Regreening worked, which is exactly why it should not be the last word

Sudbury's regreening is a genuine municipal achievement and one of the very few environmental stories in this country that improved. It gets cited at conferences, in textbooks, and by people who have never been here. It should be.

It is also thirty-two years of tree planting on ground whose soil chemistry is still being studied, and the monitoring budget has not moved in a decade while the planting budget has. A canopy is not a remediation. It is the most visible part of one, which is not the same thing and is easier to photograph.

This is the specific hazard of a success story: it becomes the answer to questions it was never designed to answer. Ask about metals in the soil and you will be shown the tree count. Ask about the lakes and you will be shown the tree count. The count is real and the trees are real, and neither tells you what is happening two feet down.

Nobody planting on those ridges believes otherwise. The people who run the programme have been the most candid voices in the city about what it does and does not do. The gap is not in the science. It is in the budget line, and in a council that finds it easier to fund something it can hold a photograph of.

There is a version of this argument that says raising the question at all is disloyal — that a city with this much environmental history has earned the right to enjoy the good news without an asterisk. It has earned that. What it has not earned is the right to stop looking, and the paper is not aware of anyone involved in the work who would claim otherwise.

Fund the soil monitoring at the same rate as the planting, and publish the results annually alongside the tree count, in the same document. If the numbers are as good as the trees look, the city loses nothing by showing them — and if they are not, the city needs to know before it spends another thirty years planting on the assumption that they are.