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09/ Tommy Thompson Park IMAGE/ Rick Harris

10/ Footbridge on the Leslie Street Spit IMAGE/ John Vetterli As well, the Spit has historical and associative value as it has direct associations with demolition episodes in the city that yield information about development pressure and planning ideals that have impacted the city and its surrounding landscape through time. It is also associated with Ports Toronto and the TRCA, which are significant Toronto agencies that have played a defining role in the development of the waterfront and/or natural landscapes in the city.

And finally, the Spit has contextual value as it is a character-defining part of the Toronto waterfront. Formally identified as an Environmentally Significant Area (by the City of Toronto) and a globally significant Important Bird Area (by Birdlife International), the Leslie Street Spit is an important landform that is valued by the community and is home to a wide variety of wildlife. The Leslie Street Spit meets all of the high level criteria set out in O. Reg. 9/06 of the Ontario Heritage Act. Designating the Spit as a cultural heritage landscape would give this treasured landscape protection and could result in a strategy that would keep both the ecological and cultural attributes of this landscape intact in perpetuity. Defining it as a heritage resource, as well as an ecological one, would result in the preservation, conservation, and restoration of Toronto’s “urban wilderness.”

BIo/ HEIdY ScHoPF IS A cuLTuRAL HERITAGE SPEcIALIST AT STAnTEc. SHE HAS woRkEd In THE FIELd oF cuLTuRAL RESouRcE MAnAGEMEnT FoR THE PAST FIvE YEARS AS BoTH A RESEARcH ARcHAEoLoGIST And AS A HERITAGE SPEcIALIST. SHE HAS BEEn ExPLoRInG And wRITInG ABouT THE SPIT SIncE 2009 And conTInuES To RESEARcH THE SPIT ALonG wITH AcAdEMIc co-AuTHoR JEnnIFER FoSTER.

From policy and political boundaries to riparian buffers, this issue looks at things on the fringes. Where does one region end and the next begin, and how do we sensitively and appropriately manage things in transition? Our Round Table explores bi-national and international landscapes and waterways, to examine the parts of landscape practice that relate, react, or respond to what’s on the edge.

ModERATEd BY dEnISE PInTo

BIoS/ MuRRAY cLAMEn HELd THE PoSITIonS oF EnGInEERInG AdvISER And SEcRETARY In THE cAnAdIAn SEcTIon oF THE cAnAdA-unITEd STATES InTERnATIonAL JoInT coMMISSIon (IJc) And HAS LEd And PARTIcIPATEd In nuMERouS cAnAdA-u.S. wATER RESouRcE STudIES And ASSESSMEnTS. wITH MoRE THAn THIRTY YEARS oF coMBInEd ExPERIEncE AT THE IJc And EnvIRonMEnT cAnAdA, dR. cLAMEn HAS SIGnIFIcAnT ExPERTISE In InTEGRATEd wATER RESouRcE MAnAGEMEnT, IncLudInG THE ESTABLISHMEnT oF cooPERATIvE APPRoAcHES wITH kEY EnvIRonMEnTAL PARTnERS, STAkEHoLdERS, nGoS, And GovERnMEnT dEPARTMEnTS AT THE FEdERAL, PRovIncIAL, And STATE LEvELS In BoTH counTRIES. HE cuRREnTLY IS An AFFILIATE PRoFESSoR AT McGILL unIvERSITY, In MonTREAL, In THE BIoRESouRcE EnGInEERInG dEPARTMEnT And TEAcHES A GRAduATE couRSE on wATER PoLIcY.

dEnISE PInTo IS THE ExEcuTIvE dIREcToR oF THE JAnE’S wALk PRoJEcT, wHIcH SuPPoRTS RESIdEnTS FRoM MoRE THAn 200 cITIES—FRoM cALGARY To cALcuTTA—To PRoducE wALkInG TouRS THAT GET nEIGHBouRS ToGETHER ExPLoRInG THE PLAcES THEY LIvE, woRk, And PLAY. dEnISE HAS LEcTuREd wIdELY And wALkEd wITH coMMunITY LEAdERS In vIEnnA, HonG konG, And cHIcAGo. TRAInEd AS A LAndScAPE ARcHITEcT, SHE IS A BoARd MEMBER FoR oPEn STREETS ToRonTo, MABELLEARTS, And Ground: Landscape architect QuarterLy, wHERE SHE FREquEnTLY conTRIBuTES. THIS YEAR, SHE wAS nAMEd A vITAL PERSon BY THE ToRonTo FoundATIon, HonouREd FoR MAkInG A dIFFEREncE In THE cITY.

kRYSTYn TuLLY IS vIcE PRESIdEnT And co-FoundER oF LAkE onTARIo wATERkEEPER/SwIM dRInk FISH cAnAdA And co-cREAToR oF THE wEB’S MoST PoPuLAR BEAcH InFoRMATIon SERvIcE, SwIM GuIdE. TuLLY HAS A B.A. In PuBLIc AdMInISTRATIon And GovERnAncE, wITH A MInoR In non-PRoFIT oRGAnIzATIonS, And A B.A.A. In RAdIo And TELEvISIon ARTS, BoTH FRoM RYERSon unIvERSITY In ToRonTo. SHE HAS SPokEn on non-PRoFITS, TEcHnoLoGY, And coMMunITY EnGAGEMEnT FoR A RAnGE oF AudIEncES, IncLudInG FEdERAL, PRovIncIAL, STATE, And MunIcIPAL wATER AGEncIES.

02/ Fishing in Lake Ontario at Port Credit IMAGE/ Ian Muttoo

03/ The Great Lakes from space by NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre IMAGE/ Courtesy of NASA 04/ Warning sign on Lake Erie IMAGE/ Sarah Keating 05/ Pollution and erosion are ongoing problems in the Great Lakes. IMAGE/ Courtesy of International Joint Commission 03 denise Pinto (dP): For this issue of Ground, the theme of which is “edges,” we are very interested in bi-national and international landscapes, and how political boundaries are superimposed on watersheds, which can often lead to competing priorities. There are policy moves, and people flows, and water flows, and political consciousness around the issues on both sides of the border. We’d like to have a discussion about what the edge of that interaction looks like.

I’ll start with Murray. When I was looking at water issues along the U.S./Canada border, I came across a term you use: transboundary water management. Could you talk about what that is, and how your thinking about shared oversight has changed in the past twenty years?

Murray clamen (Mc): Water management is all about balancing a range of interests, working on different problems and processes, and coordinating the management of both natural and constructed systems. For example, you might talk about a water supply system for a city, but you could also talk about incentives for conservation, or about stormwater runoff. These are all examples of water management projects. It’s a very broad activity, considering the physical, environmental, economic, social, and political interests. Transboundary water management, or transboundary integrated water resource management, is all those things, plus.

As an example: various researchers have noted that there is something in the order of 260 rivers covering 45 percent of the total global land barrier shared by two or more countries. So, when you have situations like that, transboundary becomes a rather important issue, and it’s very challenging, because in addition to the normal issues you have to deal with that I mentioned previously, you have different jurisdictions, different laws and regulations, customs, perhaps languages. How do you deal with these challenges in a contemporary way?

The International Joint Commission (IJC) has two basic responsibilities. One is to give advice if both governments have an issue that they need the IJC to advise on. The other responsibility is much more practical and fundamental, and it goes back to when the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 was signed. If there’s a project in some transboundary waters that affects one country or the other, then the country undertaking the project might have to get approval from the IJC.

Furthermore, if the project is approved, the IJC sets up a group of bi-national experts to monitor and make sure that it’s in compliance with the “order of approval,” as it’s called.

The government signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972, and continues to improve it. It was improved in 1978, 1987, and very recently in 2012. The agreement gives the IJC some very important responsibilities to monitor and report on how well the governments are doing. The IJC is required to comment on climate change and land use, for example, but it has quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what other tough topics it can talk about and bring to bear.

dP: Beyond bi-national considerations, how are First Nations’ uses of and connection to water considered in the work that the IJC does?

Mc: In the early years of the IJC, there was very little coordination or input, and, in my opinion anyway, First Nations were not very well represented. Over the last couple of years, it’s my opinion that the commission, both in Canada and the United States, is doing a much better job of reaching out to First Nations in Canada and the U.S. I think the IJC still has a way to go, but there has been some success. For example, there is now First Nations representation on various boards of experts that monitor projects. First Nations serve as equal partners with other government people, with non-government people, and academics.

The IJC also makes an effort to hold public meetings, public hearings, round tables, workshops, or open houses with First Nations’ groups on their home territory. This helps commission members understand better any problems that may exist in that particular area. Several First Nations folks have indicated that they would like to be commissioners, but that hasn’t happened yet.

dP: With more perspectives at the table, settling on policy directions is quite a bit more complex and challenging. Is the work that’s coming out enhanced by that collaboration and sharing? Mc: Most definitely. For the past 15 years or so, the IJC has been undertaking some very serious studies on how to improve the St. Lawrence Seaway power project. There has been quite a bit of participation by First Nations, and the IJC has been praised for taking into account the various perspectives that First Nations have brought, such as ecosystem protection and ecosystem values, and maintaining as much of the ecosystem as possible. The IJC has moved quite a bit from the original proposal to the one that’s currently on the table, at least in part due to First Nations participation.

dP: That’s a wonderful segue into your work, Krystyn, because you are working with so many different people and organizations to support a common vision for watershed management based on grassroots care and stewardship. Could you talk a little bit about Waterkeeper, and how you develop a common vision and enable people to take action?

krystyn Tully (kT): At Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, we’ve got two initiatives: first, our local Great Lakes-focused work to restore and keep intact Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes watershed, and the Swim Drink Fish Canada umbrella. The common thread for us is that we’re a network of people who all care about swimming and fishing in the water. When you think about what a watershed in an urban area looks like, particularly in the Great Lakes, there’s always going to be people in the frame. They’re not water bodies devoid of human presence, so when we think about watershed management, and our relationship to water, we need to make sure that people are present. There’s still an old school of urban planning, or policy-making, that looks out at a body of water and sees emptiness, which is not actually the case. There are recreational water users, there’s wildlife, fish, birds, there’s a whole world of life and nature that’s happening on and under the water. When we remember and embrace that, the communities we build around water will be stronger.

The vision and goal of the Swim Drink Fish project is that people need to be able to touch the water around them. This idea can be found in most cultural traditions throughout the course of human history. The water needs to be clean enough that you can touch it without getting sick, that it can provide a drinking water supply, and you need to be able to find fish for a sustainable food supply, and this relates both to actually eating fish and also just to the presence of fish as part of a thriving ecosystem. One additional goal is navigation, or access, and the right to move.

Our community of Waterkeepers are all people who explicitly understand that these are goals or values they have to try to protect. There are so many organizations connected

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with watershed protection, so many companies catering to recreational water users, outdoor activities, tourism, and land use and development.

Even real estate is affected by sewage in the water, so that then becomes the touchstone around which you can have a conversation with that industry about how to develop a Swim Drink Fish community. It starts with water where you can swim, drink, and fish, and then you have every economic opportunity in the world available to you if you can do those three things.

dP: Those handles on the issue are so relatable to so many people. Do you work with any international partners in the United States, and is that any different from your work in Canada? Do you have your jurisdiction and they have theirs in the United States for the shared waterways?

kT: It’s pretty seamless. There are two types of international collaboration that we do. One is actually working to protect the Great Lakes, and since Lake Ontario is partially in Ontario and partially in New York State, with anything we do, we’re collaborating.

It is really easy to just focus on the jurisdiction you’re in. But we try to make an effort, and say, “Oh right, I’m going to read the Rochester newspaper this morning, I’m going to read the Buffalo newspaper this morning, I’m going to make an effort to see what the EPA in the United States is doing about sewage and stormwater.”

The other type of international collaboration is our work with partners. Through our Swim Guide, for example, we have 60 non-profit partner organizations that are outside of Canada. Because we’re all working to protect swimmable water, and because there is a relatively standardized system for monitoring beach water quality and beach health, it’s really easy to forget that our partners are in a different country. We’re talking about the exact same activities. Are people using the water to swim and bathe? Is it monitored? If not, how do we get it monitored? If it is monitored, what’s the water quality like? People basically care about the same things. They want information about a watershed when they need it, and in a format they can understand, in a way that’s accessible and easy for them to use. As an organization working towards a shared goal, the political boundaries really just fall away.

Mc: A lot of people just focus on the edge of the beach and the water, and don’t necessarily think about where it comes from. I’m not sure that people really understand what a total watershed approach really is, because a watershed can extend quite far away and high up on the land side. So, while I think it’s important to consider water in the context of swimming and beaches, hopefully people will also look at new ways of influencing how water reaches a particular area.

dP: That’s a great point. At every moment in the watershed, we’re responsible for the health and quality of the water at the edge, certainly.

Mc: And it can come down to various landscapes. It can be how parking lots are designed, how buildings are built, how schools are designed, how parks operate— it’s a lot of little things that add up, so I think everybody can play a part. Most people have shared values around swimmable, drinkable, fishable water; they can have an important impact.

dP: In terms of engaging citizens around this on both sides of the border, are there ever conflicting cultural priorities or attitudes that have been challenging, or that you’ve had to navigate?

kT: Not in terms of priorities or values, no. Sometimes we get some questions like, “What does it really mean?” and we talk it through, but it’s more about nomenclature and ways of seeing. One example is that in the United States, the way that their beach water law and policy has evolved, they really focus on coastlines, which means the ocean coasts and the Great Lakes coast, and not so much on the interior.

We’ve been really influential in training some U.S. organizations to understand that those swimming holes they love are beaches, too. We should be taking our kids to the beach at least once a year; we should try camping. For a lot of people, they don’t go to the beach

06/ Connecting people to the watersheds in which they live, through parks such as HT0, in Toronto, shown here, is crucial to protecting those watersheds. IMAGE/ Ruby Pajares 07/ Climate change is expected to increase the rate of flooding in many areas. IMAGE/ Courtesy of the International Joint Commission

or try fishing because they love nature, they do it because it’s an open space where they can spend time with the people they care about the most—and then that body of water they spend time in becomes the backdrop or the setting for some of the most important and magical moment of their lives.

dP: Murray, we were talking about policy, and you’re making policy recommendations related to a much bigger time scale than the kind of activity we’re talking about at the cultural and social scale. What are some of the ways you both navigate and balance those two time scales, and the way in which people relate and engage with water, and our priorities over the next 100 years, in order to make sure that we have clean, safe, accessible water?

Mc: When I was at the International Joint Commission, about twenty years ago the commissioners became concerned about climate change and what impacts this would have, primarily on water resources and the management side of the operation. They were noticing that in many different watersheds, things seemed to be out of the norm. Climate events were outside the recorded averages. And this appeared to be happening in other parts of the country, too—for example, in Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and Montana, where the IJC is responsible for apportioning water. There was concern about the glaciers receding, and whether or not the water supply would be the same as it was. So the IJC started to have independent workshops about climate change, trying to understand what it was all about, and whether or not the climate change models were adequate for looking long term at a particular watershed that was very small.

I think the focus now is on adaptation. Climate change brings a lot of uncertainty, so what I think the IJC is trying to do is to build as much as they can of what they call adaptive capacity. They recently set up an adaptive management team—in the Great Lakes, and that’s the largest watershed that the commission deals with—in the hopes of monitoring and looking at different aspects of the ecosystem, to see over the long term what might be happening, and whether this is directly or indirectly related to climate change, and what sort of measures can be put in place that allow for changes in the face of all this uncertainty.

kT: If you look at any poll or study, Canadians are more likely than any other country in the world to say that they love nature and the environment. But when you rank Canada against other developed countries, we rank among the lowest when it comes to every measure of environmental protection. So there’s this mysterious gap between what we say is really important to us as individuals, and what we are actually doing when it comes to taking care of our natural resources. Why is that?

This question is something we have focused on extensively for the past year, and what we have found is that there is a water literacy gap. People say that they love water, but they don’t actually understand what a watershed is, or how it works, or how the things that they do every day affect the water around them, and how the water around them affects the things that they do. Closing that water literacy gap has become our main mission as an organization.

When you understand how water flows, and where it comes from, and where it goes, and how the system acts and behaves, then you start to understand your place in that system as an individual, and then you start making much smarter decisions about how to act and behave in that watershed—whether it’s a massive hundred-year vision for land use or a very, very small decision about what to plant in your front yard garden, just knowing where you fit in that watershed is incredibly important.

To shift behaviour, the number one thing that needs to improve or change is water literacy. With climate change, and other emerging issues, we need to adapt as new information becomes available, and we need to be able to adapt very quickly. If a chemical everybody thought was fine turns out to be harmful to fish, we need to be able to respond rapidly as that new information becomes available to us. When people were more closely connected to watersheds, they could see changes happening, but we’re more disconnected now. In a lot of cases, people growing up in urban areas don’t know the difference between a polluted water body and a clean water body. How are we supposed to be able to respond to threats if we can’t identify them in the first place?

Mc: In the context of water literacy, it’s a blessing and a curse that Canada has so much water, with thousands of lakes all across the country. And, for the most part, our fresh water resource is pretty good. But this creates a perception that Canada has no water problems. People see it as plentiful and have no perception of water management challenges. It’s as if abundance equals no problem. And that’s just not true.

In terms of managing chemicals and toxins, for example, Europe does a much better job than we do, and the United States has better laws and regulations in many states than we do. Our record of prosecution is not very good.

Water literacy is definitely important, but if you look at the education system, I don’t know where learning about water fits in. In Ottawa, the municipality used to put a little flyer in everyone’s water bill, talking about water issues such as conservation, or some other way to improve water management in the city. But they stopped doing that.

There are two things I always emphasize. Number one is, if the opportunity arises to tell somebody about the importance of water, have something in your head that you can just blurt out that will capture their imagination, no matter who that person is. The second

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08 thing is: the media does not see water as a problem until there’s a crisis, whether it’s a flood, a drought, pollution that affects drinking water, or problems on a First Nations reserve. Other than those things, the media really doesn’t report on water issues.

kT: The shifting baseline syndrome is something relevant to people in the landscape architecture field. This is a fancy way of saying that what you see in front of you, you think is normal. As our ecosystems decline, what are we considering to be a normal, healthy, functioning ecosystem? It bears no resemblance to what you would have seen a hundred years ago, which bears little resemblance to what you would have seen two hundred years ago. Someone who grows up in a contaminated or degraded area thinks that’s normal; incremental damage or change doesn’t seem so bad, because it’s only moderately worse than what they’re used to seeing. What we think is urgent changes from generation to generation, and I believe that the challenge for this generation is to confront the baseline and the definition of normal, so that the people who come after us don’t assume that what we have is normal. These zones in the Great Lakes where you can’t touch the water because it’s so contaminated, or the cities that have no access to their waterfront because they’ve been industrialized or rendered so contaminated that they’re no longer safe to use—these shouldn’t be considered normal things that we accept. The only time the baseline shifts in the right direction is when the people who are making choices about planning and design get creative, and think bigger, and aim higher. So we need to think not just about how we maintain the status quo when it comes to water quality, or stormwater management, or sewage management, or species biodiversity, but, “How could we improve it?” and “How could we do better?” Our goal should be that every development isn’t just as good as the development that came before, but is better. That’s the only way we’re going to make progress.

dP: I wonder to what extent landscape architects who are working on daylighting streams, or re-naturalizing the mouth of a river, or looking at systems that clean and attenuate water in an urban setting, are having an effect on the level of water literacy in the general public and making the invisible visible. The edge of our experience—our connection and our relationship to water—shouldn’t just be visible at the waterfront. It should be in all of the public and private landscapes around us. So, how might landscape architects appropriately work some of the considerations you’ve talked about into design work that amplifies the presence of water in our daily lives?

kT: I love the idea of creating opportunities for accidental interactions with water. I don’t think we want to live in a world where the Great Lakes are like large aquariums where we stock the fish, or a beach is a place that is a designated zone like an amusement park or a theme park. I think the healthiest relationships with water are the ones that are unexpected and unplanned. For example, say you live in a residential neighbourhood, and you go for a walk around the block with your kids and they find frogs, because we’ve got living ditches. They find flowers, or see birds, because these species interact with the water ecosystem, and you get to experience things that you didn’t plan.

That’s where the creativity of a landscape architect working on a project fuels the creativity of the people who are living in those spaces. That’s where you can get cultural innovation, economic innovation, and the things that make a community strong and prosperous. Mc: One of the challenges is that there’s a tendency for people to want to live by water. They want to experience it, they want to go near it or go in it, swim in it, fish in it, boat on it as often as the weather allows. It’s an experience that people hold in high value. What I see happening around the Great Lakes and in other places is that people are building unwisely beside the water. This is not good for the environment. I don’t have any particular solutions for this, other than to try and design things in as soft a way as possible.

We haven’t really talked about the influence of industry. When I was with the IJC, we attempted to work with industry in a positive way—because for better or for worse, industry probably has the most significant impact in terms of water quality. And a lot of people perceive them as the bad actors— they take huge amounts of water, in some cases they don’t even pay for it, they use it in some industrial process, and they put it back, and cause all this pollution. I know the IJC was trying to invite industry folks into the tent more, to learn more about processes, how they can be made less polluting, and make sure that the values we talked about are at least shared. I think we’ve got to make tremendous improvements in the way in which we manage water in North America, because it’s not very good right now.

There’s a little book that was put out as a result of a conference which I attended in Kingston many years ago. It’s called Water as a Social Opportunity, and it’s very helpful, it’s a very positive book. Maybe that’s the kind of approach we need—people talking more positively about solutions, as opposed to focusing just on problems and saying that it’s everybody else’s problem.

kT: With regard to industry, if you want to understand what the biggest threats to watersheds are, you just have to look at what

08/ Boating is a popular activity in the Great Lakes watershed.

IMAGE/ Dylan Neild 09/ Recreational fishing is one way that people connect with their watersheds.

the dominant economy of the day is. When the dominant economy was fishing, the greatest threat to ecosystems was the devastation of fish stocks and species; when the dominant economy of the day, particularly in the Great Lakes, was industrial manufacturing, the dominant threat to the lakes was pollution from chemicals and the emissions from those factories. As manufacturing is moving away from the Great Lakes, and the dominant economy moves to more of a service/creative economy, the dominant threats to the lake currently are those from municipal systems. So we see emerging issues such as pharmaceuticals in the water and micro-plastics. It’s relatively easy to reflect back on environmental concerns and to predict future trends for environmental concerns. This idea of industry as the enemy is not necessarily true or false, but it’s very indicative of a particular moment in time. Anyone who is thinking about future planning should be looking to those economic cues if they want to understand what the threats might be in the future, so that we can take steps now, instead of waiting until we discover that something is devastating and try to respond after the fact.

Natural systems are very fluid. A wetland is dry for part of the year, and under water for part of the year. Change is really the only thing that is constant when it comes to water, so the important thing is to bring people back down to the water. I love the fact that parks such as HTO and Sugar Beach [in Toronto] exist, but they drive me crazy because you can’t go in the water, which is the definition of a beach. People show up expecting to jump into the lake, and instead it’s got a hard-edge shoreline. They are parks that are supposed to bring people back to the lake, but they actually create new, very powerful barriers between people and water. We should be dismantling those barriers, not creating more of them. When people are being trained to look at water but not touch it, I think that is stifling and potentially dangerous—to raise a generation of people who think that water is something to be seen and not touched.

Mc: There is a movement, but it’s very slow and not very widespread, in the United States to take down dams because the ecosystem values are higher than whatever the dam was originally built for and it may not serve any purpose anymore. Obviously, you have to be very careful about how it’s taken down and what the final product will be, but the point is that we may be going back to the future in the sense that things that have been built don’t necessarily have to remain. So whether it’s a dam that comes down, or a hardened shoreline that is softened, with some ingenuity, good planning, public involvement, and some funding, we can restore.

dP: There are real possibilities to do that now, with decaying urban landscapes and aging infrastructure all around us, which need to be transformed in some way. This is one place where we can insert these new ideas.

Mc: I think the public is going to play a major role in this. If the public can push for it, there may be more of it happening.

And landscape architects and urban planners can think more about how to better design the landscape interface—the edges—between water and land. That will go a long way to improving water management and the watersheds in which people live. In my opinion, climate change is all about uncertainty, so when designing anything, try to build in as much adaptive capacity as possible.

kT: The thread that runs through this conversation for me is that the abundance of water in the Great Lakes watershed leads us to think that we have very little to worry about. And the smallness, the localness, of some of the projects we do might make us feel that it’s too small a project to make a significant change. But we know that that’s not true, and that all water issues essentially are local issues, because of the nature of water.

When we go out and talk to people about their connection to water and a body of water that’s shaped their life, we call that story a watermark. Everybody has one. It’s like a birthmark, and everyone’s is slightly different. The water you grow up with influences your physical health, your mental health, the jobs you’ll take, the people you’ll meet. And anyone who has an opportunity to influence the relationship of people in that community to water—what they’re doing is helping to write the watermark.

We’re creating stories that people are going to tell about water in the future. What do we want those stories to be? Do we want them to be stories about drought, or mistakes, or inaction? Or do we want them to be stories about nature, and beauty, and wonder, and prosperity?

Everything that shapes those stories consists of tiny decisions made on a daily basis, usually by anonymous people, at moments that don’t necessarily seem significant when you’re actually experiencing them, and it’s really important that we wake up to the importance of those small choices that we’re making.

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Alternative infrastructure to ensure access to clean drinking water at Shoal Lake 40 First Nation

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01/ The site context for Emma Mendel’s proposals for alternative infrastructure at Shoal Lake 40 First Nation

IMAGE/ Emma Mendel