Our Oak Ridges Moraine Efforts!

This deer's habitat could be threatened by land
development on the Oak Ridges Moraine.

This is a scene from the beautiful and fragile
Oak Ridges Moraine, located between
Caledon and the Ganaraska Forest, stretching
through Richmond Hill, Markham, Aurora and many
other York towns.

The Oak Ridges Moraine is a fragile ecosystem that runs 160
kilometres along a ridge across southern Ontario. It is
often called the Rain Barrel of southern Ontario because it
divides the Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario watersheds. It is very fragile becuase its soil is very sandy and silty so damage could easily occur. It is home to over 200 species of
birds and lots of other mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other animals. It is very important to animals because it is their only habitat. It is also home to a large number of trees which grow in the immense and beautiful forests.

A trail on the scenic moraine.

Some of the beautiful flowers that can be found on the moraine. These are marsh Marigolds.

Now that you know the basic facts about the moraine we'll tell you why it became our project. We adopted the Oak Ridges Moraine as our official Millennium Project in November 1999.

Residential housing developers are destroying the moraine's
pristine forests faster than you can say Good-bye animal
habitat! The government wasn't doing anything about it and
all sorts of other organizations were getting ignored. It
sounded like a lost cause. But we took it up anyway. In mid
November 1999 we started a petition to Save the Oak Ridges
Moraine! At first the petition went very well. After
explaining our cause we managed to get most of our classmates
signatures as well as our family, teachers and other people
in our community. At this time a friend of ours who wasn't
in the Environmental club volunteered to help with our
petition. Her name was Andrea. Andrea took our petition to
her church and managed to get about 115 signatures for us.
The number of signatures we were getting began to slump, but
we kept going anyway. Although we didn't reach our goal of
800 signatures we decided the moraine couldn't wait. At that
time (February 2000) developers and environmental groups
were fighting over the moraine in court. We thought it was
the perfect time to send in our petition. We sent it to the
Ontario minister of the Environment, Tony Clement with 239 signatures.

A month later we received a response from the office of the Environment minister of Ontario. They had recieved our petiton and were impressed with our efforts. Although the Oak Ridges Moraine still faces many dangers from development, we like to think that we and the 239 others who signed our petition made a difference in the safety of the moraine. We will keep you posted in any more developments of our involvement with the Oak Ridges Moraine.

The government put a 6 month development freeze on the Oak Ridges Moraine. Unfortunately it will only last 6 months and there will be up to 200 exemptions from the freeze. The whole thing was only to help the government win a by-election in Vaughan, Ontario. This clearly demonstrates the corruption in politics and is another reason why you should email Ontario premier Mike Harris Here.

Last Updated: 2001