Highway of Heroes gearing up to plant 640,000 more trees this spring

By Courtney Bachar/The Oshawa Express

The Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign is gearing up for another season of tree planting, with another 28,000 trees slotted for Durham Region.

Despite the current COVID-19 pandemic, Highway of Heroes Campaign Chair and Co-Founder Mark Cullen says the campaign is moving forward as planned.

“We’ve been working very hard for about a year now to find planting opportunities and to find real estate on private and public lands along the highway,” says Cullen, adding they’ve secured enough land now to plant 640,000 trees this season.

“We’re really excited about that,” he adds.

Highway of Heroes partners with Forests Ontario to have these trees planted. Forests Ontario, a non-profit charity with a vision and mission of making Ontario’s forests greener, helps with finding the trees as well as locating the land for the trees to be planted. This includes a lot of private contracts with land owners between Windsor and the Quebec border along Highway 401.

The Highway of Heroes stretches 170 km between CFB Trenton and the coroner’s office in Toronto at Keele Street and Highway 401 along the highway, however, because of a lack of access of land, Cullen says the land in which trees are being planted has expanded all the way from Windsor to the Quebec border.

“We weren’t getting enough uptake from land owners on the Highway of Heroes alone, so in order to reach our goal of two million trees, we needed to expand the boundaries.”

Cullen says the goal is to have two million trees planted by 2022.

Approximately 150,000 trees have been planted along the Highway 401 corridor since the campaign began just four-and-a-half years ago, with approximately 50,000 of those trees being planted in Durham.

Of the trees planted so far, 117,000 have been planted on the highway, one for each of Canada’s war-dead since 1812, and are different from the ones being planted on the corridor. These trees are bigger, more expensive, they’re more expensive to plant, and the Ministry of Transportation guidelines for planting trees along the highway must be followed.

The trees planted on the private lands are smaller, two-to-three-year-old seedlings and stand about six to eight feet tall.

Of the 640,000 trees slated to be planted this year, 20,000 of those will be on the highway, while the other 620,000 trees will be planted off the highway.

Cullen says the trees being planted on the right-of-way will be within the 170km of highway that represents the Highway of Heroes, while the remainder will be planted within the expansion area between Windsor and Quebec.

While the public tree planting events this spring have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cullen says they still have 29 private tree planting partners that will be planting on private lands this season, with all but two partners saying they will continue to work through the pandemic.

“We’re following all of the social distancing protocols, we have the help, they have access to the trees and we’re very excited that we’re actually able to get this done this spring,” says Cullen. “Forests Ontario has been a tremendous partner in helping us ramp up our tree planting numbers.

The Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign is the largest living tribute to the military in the world.

“We think it’s equally significant to all of the concrete and granite memorials that we’ve built across the country, which are all great ideas, but this is different. [Generations to come] will experience the benefit of this campaign because, really, [trees] begin to accrue in 25 to 30 years, so this is a very long-term tribute to our war-dead and to those who volunteer for military service during times of war,” he says. “This is a memorial that says we honour our military, we honour the war-dead, but we’re doing it with something that’s living and will live for 300 years.”

In addition to honouring Canada’s military, Cullen says there is also a large environmental benefit to the campaign.

“The environmental benefits will be incredibly huge over a lifetime of this living monument. The trees we will have planted as of the end of May, about 825,000 trees, represents over one million, 300,000 tonnes of carbon sequestered over the next 100 years,” Cullen says, adding 221 million pounds of oxygen is produced annually over the life of the trees.

“This is significant,” he says. “Highway 401, between Toronto and Montreal, is the busiest highway in North America. Think of the carbon that’s produced and think of these trees on either side of the highway insulating the population of Ontario from all of that pollution, from all of that carbon, to the degree that trees can.”

This, he notes, “is why it’s the perfect place for trees to be.”

And, for people wondering how they can get involved with the initiative, Cullen says there are several ways in which the community can help.

“People get very excited and fired up about what we’re doing and want to know how they can help,” he says, noting people can visit the website and sign up for the newsletter, attend a public tree planting event (keep an eye on the website for future dates), or consider donating towards the cause.

“We need $1.5 million to finish this campaign and if Canadians are able, we would like them to consider this (campaign), not just for the military tribute, but also for the environmental benefits as well.”

For more information or to donate to the Highway of Heroes Tree Campaign, visit www.hohtribute.ca.