic and integrated systems of not only plants but other living creatures.

Manjula Selvarajah: Is that issue, this idea of people or countries going ahead with restoring using monocultures, is that a thing?

Blaine Pearson: I think to a degree, there is an issue. When we did our research with the National Tree Seed Centre several years ago, one of the things that came out in the conversations from a qualitative standpoint with a number of players across the industry, was that when they don’t have access to a particular seed or a particular plant that they would like to be putting into a prescription, if they don’t have access to it, they either substitute with something else, or they just don’t plant anything in its place. And that, you know, puts a very fine point on the role and the value of ensuring that we have sufficient seed supply. So certainly, it is happening when you can’t find something, that would be the right thing for that area, you get into a situation where you’ve got to do your best.

Faisal Moola: And if I can add to that, the danger is that in the absence of clear policy, we also have perverse incentives. Now I’m very concerned about carbon offsets, because carbon offsets and the monetization of tree planting is sending a very clear incentive to the market to plant trees with one goal only, which is to maximize the sequestration and storage of carbon. So as a consequence, we’re seeing carbon offset projects come out that are claiming to be ecological restoration, but in fact, they are plantations: very, very low biodiversity, typically one or two trees, trees are being planted in rows, they don’t deliver on ecosystem services. And in many cases, they actually are in conflict with local communities and Indigenous peoples, because as important as where we plant and how many trees we plant, is how we plant.

Narration: That question — how we plant — has taken on a new urgency. In December, 2022 countries from around the world gathered in Montreal and signed the Global Biodiversity Framework. As far as UN agreements go, this one’s a big deal — setting targets to reverse biodiversity loss before the end of the decade. And with the scale-up of carbon markets, the stakes are higher than ever.

Blaine Pearson: I think maybe just to expand on that, this is sort of a highly nascent industry. It’s new. I think we’re all trying to figure out how to value this work and how to do it to its best approach or its best outcome. Because I do agree with you with respect to the risks of the way that carbon markets are currently structured. I do have some hope how higher quality carbon credits are going to be developed in the future, and how ideals of biodiverse plantings are going to be built into those credits. We are on a precipice, there’s no denying. One in four tree species in Canada is at risk, and I think once we start to understand and feel the impacts of those losses more acutely, there’s going to be a faster adoption to value biodiversity and to have it built into the economics of how we solve for this.

Manjula Selvarajah: You were saying, Blaine, that you’re optimistic, that it’s an imperfect solution, at least some of it is happening. And Faisal, I mean, I think it comes back again to the need for policy, right? To make sure that those incentives are right, that there needs to be some sort of granularity to those policies, to recognize the need for more biodiversity.

Faisal Moola: Right, exactly. Fundamentally, planting trees, protecting trees, better managing trees is an effective solution of mitigating climate change. In fact…

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s a start, is what you’re saying.

Faisal Moola: Yes, but it can actually go very far, because some of the climate modeling is actually shown that the so-called nature-based solutions to climate change — so this is protecting the forests that we have now, restoring the forests that we have that are degraded, planting new forests, with the help of Blaine and others — doing all of that, could account for as much as 30 to 40 percent of the carbon dioxide mitigation that is required by 2030 to ensure that global heating is capped at 2 degrees Celsius. So in principle, this actually can work. What we don’t want to see is what my colleagues and I are referring to as carbon colonialism, where Indigenous peoples are being moved off their traditional territories in order to make way for tree planting. Now, thankfully, this has not happened in Canada yet, but it is happening in countries such as Tanzania, it’s happening in India, it’s happening in many, many other places. And it’s largely happening because of the market incentive for carbon offset projects and the lack of effective regulations and policy to protect Indigenous rights.

Manjula Selvarajah: I did want to shift the conversation to something because, just, it’s a very practical question that I’m trying to get a sense of, Blaine. Let’s take a community in L.A., for example, you know, on the ground they’re trying to restore an area around them that’s been destroyed by wildfire. How would they start? Would such a community have sort of a blueprint of seeds of what existed there?

Blaine Pearson: Yeah. I mean, that really is the point of having, you know, locally constructed networks of seed collectors and seed cleaners and seed bankers. There is a much more localized, and therefore successful approach to ecological restoration. So yeah, if there were to be a disruption to an ecosystem, and that particular community had been prepared by collecting local seed that was adapted to the ecosystem in which they lived, they would be very well prepared.

Manjula Selvarajah: I think of how ecosystems are changing. You’ve mentioned this before. You know, with the warming climate, things that may have thrived in an area may not thrive there in the future. How then do you, when you’re structuring that… I don’t know if that’s the right term for it — blueprint — how then do you plan and choose what seeds will be needed for the future?

Blaine Pearson: Well this is a really interesting question, and I think it’s one that is going to probably lead us into somewhat controversial territory again.

Manjula Selvarajah: Let’s go there.

Blaine Pearson: Let’s go there. I mean, I think one of the big things that we can all accept is happening is that climate is shifting, and therefore temperatures in many places are hotter, and places are becoming wetter. And in order to defend against those changes, one of the, sort of, biological approaches that has become more prevalent in recent years is a concept called assisted migration, or seed transfer, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It’s essentially taking seeds, or genetic material, from one spot and moving it physically to another.

Now this comes with a host of challenges, of course, but most importantly, we don’t currently have systems, or universalized systems, to trace where seed has come from, which is one of the things that we’re working closely on solving for. If we know where seeds have been collected, and we have that information and that data verified in a shared ledger, we’re going to be more capable of making those decisions. I think when you also layer in technologies like AI and the ability to take data sets, things like climate modelling or forest fire modelling or ecosystem shift models, and put those together to produce precision prescriptions that also helps to change the game. Again, there’s a huge amount of…

Manjua Selvarajah: To open up more possibilities.

Blaine Pearson: Yeah to open up possibilities, but to understand a little bit more about what temperatures or rainfall are going to be like 30, 40, 50 years from now, and therefore, what we need to be thinking about planting in the ground today.

Faisal Moola: I don’t disagree with anything that Blaine has said. In fact, I will go further.

Blaine Pearson: I love it.

Faisal Moola: I will actually go further to suggest that there are probably places that should not be planted, because these are places that used to have forests. Those forests have disappeared as a consequence of forest fire or other natural disturbances exacerbated by climate change. And I would actually argue that we need to recognize that the system is changing so quickly and overwhelming the assumptions that we thought around ecological restoration that they are going to stay open. And I’m going to introduce a term, which I love. It’s called biome awareness disparity, or BAD. And it was a group of scientists, Brazilian scientists, scientists from India, my own lab has been publishing on this, recognizing that we tend to fetishize forests and trees. We love trees for good reason, but our prioritization and our preference is many times coming at the expense of open, natural ecosystems. These are grasslands, these are wetlands, and these are areas that are merging out of climate change impacts such as forest fires. They also need to be protected, they also need to be restored and they also need to be valued for their socio-ecological benefits.

Blaine Pearson: I’m really glad you brought that up, Faisal, because grasslands around the world store a third of the terrestrial carbon stock, and native grasslands can hold up to 200 tonnes of carbon per hectare. So it becomes, you know, when you start to compare apples to apples, carbon to carbon, we start to see a different picture emerging that it’s not just forests, it’s any ecosystem that has been restored and enabled to do this work of sequestering the carbon.

Manjula Selvarajah: One of the things that I think about is all of the changes that are happening south of the border. I mean, there’s policy changes practically every day. There’s news breaking every day. Blaine, do you think that the temperature’s changing for these kinds of solutions?

Blaine Pearson: Taking a big breath in here. I think certainly south of the border, there is a lot of policy shifting that’s going on right now. I just spent the day, two days ago, with the team at the City of New York Parks & Recreation at their Greenbelt Native Plant Center and their seed collection group. We had very frank conversations about this. And you know, those people are not slowing down. So, you know, where policy is saying one thing, I think people are still empowered…

Manjula Selvarajah: Doing what they can.

Blaine Pearson: Exactly. And I also think the science is continuing to push us forward. And certainly, if we keep an eye on the science and keep our focus on that, I think we really can’t go astray. And I look to Europe and what’s happening there, and the efforts that are being undertaken there, from a policy standpoint, and even, you know, parts of our own country, there are really great strides being taken.

I still harbour huge amounts of hope. You know, where there are always going to be the players who are going to diminish the value of nature in our world. I think it’s incumbent upon the believers to unite and to find ways to connect with one another and continue to connect with nature and give it meaning.

Manjula Selvarajah: Faisal, do you have some thoughts on that?

Faisal Moola: Yes, so the Trump administration’s decision to essentially eviscerate USAID has had a horrific impact on ecosystem restoration, particularly in the developing world. I work with lots of local communities and Indigenous peoples, where primarily the funding for tree planting projects for other elements of ecological restoration was coming from USAID, so it was development, aid and assistance. All of them lost their funding when the Trump administration decided to essentially shut down USAID. But it’s not just the U.S., right? The U.K. has cut back severely its foreign aid and assistance programming. So has the Netherlands, so has France. And so two weeks ago I met with senior officials from Global Affairs Canada. We had a very good conversation, because it turns out that Canada has committed $200 million around the implementation of that international agreement called the Global Biodiversity Framework. And we talked about the idea that, okay, can we have that $200 million begin to flow to backstop some of these projects that were, you know, planting trees in the Sahel or in other areas where we do need to have trees planted to avoid further ecosystem degradation. You know, the bureaucrats seemed quite interested in that.

And so, you know, we have lost tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government, from the U.K., from France, Netherlands, from other countries. I’m really hoping that Canada is going to step up and help to make up that shortfall, because we do have really innovative people like Blaine who have, you know, are enthusiastic and have technical knowledge. We have great universities in this country where people have been doing a lot of work.

Manjula Selvarajah: But I wonder, how do you actually figure out that it’s being… that it’s actually being done? Like this seems to be something that is really tricky to monitor. So how do you know when you’ve actually fixed something or that the restoration is done?

Blaine Pearson: So I think there’s a lot of really interesting emerging and in some cases advanced technology that’s being applied to this. Using LiDAR, which is Light Detection and Ranging, so you can see over time how a landscape or a forest ecosystem is growing or not. And there is a lot of work being done on this, again, as a byproduct of the carbon markets, because they have the requirement to be able to prove the success and, you know, continued sequestration of the landscapes that they’re planting. So, monitoring and verification for carbon markets is a huge and emerging sort of part of that puzzle.

Manjula Selvarajah: Faisal?

Faisal Moola: In our lab, we use UAVs and drones and remote sensing in large part to try to better understand how boreal forests are coming back or not coming back after forest fire, and with or without assisted reforestation. In much of the advice that we’re giving to the federal government in terms of policy development, we’ve said that you actually have to monitor on social science criteria as well to report on whether or not Indigenous peoples are involved in these projects. So for example, the culturally significant species, are they being reintroduced in areas? Or perhaps they are in decline? Or are they disappearing? So in terms of monitoring, what I’d like to see is both the biophysical monitoring that we, Blaine and I, have both talked about, but also the socio-ecological monitoring as well, so that we can report back to the United Nations, because we have to do this.

Manjula Selvarajah: Well Faisal, Blaine, it’s been such a pleasure to chat with both of you. Thank you for your time today.

Faisal Moola: Thank you so much.

Blaine Pearson: Thank you.

Narration: The point that Faisal is making, I think, is worth repeating. If we’re going to get restoration right, we can’t ignore that the biodiversity we’re trying to bring back is also located in traditional Indigenous lands, and as he says, all of our conservation efforts need to respect those rights.

After my conversation with Blaine and Faisal, I had a pretty good idea about how complicated it is to restore and repair nature, but I wanted to go somewhere where people had done exactly that. Lucky for me, there’s a place like that in my own backyard.

[sound of Manjula in a moving vehicle]

Jim Robb explains how a garbage dump was restored at the Rouge National Urban Park.

D’Amour Walker shows off the seeds she’s collected.

Manjula Selvarajah: Well, it’s amazing, because I’m just coming from doing a little bit of work at home. You know, I pass a whole bunch of grocery stores, and then within minutes, I’m going down this, what looks like a really isolated trail, and we just passed over… was that the Rouge Creek that we just passed over?

D’amour Walker: Yeah, that’s the Rouge River.

Manjula Selvarajah: Incredible.

Narration: The Rouge National Urban Park. Long before it was Canada’s first such park, part of it was a garbage dump.

D’amour Walker: I think this is one of the places that really took off the best. They never thought that this would be anything but basically a desert.

Narration: That’s D’Amour Walker. I’m riding shotgun with her. She’s the assistant project coordinator for Friends of the Rouge Watershed, the organization that began restoring this damaged ecosystem 35 years ago.

Diamore Walker: Like they never thought anything would grow here for, like many decades, and Jim proved them wrong.

Narration: Jim is Jim Robb, D’Amour’s boss. Together, they offered to show me around for the day.

Manjula Selvarajah: So give us a sense of where we are today. Where are we right now?

D’Amour Walker: So we are sitting on a part of the Rouge, so across the railway, on this side, used to be the garbage hill where they dumped all the garbage for many, many years.

Manjula Selvarajah: And that’s that, that big hill I see in front of me.

D’Amour Walker: Yes, that is the big hill you see in front of you.

Manjula Selvarajah: Now you remember a time that was actually it, its old name, Garbage Hill. What did that look like then?

Jim Robb: It had a very eerie or spooky sense to it, because you’ve been out there and you could tell it wasn’t a healthy landscape. And every once while you’d hear this poof, and it would be the auto igniters lighting up the methane, so the big torch lights up and goes like 10 feet in the sky. So it had a very dystopian feel to it.

Narration: Turning a dystopia into a utopia isn’t easy. To fully heal from the pollution left behind by the dump, Jim said that it’ll take hundreds of years. But already, the work that they have put in is paying off.

Jim Robb: It’s basically gone from being completely barren to probably about 20 percent of it is forest cover now, and it’s different than a park where you just have a lot of picnic tables and ball diamonds and that. The idea of this park is to, near the city, protect an area that can have something near ecological integrity, which means all the species that really belong here can be here. And there’s actually a few black bear here now in the park. It maybe… it may make a few people nervous. Otters have been coming back. They’ve been eliminated. There are all kinds of map turtles, painted turtles, all kinds of different types of toads and frogs and salamanders. So this area has just become so rich.

Narration: That richness took a lot of dirt, a lot of sweat and a lot of helping hands. But Jim says, you have to start with the best science and knowledge.

Jim Robb: I usually watch a site for a year or two to see the way the water is flowing, to see what’s growing there. I look at surrounding areas and see what trees are doing well there, and use that as your template. But in the end, Mother Nature will give you some little taps on the shoulder that say, “That’s not really what belongs here,” and you’ll have to change your plan.

Manjula Selvarajah: Hello.

Passerby: Hi!

Manjula Selvarajah: Looks like your dog’s enjoying the walk?

Passerby: Oh she loves it. The turtles are out, too.

Jim Robb: Oh fantastic!

Manjula Selvarajah: Oh, oh!

D’Amour Walker: Oh, I think that’s a Blanding’s? Is that a Blanding’s, Jim? Look at his big yellow throat.

Jim Robb: You can already see it, you can see that its shell sort of pointed up. Can you see it?

Manjula Selvarajah: Oh my goodness, I can definitely… he just went into the water.

D’Amour Walker: So a Blanding’s turtle, the main thing you will see is…

Narration: So that turtle that D’Amour spotted, the Blanding’s turtle? It’s quite rare, and one of the more endangered species in the park. Jim helped to reintroduce the species with the Toronto Zoo.

Jim Robb: Most people don’t realize, even though it’s next to the city of Toronto, this is probably the most biologically diverse park in all of Canada.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s interesting because it’s almost like the passing of an inheritance, right? You’re handing over restored land, and you’re also handing over this love and knowledge for the land.

Jim Robb: Yeah, I’ll work on it as long as I have breath in my lungs. But you know, you do get older, and you do also need to… Succession, just like in a landscape, restoration is about helping Mother Nature do natural succession. And just like that, older people have to mentor young people so that any knowledge that you’ve gained that might be useful, you can pass it on, and then they’ll try new things that’ll be things I didn’t think of that may be even better.

Narration: I could have spent all day, many days actually, with Jim and D’Amour in the park. It was truly beautiful and surprising, and I couldn’t get over the fact that such wilderness existed right beside the place that I play softball every weekend. Given the constant drum beat of bad environmental news we hear every day, it was comforting to know that with a lot of hard work and political will, it’s still possible to return nature to something like its original state. The noises of biodiversity are music to the ears.

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith and written by Jason McBride. Lara Torvi, Sana Maqbool and Sarah Liss are the associate producers. Mack Swain composed the theme song and all the music in this episode. Gab Harpelle is our mix engineer. Kathryn Hayward is our executive producer. I’m your host, Manjula Selvarajah.

Listen up for the next episode where we speak to the UN’s heat officer about solving for extreme heat in cities.

Jim Robb: When I used to walk around here 20 years ago before we built the ponds, or 23 years ago, I remember hearing one or two great tree frogs. (And the great tree frog is actually our logo — you can see on my thing.) And they change colours; they have little cells that can move the colours around, so they can go from being bright green to a mottled grey. So I’d hear one or two. And within a year of building these ponds, I came back and there were hundreds and hundreds. There were so many and they were so loud, when the train went by they were louder than the train. Now I was on the far side. And I was so happy. I didn’t expect that outcome that quickly — like, there were hundreds and hundreds, and they were pretty loud. And I was on the far side of the wetland away from the train and they were drowning out the train, and it just made me so happy.

Illustration by Kelvin Li; Photography: Courtesy of the Friends of the Rouge Watershed