You weren't always here...

If you had come to this area 400 years ago or earlier, you would have found a land blanketed by forests. You would see the Ottawa River, which the Algonquin people native to the area called Kichi Sibi, running wild with rapids that are today submerged by dams. Wildlife was plentiful. It wasn’t until the 1600s that the first French explorers paddled up the Kichi Sibi. Soon the river swelled with canoes bringing beaver furs from the west to Montreal. The hefty trade in furs done by the Odawa people, who traveled here from Lake Huron, earned the river its new name, "Ottawa", among the Europeans. Beaver populations in the area declined.

In 1800, an American investor by the name of Philemon Wright set up a settlement and mill on the north shore of the river. This settlement later became Hull, Quebec. Wright promptly got down to the businesses of deforesting the area, later to be joined by logger barons like Bronson and Booth. By mid-century, Ottawa Valley logging operations were sending millions of cubic feet of old-growth forest down the river to Montreal for export each year.

Meanwhile, settlers were clearing forest cover throughout Eastern Ontario for farming. Between 1826 and 1836, the building of the Rideau Canal system transformed the geography of the entire waterway between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. The labourers who built the canal—mostly French Canadians and Irish immigrants—settled alongside French lumberjacks in what is now downtown Ottawa. It was originally known as Bytown. 

By 1900, settlers were farming nearly all the land around the city, and logging had moved further up the Ottawa Valley. Bytown had become Ottawa, Canada's capital city, with a population of about 50,000 people. You could hop on an electric streetcar and head out to Hintonburg, the city's first suburb. Railroad tracks criss-crossed the landscape. Pulp and paper mills were being built along the Ottawa River and pumping chemical waste straight into the water, where it mingled with raw sewage coming from the city's new sewers.

By the 1950s, personal automobiles, paved roads, and buses had replaced the streetcars, and Ottawa's population was sprawling out onto the countryside in low-density suburbs. The government established a "greenbelt" around Ottawa in 1958 in an attempt to limit this urban sprawl, protect natural spaces, and provide future parks and open spaces.

Now here we are today, in 2009. The ecology of Ottawa has been utterly transformed over the past two centuries.

Some forms of pollution have been cleaned up; Ottawa has been treating the vast majority of its sewage since the 1960s, and there are limits on the pollution that can be discharged into the air and water by industries in the area.

But pollution still occurs. Our reliance on cars has increased, and suburban sprawl is threatening many forest stands, wetlands, and other ecologically critical places that remain.

Key natural areas that remain:

1) South March Highlands
2) Leitrim Wetland
3) Marlborough Forest
4) Larose Forest
5) Mer Bleue Bog
6) Stony Swamp Conservation Area
7) South Gloucester Conservation Area
8) Britannia Conservation Area
9) Deschenes Rapids
10) Pertie Islands
11) Richmond Fen
12) Torbolton Forest