The Regreening Story Every Sudbury Kid Should Know by Heart

Here is a fact that still gets under my skin every time I say it out loud: NASA astronauts trained in Greater Sudbury in the early 1970s because the landscape looked close enough to the moon.

That is not a joke. That is not a Northern myth somebody's uncle made up at a cookout. Apollo 16 and 17 crews came here because decades of smelter emissions and logging had stripped the Canadian Shield down to bare black rock and acid soil. The Sudbury Basin looked more like a crater than a community.

And then, starting in 1978, this city decided to do something that most people said was impossible: grow it all back.

What the moonscape actually was

My dad worked underground at Falconbridge for 31 years, so I grew up hearing the older version of this story — the one where nobody called it "environmental damage." They called it the cost of keeping the lights on. Sulphur dioxide from the roast yards and smelters killed vegetation across roughly 17,000 hectares. Another 80,000 hectares of semi-barren land surrounded that dead zone. Soil eroded off the rock. Rain turned acidic. Lakes went lifeless.

If you drove into Sudbury from the south in the 1970s, you saw a landscape that looked like somebody had taken a blowtorch to the entire region. Black rock, orange soil, no canopy. People from Toronto and Ottawa used it as proof that the North was an industrial sacrifice zone.

That narrative stuck for decades. And honestly, a lot of Sudburians internalized it.

What VETAC and Laurentian figured out

In 1978, the city established VETAC — the Vegetation Enhancement Technical Advisory Committee — and paired it with researchers at Laurentian University who were willing to run experiments on land that most botanists had written off.

The breakthrough was straightforward but brilliant: spread crushed limestone over the blackened rock to neutralize the acid, then seed it with a grass and legume mix to build a thin living soil layer. Once that base held, you could plant tree seedlings — mostly jack pine, red pine, and birch — and give them a fighting chance.

It sounds simple on paper. In practice, it meant thousands of volunteers spreading lime by hand on rocky hillsides in July heat. It meant Laurentian grad students monitoring survival rates plot by plot. It meant city council funding the program year after year, even when budgets got tight and the results were measured in centimetres of growth per season.

The numbers that matter

Since 1978, Greater Sudbury's regreening program has planted over 10 million trees and treated more than 3,400 hectares of barren land. Volunteers have limed thousands of additional hectares. Lakes that were biologically dead are now supporting fish populations again. The black rock hillsides along Highway 17 that used to make visitors wince are now covered in birch and pine canopy.

The program is internationally recognized. Sudbury has won United Nations awards for the work. Cities from around the world have studied our approach as a model for industrial landscape recovery.

And yet — and this is the part that gets me — half the people I talk to under thirty have only a vague sense that any of this happened.

Why this matters right now

The regreening is not a historical footnote. It is the single best argument for what Greater Sudbury actually is: a city that looked at genuine devastation and chose to fix it, decade by decade, tree by tree, with community labour and stubborn Northern patience.

When somebody from down south cracks a joke about Sudbury being ugly or remote or industrial, the regreening story is your answer. Not a defensive one. A factual one. We turned a moonscape into a living forest. What has your city recovered from lately?

It also matters because the work is not finished. The program still runs every year. Volunteers still show up. There are still sections of barren land that need treatment. If you have never participated in a regreening planting day, fix that this spring. The city posts dates on its website, and the morning goes fast when you are putting seedlings into ground that your grandparents' generation thought was permanently dead.

The part nobody talks about

My mother — the art teacher — used to say that the regreening changed how Sudbury people carried themselves. Before, there was a defensiveness. A shrug. "Yeah, it's not pretty, but we have jobs." After a couple decades of watching the green come back, the tone shifted. People started saying "come see this" instead of "don't bother."

That shift is the real legacy. Not just the trees. The pride underneath them.

If you are raising kids in Greater Sudbury right now, make sure they know this story. Not the sanitized version from a textbook. The real one — where their city was written off, and then it grew back anyway.

That is a Northern story worth passing down.