Issue link: https://publications.tfs.ca/i/1214508
Nature is the eternal foundation of our home and native land, and all of us who live here are inextricably bound to that landscape. It shapes the rhythm of our lives through the seasons, and when climate change brings challenge and damage from extreme weather, both we and the land suffer. Yet despite this interwoven existence we all share, it is only humans who experience a severed connection from nature, critically so in urban and technology-dense settings. Our Toronto campus sits on a plateau overlooking our portion of the Don Valley ravine. Despite its proximity, the ravine is a gift few city-dwellers visit, making it seem other and unknown to most people. This is precisely why education in nature at TFS begins with our youngest learners, at age 2, and extends through to Level V. "The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass, speaks to me. The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me. The strength of the fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun, and the life that never goes away, they speak to me. And my heart soars." The late Dan George, OC, chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, British Columbia If a nation had a tapestry, woven to express the heart and soul of its being, and the tapestries of all nations were hung in a museum, a visitor could meander over to the one called Canada and see this: each thread a colour in its vast physical landscape, from the deep greens, blues and greys of the Pacific Northwest, through grasslands of pale straw, flaxen fields to the horizon on the prairies, quartz- flecked rocks just north in the nation's centre, to the ever-changing ocean meeting the red soil and light sand of the Maritimes, and of course the true north, crystal and ice, blinding white. TFS 11 The TFS ravine, accessed from the Junior School.