As the consummate hiker, Willetts is a fisherman and bush pilot, a canoeist and energy executive, a recreation and environment devotee, a sailor and climber, and a wilderness camper. His “short list” of past treks also includes the Thar desert of India, the Northwest Territories, the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, the Grand Canyon, Egypt and Arizona.
“With what I’ve seen of our natural world, I’m hard-pressed to express how lucky we are in Brampton to have this gem of a wildlife sanctuary called Claireville Conservation Area in our back yards.
“I brought up my three sons hiking around Claireville simply because I knew they’d see more deer, fox, coyote, beavers, owls, raptors and other birds, bugs, fish and reptiles in a few hours than they would on a major canoe trip.”
Small wonder that John Willetts, senior account manager with Blink Communications Inc., and president of Friends of Claireville, was nominated and appointed as co-chair of the city’s new Brampton Environmental Planning Advisory Committee (BEPAC), which is expected to develop an Environmental Master Plan to make some changes and enhancements to the way citizens and businesses can enjoy their surroundings. The committee is “charged” with reviewing and advising on all “important environmental planning initiatives” introduced by the city, region, conservation authorities and governments.
On a grander scale, Willetts is concerned about mankind’s growing carbon footprint, especially with China’s burgeoning hunger for fossil-fuel energy and westernized lifestyles. “We burn coal and turn it into a tiny pile of ash, but since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, we’re faced with those missing tonnages of mass merely being converted into pollutants. You need about five acres of forest to suck up just one tonne of carbon – about 80 per cent of everything a tree ingests is airborne carbon – so that planting trees or leaving them in the ground is a no-brainer,” he says.
“Five-hundred years ago the forests covered most of Canada and U.S. and Brazil. Between GTA and North Bay it’s nearly all meadowland now. Also, 40 years ago we were much more job-neutral and pedestrian-like, but most of the workforce now drive their cars to work, or to the nearest train or subway station.”
True environmental sustainability is impossible unless your home is an igloo, he says, because all urban residents consume carbon energy. “Energy efficiency is irrelevant if your house is 5,000 square feet and your driveway has three cars on it. And how do you tell Brazil to stop cutting their rainforests when your own prime timber is gone? How do you tell thousands of motorists in a gridlock to get jobs closer to home and drive their bicycles to work?”
BEPAC won’t save the world. But it’s felt that little BEPACs and conservation areas like Claireville are important – even if they’re future remnants of a world whose atmosphere is unbreathable and people live under oxygen domes.“The big idea behind BEPAC is to tie various initiatives into a central clearing house for environmental sustainability,” said Willetts. “Cities must become more effective environmental stewards to reduce our carbon consumption, and Brampton has 6,000 acres of green space but will be taking the environmental approach more seriously.”
In addition, he says the city is recognizing its opportunity to protect natural spaces and support neighbourhood parks for “structured sports and unstructured recreation”.
There are complex environmental issues related to Brampton’s new planning initiatives – such as the Official Plan, transportation plan, watershed and stormwater management, and the city’s “integrated community sustainability” plan. BEPAC was organized to help inject sustainability into all of them, and into other “layers” of the challenge such as Greenbelt and Places to Grow legislation and the Clean Water Act.
Aside from three city councillors, the other members of BEPAC are: Jayne Pilot of Pilot Performance Resources Management; Ian Drever of R.J. Burnside & Associates; Bill Costigane of Sheridan College; and Paul Hundal, nominated by Brampton’s Citizen Interview Committee.
Conservation areas like Claireville are provincial property and are managed by “authorities” that typically used to be biologists, but now are largely elected municipal officials. “They’re now called assets”, said Willetts, “and that point is made clear every time TRCA proposes to sell off a chunk of Claireville to developers. I originally thought it was land held in trust for Ontario citizens and untouchable. Most of Claireville was expropriated from farmers in the 1960s for stormwater management – a good cause. But asset appraisers only think in terms of highest end use.”
People living near Claireville would be hard-put to be comfortable in another cityscape. In Willetts’s perfect world, the gas-price crisis would convince more businesses to seek better employee proximity, farmers’ markets to flourish in urban communities, and people to seek jobs precisely where all their needs are met – including walking trails close at hand. Furthermore, planners should be right-sizing the communities for low-carbon living. By means of limiting suburban sprawl, the province's Places to Grow initiative has summoned a host of cities and towns in the Golden Triangle to think along those lines, to consider turning neglected sectors of their urban streetscapes into self-sustaining communities.
When not busy at Blink Communications in Oakville, sailing a boat down Egypt’s Nile River, or watching a lioness chase a hyena into an African culvert, Willetts is the proactive driver of Friends of Claireville, perhaps the most visible conservation group in the GTA. The steward and “owner” of Claireville’s 2,100 acres or 9.1 square kilometres – the largest nature preserve in the GTA – is Toronto Regional Conservation Authority (TRCA). The “park” is nearly all in Brampton. Its southern tip in Etobicoke is the site of a control dam and reservoir built following Hurricane Hazel in 1957. It's a safeguard against flooding.
Willetts, a 20-year resident of Brampton, points out that the park is home to 165 species of birds, 77 animal species, 240 plant species, hundreds of deer, many kilometres of trails, and an assortment of woods, valleys and streams. Over the years, TRCA and its volunteers have improved animal habitats, created wetlands, planted more than 30,000 trees and carried out numerous wildlife surveys.
The key educational prompts for Claireville’s visitors and student tours are: to leave it looking better than when you found it; to stay on the trails, realizing that you always have an impact on animals; to respect other endeavours such as horse-riding, bird-watching and hiking; be your own park steward by educating others; and report vandalism, dumping or poaching. In addition, TRCA has an organized Stewards of the Field group that sets examples for visitors “by doing” and by sharing knowledge with them.
“And don’t forget,” says Willetts: “At Claireville we’re looking for corporate sponsors for our trail developments and tree-planting season.”
