- Brand new School opens in Southwest Edmonton, honorably named for longtime Edmonton Choir director and Educator Garth Worthington.
- Artsy/creative themes abound in the school including the hand painted external mural with many subtle references, including to the ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell.
- Traditional commercial farming still takes place just across the street at Edmonton’s South City Limit.
- Year by year, the loss of the most fertile topsoil in Alberta is scraped away and sold off to make way for new housing developments.
- The Soil microbiome is the crucial conversion factor in the sustainability of all productive ecosystems. Once lost, it cannot be restored.
At the extreme southern outskirts of Edmonton in central Alberta, with ploughed farmer’s fields on one side of the road, new housing developments on the other, lies the New Garth Worthington Elementary-Junior high school.
In many cases schools and parks are named after politicians who decidedly do not deserve this honor or respect, but in the case of Garth Worthington Junior High, they got it right. Garth Worthington started and led the Edmonton All-City choir and high-school aged Centennial Singers for 3 decades, in addition to his music teaching duties with Edmonton Public Schools.
Garth Worthington also started and conducted many different choirs during his studies at the University of Alberta in the 1960s. He was passionate about music in schools and the benefit of singing and all the arts for the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional development of children.
He always urged his musicians to find the beauty in the music, to make it come alive, the charge it with feeling and make it the best it could possibly be. And above all he valued each individual and taught kindness, respect, and generosity to others.
These lessons were never lost on me, some 45 years later with most of those spent as a professional musician and educator. Garth’s son, Trent Worthington, is well known to Alberta audiences for his work as a singer, conductor, and composer/arranger of Edmonton’s professional choir, ‘Pro Coro’, and still teaches school music north of Edmonton in St. Albert.
The new Garth Worthington school has a hip, artsy look, though is strictly speaking not an ‘arts school’, not yet at least, though all signs point to it evolving into one.
Modern murals on the side of the school pay homage to another great Alberta musician, singer songwriter Joni Mitchell. Mitchell, composer of famous songs like Both Sides Now, Circle Game, Help Me, and perhaps her most famous song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ was actually born in Fort Mcleod in Southern Alberta, and was invited to the school’s opening last year.
According to Alexandra Jade, the mural artist, there are references to a musical staff and the windows may represent the ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ of Joni Mitchell’s famous song. Other images which may be present in the highly abstract mural include two hands interlocked, an open book, a bird, floral and greenery, and a face silhouette.
Both music teachers at the school are by happy coincidence actually alumni of Garth Worthington led choirs in their youth. In fact, at the official opening of the school last fall, an ‘alumni choir’ led by Trent Worthington attracted about 40 former choir members.
The major theme of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, is environmental conservation. One verse reads “They took all the trees, put them in a tree museum, then they charged people a dollar and a half just to see em”. The chorus reads, ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone. Paved Paradise, put in a parking lot. “
The irony is, looking out across the staff parking at Garth Worthington School, this is the ‘edge’ where the Southern City Limit meets the country and farmland. This is not just any farmland either. The top soil south of Edmonton is some of the most fertile in all of Western Canada.
I witnessed the combine pulling the last of a crop off the remaining field next to the school, flanked by between moderately affordable high-density single-family housing. Three or four huge mounds of topsoil scraped from the Earth await sale and transport to Garden Centers.
Top soil is scraped away and sold to garden centers to make way for housing. This is some of the most fertile soil in all of Alberta
It is bitter sweet progress. It takes hundreds, possibly thousands of years to create rich and fertile topsoil like we had in central Alberta, and bit by bit it is stripped away for expansion and largely immigration to urban Edmonton.
From a local or even global systems/ecosystems perspective, we can consider soil as both a structural element and an essential conversion factor. The soil structure ‘holds’ the moisture, holds the nutrients, and indeed, holds the roots, of all trees, shrubs, grasses, and crops.
But within the soil itself, fertile soil is the ultimate conversion engine, powered not only by the minerals, gases, and water within the soil, but especially by the microbiome and collective layers of decomposing and converting microorganisms within the soil.
Once disturbed, neither the removed topsoil, nor any replacement soils added in 1–2-foot layers in new developments, will ever regain that fertility, that conversion efficacy, which was vital to the entire sustained ecosystem in the natural climax community here in the Aspen Parkland and grasslands climate zones.
Granted, modern farming practices have all but destroyed the natural resiliency and vibrancy of soils due to uses of commercial fertilizers, pesticides, and GMO seed crops. However, in actual sustainable communities designed from a systems perspective, portions of natural undisturbed soil should ideally be ‘set aside’ or conserved as a kind of mother-seed source to regrow naturally diverse soil micro-cultures.
We celebrate Edmonton’s growth and new infrastructure with the beautiful and worthy Garth Worthington School in the city’s extreme southwest. But one can’t help but wonder if we ought to still reserve portions of the land, if not in the natural state, at least in an agricultural state.
Perhaps we should pave only half of paradise, and preserve viable soil bio-cultures within the city. It is a fantastic new school, a fitting tribute to a good man, with symbolic tributes to Joni Mitchells ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, and yet where it stands literally paradise was paved and a parking lot installed.
Further Information on the Garth Worthington School Mural. https://alixandrajade.ca/portfolio/garth-worthington-school/
