Toronto’s naturalist community is taking down Don Valley raves
City council just agreed to draft an anti-rave action plan for the area
A battle is brewing between two impassioned Toronto groups: naturalists, who argue that the Don Valley should be protected against damage caused by illicit raves, and ravers, who say “an increasingly corporate and inaccessible Toronto” has made gathering in public outdoor spaces necessary.
According to a Toronto Star report, over the summer, ravers destroyed crucial restorative work completed by volunteer naturalists.
“Imagine the dismay of all those volunteers to discover their loving efforts at Cottonwood Flats site have suddenly been trashed,” says a post published by the Toronto Field Naturalists, a non-profit organization that seeks to “protect Toronto’s green spaces and the species that inhabit them.”
Related: My friends are getting into sober raves, and I just can’t see the appeal
In the Star, Octavian Cadabeschi, a rave community organizer who helped throw a particularly well-attended event in the Don Valley’s Cottonwood Flats area last summer, insisted that the ravers tried to keep the location clean.
City council has now gotten involved, voting late last week to draft an action plan to keep revellers away, following a motion by Councillor Paula Fletcher.
Raving has vibrantly persevered through crackdown attempts for decades. If the city is successful with this one and ravers need to get creative, it could be cool to watch the sun rise from an abandoned Bay store?
Related: Inside the last day of Hudson’s Bay’s Toronto flagship
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
