By Jeff Doner, Chief Executive Officer, Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust
A full-circle journey back to the landscape that shaped a life and career. I grew up on the 4th Line outside Millbrook.
Some of my earliest memories of independence involve getting on my bike and riding through the Ganaraska Forest to my grandparents’ home near Kendal. At the time, it didn’t feel particularly remarkable. It was simply where I lived.
There were countless days playing basketball on the school-yard courts. Lunches at Donna’s Pizza. The old Millbrook bowling alley. Boy Scouts. Public speaking competitions at the Royal Canadian Legion and Lions Club. One summer, I worked as an actor at 4th Line Theatre, performing outdoors against a backdrop of fields, forests and rolling countryside. And my best friend and I spent more hours than I could possibly count exploring the nearly 150 acres of forest our families owned where we grew up.
I didn’t have language for any of it then. I certainly wasn’t thinking about watersheds, ecological corridors, groundwater recharge or landscape-scale conservation. I was just a kid growing up in Millbrook.
What I understand now is that I was also growing up on the Oak Ridges Moraine. And more than four decades later, I have somehow found my way back to it. This past summer, I became CEO of the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust.
Even writing that sentence still feels a little surreal. There is, of course, something worth celebrating in the journey itself. I grew up in a small Ontario community, left home, built a career, worked in communications, philanthropy, healthcare and community leadership, and eventually found myself with the opportunity to lead an organization whose work spans one of Ontario’s most important natural landscapes.
For the kid who once rode his bike through the Ganaraska Forest, becoming a CEO was not something I could have imagined. But the title is not really what makes this moment meaningful to me. It is where the title brought me. Back here. Back to the landscape that helped raise me.
There is something powerful about reaching a point in your life when you can look backward and suddenly see connections that were invisible at the time. I can think now about that bike ride to Kendal differently. I can think about those acres of forest differently. I can think about standing on the outdoor stage at 4th Line Theatre differently. I was performing on the very landscape I would someday have a professional responsibility to help protect.
Of course, I had no idea. Maybe that is part of what makes the Oak Ridges Moraine so fascinating.
For those of us who grew up in communities like Millbrook, the Moraine rarely announced itself. It was simply home. It was the hill in the road. The woodlot behind the house. The creek you crossed. The farm down the road. The place where you rode your bike, built forts, went for walks, played outside or watched the seasons change.
You could spend your entire childhood on the Moraine without ever thinking of yourself as someone who lived “on the Moraine.” I certainly did.
Only later have I come to understand the extraordinary natural system beneath those familiar places, and how much it does for the communities that sit upon it and the millions of people who depend upon it.
The Moraine stores and filters water. It supports forests, wetlands, farmland and wildlife habitat. It connects natural areas across a heavily populated part of Ontario. But those facts, important as they are, tell only part of the story.
Because landscapes also shape people. They become part of our memory and identity. They are where childhood happens. And that realization has influenced the way I am beginning to think about the future of conservation.
Protecting land will always be at the heart of what organizations like the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust do. There are places that need to remain intact for generations to come. But conservation cannot simply be about drawing boundaries around parcels of land. We also have to build relationships between people and place.
That means storytelling. Education. Community. Philanthropy. Partnership.
It means helping people understand not just that a landscape is important, but why it matters to them. Because protecting something for the next generation becomes much easier when the next generation has been given a reason to love it.
I think often now about children growing up in Millbrook today. Some of them are probably riding bikes down the same roads, walking through the same forests, playing on the same school grounds and looking across the same rolling landscape I knew. Most are probably not thinking about the Oak Ridges Moraine either. And maybe they shouldn’t have to. Childhood should first be about experiencing a place. Understanding can come later. Mine did.
It took leaving Millbrook, building a life and career elsewhere, becoming a parent and eventually returning to this landscape in an entirely unexpected way for me to fully appreciate what had been around me all along. That is the full-circle part of this story that means the most to me.
I left Millbrook carrying a little of this place with me with-out realizing it. Now I have comeback with the opportunity, and responsibility, to help protect it. I hope there is something in that journey for young people growing up here, too. You do not need to know exactly where your life is going. You do not need to have the impressive title mapped out.
The experiences that seem ordinary today; the community you are part of, the people who encourage you, the places you explore, the stage you stand on, the forest you ride your bike through; may be quietly laying foundations you will only recognize years later.
Sometimes a career takes you far away from where you started. And sometimes, if you are fortunate, it has a way of bringing you home.