Green Cottager Award, Individual/Family

They didn’t call him “Channel-Man Stan” for nothing. Through a lifetime of cottaging in Seven Mile Narrows, on the South Channel of Georgian Bay, near Parry Sound, Stanley Topping devoted himself to finding ways to live in harmony with the wildlife surrounding his cottage, and sharing with others what he learned about how to preserve the area’s land and water. He died in July, 2006, at age 74, of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which his family suspects was caused by a fungal infection, possibly from inadvertently inhaling bat droppings. As a tribute, friends and supporters from the South Channel Association, which he helped found, designed and printed T-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with one of Topping’s favourite expressions: “If you can’t put it in your mouth, don’t put it in the water.”

Topping, a highway engineer based near Rochester, NY, began bonding with the South Channel area in the 1940s, when his father built a cottage there. Come April, year after year, Stanley eagerly made the trek north as soon as the ice melted enough to allow passage of his boat through the channel to his property. “From the get-go, he was environmentally conscious,” says Stanley’s son, Lance, now 46, recalling his father’s prescient green approach to the building of three cottages on the five acres of land (including 1,000 feet of sandy beach) he bought with his wife, Carol, back in the 1970s. That dedication to making as small an ecological imprint as possible drew grumbles from his then-teenage son that the modified A-frame structure Stanley favoured was weird-looking and not big enough. Dad was unswayed, opting to build in a manner that fit unobtrusively with the land, if not with his son’s sense of aesthetics. His early insistence on biodegradable soaps and washing not in the lake but in a rudimentary shower rig dismayed his daughter, Johanna (now 40), and her girlfriends. Now, though, Lance and Johanna appreciate everything their father taught them about being environmentally responsible. They continue to enjoy their father’s green cottaging legacy with their own children—from funny-shaped A-frame cabins to an old outhouse that does double duty as the bulletin board and communications hub for family and guests in residence. On its walls, they continue his tradition of posting announcements of wildlife sightings, sharing space with witty cartoons by Stanley himself, including several depictions of a bear that wandered onto the property. Stanley didn’t mind letting it take naps in a tree, even though that meant keeping his beloved dogs inside whenever it showed up.

“He was just a plain tree hugger in every way,” says Carol. “He formulated ideas from the time we purchased the property about the least-invasive way to do everything.” That meant cutting as few trees as possible and reusing what he could, constructing buildings in a way that disturbed the least amount of greenery, and leaving fallen trunks, which others might have considered eyesores, for the woodpeckers and sapsuckers. A voracious reader, Topping passed on his knowledge about everything from the reduction of coliforms in the water to dealing with invasive forest species—posting pictures of caterpillar egg masses, for instance, along with advice on removal and disposal on the website he started with Lance, www.southchannel.org.

At the same time, says Lance, “he wasn’t against all change.” Topping’s concern for forest health and water quality translated into significant action. As the Environmental Liaison for the South Channel Association, he worked with a number of local organizations to educate about conserving the natural forest and to improve water quality through monitoring projects and septic-system inspections. His goal, always: to enlighten others about how to minimize the human impact on the environment, and to ensure it remains clean and healthy for future generations to enjoy.

Bravely, Carol calls Stan’s death “a fitting end to a green life well lived.” She’s now interested in the Georgian Bay Association’s campaign to educate area residents and cottagers on how to prevent contracting the kind of aggressive infection that weakened her husband (wearing appropriate masks, for instance, when working in areas that may contain infected animal droppings).

Tributes to Channel-Man Stan from those who knew and loved him flowed in to the website after his death. “We know he’s missed,” says Carol.