Can sustainability be fun? Montreal thinks so

Frédéric-Back Park was once a dump; a quarry and dump almost the size of Monaco, infested with rats, roaring with garbage trucks, violently belching gas, covered in 40 million tons of waste. So dirty that in the 1970s, the surrounding residents of Saint-Michel - Montreal's most ethnically diverse neighborhood - took to the streets in protest.

But today, if you look around the park, everything is green and serene; the Hercules regeneration project is almost complete. Butterflies feed on meadows of milkweed ...