When we first went looking for our cottage on Georgian Bay, my husband, Anton, and I asked a cousin and veteran cottager if she had any advice. What questions should we ask of the current owners? What should we look for when we visit the property? We expected some tips on water systems, or maybe critter control.
“Look beyond the property, get to know your neighbours,” came the reply. “Meet them before you make an offer, if you can.”
She made a good point. The thing that makes a cottage special is not so much the property itself, but everything that surrounds it: the water we swim in and boat across, the islands we visit, the forests we hike, and, of course, the people and the other animals we meet and share the landscape with.
Without getting too philosophical on you, what this really means is that the things that make cottaging—and everything else we do in life—special are what we might call “relational.” The relationship between things is just as important, if not more important, than the individual. This may be a familiar way of thinking if you have read Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, or familiarized yourself with the teachings of other like-minded Indigenous thinkers. But it’s a pretty radical notion to apply to Canada’s property market, where we routinely divide parcels of land into individual bundles and buy and sell them as commodities. Property law is such a cornerstone of our economic and social structures that most of us never stop to question it. Even though we readily accept that lakes themselves cannot be owned, we expect the land around them to be regularly bought and sold.
You might say this is just the way the world works: surely private ownership is necessary and fundamental to the way we live. You could also say that it’s the antithesis of the way life wants to live—carving up land into arbitrary parcels is a strange way to work within the complex web of a living ecosystem, which is all about how things interconnect.
These are fundamental problems baked into the modern conception of private property. Aside from the fact that it’s based on the large-scale disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples, there is also the fact that property law in Canada and elsewhere has often aimed to protect the “rights” of an owner to do what they want with their land—reinforcing the belief that the earth is a resource for their taking. We can see evidence of an extractive property-owning mindset in the major land use changes that have happened and are continuing to happen around the world.
According to a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report, nearly a quarter of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions between 2007 and 2016 were due to agriculture, forestry, and other forms of land use. Two years later, the journal Nature Communications published an article that estimated that land use change had affected almost a third of the world’s land area between 1960 and 2019, which was about four times greater than previous assessments. In Canada, most land use change was driven by the conversion of forest to cropland between 2010 and 2015, but the conversion of forest and cropland to settlement and industry was also a factor. While land use is a leading source of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the opposite is also true: land that is not developed can be a powerful carbon sink.
Most land is developed in order to put money in the pockets of the people who own it. What if there was another way to think about private property, one that asks “how a relational approach might help us reimagine property in order to transform human-earth relations, thus sustaining life on earth,” writes Jennifer Nedelsky, a legal scholar and a professor of law at York University in Toronto. What if we began to think of the property we own as something that we hold in trust for future generations? Could we make private ownership a driver of conservation rather than a threat to it during the climate change emergency?
Enter the land trust, a legal designation with tax incentives that can bring communities together to use the power of private ownership to protect ecologically sensitive lands for public good. When landowners donate property to a land trust (or bequeath it in their will), they can set out the terms of how that land should be treated. The trust is then legally bound to carry out their wishes and to protect the land in perpetuity. Often this is done to prevent new development or to protect ecologically significant areas. It’s a powerful conservation tool. Central Park would not exist without it, and neither would the Bruce Trail.
Land trusts are not a new idea in Canada, says Ian Attridge, a lawyer and an instructor in environmental law at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ont., who has devoted his career to protecting and conserving land using this legal instrument. (Of the 30 or so land trusts in Ontario, Attridge estimates that he has worked with nearly half of them.) Trusts have been around for about 100 years in one form or another; up until the 1990s some naturalist and wildlife organizations played a land trust role by acquiring important ecological areas. Today, trusts are an increasingly attractive strategy for protecting land under threat. “They are very practical,” says Attridge. “They offer landowners and communities and government agencies a way to come together in a relatively neutral fashion to achieve something tangible: the protection and stewardship of land.”
Attridge was one of the founders of the Kawartha Land Trust (KLT) back in 2001, which began when Mieke Schipper asked Attridge for help protecting her 100 acres on Pigeon Lake near Peterborough. The trust now protects 34 properties and nearly 7,000 acres of ecologically diverse lands in the Kawarthas, which, like many cottage areas, is under constant pressure from competing land uses—the sprawling development that is required to house a growing population and the farmland that is needed to feed that population. It’s “the land between,” both in the terms of its mixed human use—including a city, its suburbs, farmland, and wilder cottage country—and in terms of the characteristics of the land itself, which transitions from limestone lowlands to Canadian Shield highlands further north.
Cottagers and cottagers’ associations have long played an active role in local land trusts: they donate land, fundraise for their endowments, and help steward properties. Increasingly, the federal and provincial governments are also taking an interest in land trusts as a way to promote climate mitigation and conservation.
In 2023, the federal government awarded the Ontario Land Trust Alliance (OLTA) more than $11.7 million as part of its Nature Smart Climate Solutions Fund. It was the largest grant in the history of the OLTA, which supports the province’s land trust but does not hold any land itself. The goal of the fund is to reduce and remove greenhouse gas emissions while enhancing environmental resilience and providing critical habitat for Canada’s wildlife. The OLTA has promised to do this “by conserving lands that are at high risk of carbon-intensive use, and by restoring and managing lands to enhance their carbon capture capacity.” Wetlands, in particular, represent excellent opportunities for climate mitigation through land trust protection—the real estate market tends to undervalue their increasingly important functions as carbon stores and flood protection. In February 2024, KLT announced its largest land acquisition to date, increasing its total footprint by more than a quarter: 1,411 acres along Pigeon Lake, Ont. The purchase was made possible in part by a $2.9 million investment from the province of Ontario’s Greenlands Conservation Partnership program. For every dollar of provincial funding, the Nature Conservancy of Canada and OLTA have matched it with about $5 from other conservation partners.
John Kintare, the executive director of KLT, calls land trusts a “hyperlocal solution.” Land trusts can protect much smaller parcels of land than what might be required for a provincial or federal park designation. This is especially useful in southern, more developed areas, such as the Kawarthas, which is already a patchwork of different land uses. As well, land trusts can respond to community needs in addition to ecological ones. The KLT’s Christie Bentham Wetland, for example,was protected when some 200 people in the community came together and raised more than $750,000 in seven weeks to be able to purchase 137 acres of unofficial hiking trails that were slated for development. Of course, like any tool, land trusts can be used for not-so-good ends too—by controlling land and making it inaccessible to the community, a trust could be used as a form of gatekeeping, and a way of keeping people out.
As land increases in value and properties become scarcer and more difficult to acquire, land trusts are focusing on other strategies to promote community-based conservation. The KLT also works with property owners to create conservation easements; these can register protections to a land title and prevent the property from being, say, subdivided in the future. In this scenario, the owner can still reap a tax benefit through the Ecological Gifts Program and receive a charitable gift receipt without donating their land outright to the trust. In addition, the KLT actively cultivates “partners in conservation,” working with landowners to help them create stewardship plans. The goal is to create a robust network of landowners across the Kawarthas, says Thom Unrau, KLT’s director of community conservation. “It’s both morally and strategically a good idea.”
Some Indigenous groups are also beginning to look at land trusts as a way to expedite Land Back, which is an Indigenous-led movement that aims to give Indigenous groups better access to—and greater decision-making powers over—traditional territories. “At first, I was resistant to the idea of a land trust because I’m very independent thinking. In order to be legit, you have to ask the federal government if they’ll give you permission,” says Becky Big Canoe, who is one of the founders of Mno Aki, a newly created Indigenous-led national land trust that relies on local Grandmothers Councils to decide how to use the land they acquire. “My ancient, Indigenous sensibilities said, ‘Hmm, that’s acknowledging that the feds actually have that right,’ and I’m kind of not down with that.”
“It’s really a colonial system that we’re all working within, including conventional land trusts,” acknowledges Attridge. Land trusts might not be the ultimate solution for an Indigenous community, he says, but they can be a useful interim strategy, especially for Indigenous Peoples who may not have access to land and don’t want to spend another generation locking horns with the federal government in court. “I’m increasingly working with Indigenous communities who are thinking of land trusts in an adaptive way to look at Land Back.” Mno Aki recently acquired property near King City, which is close enough to Toronto to serve the city’s land-less Indigenous population.
One of the things that Big Canoe likes about the land trust model is that Indigenous communities can actually use the land Mno Aki acquires, instead of “protecting land from people,” or what Kintare calls “putting trees in tree museums.” Historically, settler approaches to conservation have ignored some of the most important aspects of the human-land relationship, such as foraging and hunting. While sometimes this is necessary to allow land to recover from overuse—KLT, like many land trusts, has a mix of private and publicly accessible properties—this approach to conservation risks disrupting humans’ relationship with the land.
This is perhaps the most exciting shift in the conservation movement and, by extension, the land trust movement that serves it: the acknowledgement that the strongest conservation strategies must involve connecting people to land, rather than protecting it from people.
In Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg: This Is Our Territory, elder Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams) recounts stories of his family camping out on Boyd Island or Chi’Minis/Big Island in Pigeon Lake, Ont., in the 1920s. They were often harassed by game wardens and prevented from fishing on these traditional grounds that have been used by First Nations since time immemorial.
In 2015, Mike and Terry Wilson, then owners of the island, decided that instead of subdividing it into lots, they would donate 95 per cent of it to KLT (they donated the remaining 5 per cent in 2022). Curve Lake First Nation became an important supporter of the project and made a generous donation to the community fundraising campaign to create a stewardship fund to maintain and protect the island in perpetuity. KLT staff, community leaders, cottagers, and First Nations representatives formed a special advisory group to oversee the plan. Public docks now allow anyone with a boat to visit. Hiking and fishing are permitted and rice is harvested offshore.
In Mno Aki’s land trust application, says Big Canoe, they made a point of referencing the 2018 Indigenous Circle of Experts report, which outlines conservation in Indigenous terms. It’s not enough to protect the biodiversity of the land and water itself; equally important is protecting the cultural activities that have been used to steward this biodiversity for thousands of years. “The best way to conserve land is to teach people how to live on it and use it without destroying it,” says Big Canoe. “Suddenly, we had a conservation definition that had a lot more leeway to serve our people.”
“That’s one of the lessons from Indigenous thinking,” says Attridge. “It’s our relationship with places that will lead us to care for them.”
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