Corporate Knights champions HTO
Getting someone outside of the 416 area code to read HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets may be a hard sell. But early on, the book reminds us that water is a connective force. In the Introduction, editors Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio explain, 'The future of Toronto's water is not ours alone. Despite what we do here, it matters what happens in Thunder Bay and Thornhill. And what we do affects Kingston and Quebec City. We are all downstream.'
The book may explicitly be about Toronto – its shape, history, architects, and activists – but anyone interested in how North American cities work will find that HTO provides an intense and multifaceted approach to the relationship between the natural and urban world.
In terms of format, HTO is a close cousin to other books put out by Coach House Press. Like uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, and GreenTOpia, the book explores a single topic through multiple perspectives. HTO is written by architects, geology professors, poets, and environmentalists. The book attempts to keep its focus by grouping likeminded ideas together. The essays are divided into four sections: Foundations, Transformations, Explorations, and Directions.
The history-heavy Foundations section often sounds like a textbook. In particular, Ronald F. Williamson and Robert I. Macdonald’s 'A resource like no other: Understanding the 11,000-year relationship between people and water' creaks under the task of cramming so many details into ten pages. But the reader does get a break in the form of visuals in the section. 'Shapeshifters: Toronto's changing watersheds, streams and shorelines' by Chris Hardwicke and Wayne Reeves pepper their piece with a number of old maps that must be a delight to every cartographer-at-heart.
Much of the book emphasizes that although it is often out of sight, water in Toronto is never far away. Ignoring it or attempting to tame it with pipes, parks, pavement, can have serious repercussions.
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