Great news in the War vs. Nature coming out of Winnipeg this week!
German environmental group Global Nature Fund has singled out Lake Winnipeg, Canada’s sixth largest freshwater lake, as the world’s Threatened Lake of 2013. This dubious honour has previously been held by poisoned lakes in Colombia and Peru.
Toxic blue-green algae fills Lake Winnipeg every summer. The CBC reported Saturday that “according to the GNF, nutrients and pesticides found in agricultural run-off and sewage discharge are partly responsible for causing the toxic algae.”
Thousands of people live on the shores of Lake Winnipeg and when the algae really gets cranked up, the water isn’t just fucking revolting, but lethally toxic as well. This does not only affect yuppie cottage owners and skids from Winnipeg making the trek to Grand Beach to booze it up on a hot day, but also negatively impacts the 800 people who depend directly on commercial fishing for a living, and the communities they live in.
This past summer, the Harper Government pledged $18 million to the Lake Winnipeg Basin Initiative in a potempkin-like move to appear to care about its health. Critics allege that most of that cash is going to feed a bureaucracy that will do very little, in the end, to actually solve Lake Winnipeg’s woes. At the same time, the feds are adamant about cutting the $2 million in annual funding to the Experimental Lakes Area, a research station with the longest running scientific work on eutrophication in the world. Eutrophication, for all you non-eggheads, is precisely the problem that Lake Winnipeg suffers from. Doesn’t really add up, does it? Oh well.
While provincial and federal politicians like to talk big about fixing up Lake Winnipeg, they sure as shit aren’t doing a fuck of a lot about it in real time. Until they do, Manitobans will be stuck with a giant puddle of poisonous pea soup every summer until the fucking lake just gives up the ghost for good.
via:Global Nature Fund | CBC News image: Travel Manitoba
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