Lake Winnipeg Series
The story of Lake Winnipeg needs a better telling. It deserves better than the lackadaisical stewardship it has received. It craves more than the news release-driven reporting which typifies this — and most — environmental stories. Many people want to know how to adjust their lives so that the lake can flourish. We want to know how the lake can once again become more than a managed aquaculture project.
When I started looking deeper in to the lake, I wanted to answer three questions:
- What's the state of the lake now?
- How did it get this way?
- What's being done to change things?
Those questions still need answers and to find them, I need your help. Over the weeks ahead Dispatches will be posting the interviews I have conducted with the "usual suspects". I am hoping that by putting this all out there as 'raw' material then together we can hone a compelling narrative. Call it a co-creation, or collaborative journalism.
The lake needs people who can swim together towards a broader understanding of what constitutes health. This body of water cries out for respect for who and what it is, regardless of its 'services' to humanity. We benefit because the lake is whole.
Human Misery
Hollow eyes. In an impossibly remote village in Nicaragua an 18-year-old widower was explaining how his pregnant wife was swept to her death when Hurricane Mitch parked its fury overhead. His hurt literally stole his voice away.
Dead eyes. Together a mother and I watched the last breaths of her 4-year-old daughter in the decrepit Nazran hospital. The terrible burns caused by rocket fire on their home in Chechnya might not have killed the child, but the one week wait at the border to scrape up enough bribe money for the Russian guards to let them through to medical help was what closed the curtain.
-- continued
Bramwell Ryan
Journalist
Boho by the Horn
Istanbul
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