For an Indigenous nation in northeastern Ontario, conservation means counting moose poop, growing traditional food and ‘being more in tune with our lands here, in addition to also doing some really good science’
On a sunny day in early October, three members of Nipissing First Nation paddled their way through stalks of manoomin, or wild rice, growing seven feet above the Veuve River off Lake Nipissing in northeastern Ontario. The group has been encouraging the aquatic native grass to spread as a way to tackle invasive plants and repopulate the land with a traditional source of food for birds, small mammals and humans.
Industry, poor land management and colonialism have wreaked environmental havoc on the Nipissing region. Waterways are contaminated with chemicals and being choked by algae, invasive plants are increasing fire risk while decreasing biodiversity and highway traffic is killing an unusually high number of moose. Curtis Avery, environment manager for Nipissing First Nation, believes his community can help nurse the land back to health by combining novel equipment and techniques with traditional understandings of stewardship.
For the last two years, Avery has been the nation’s first full-time environment manager, doing everything from fieldwork to preparing grant applications. Blackboards in his office are covered in maps and data detailing both the problems his region faces and the ways his small team is trying to remediate them.
“It’s all connected, right?” Avery said. “The fish in the stream to the moose on the banks — that whole system is in itself an environment and capturing that now allows us to understand what we need to do to protect it and make it more resilient in the face of more development, climate change, extreme weather events and forest management … we need the data in order for it to make sense.”
In June, Avery was finally able to hire an environmental technician, Sophie Tore, to help collect that data and then implement practical solutions. One project they’re now working on is an attempt to reduce the overgrowth of dangerous blue-green algae blooms, or cyanobacteria, in local waterways. Their hope is to gather enough information to be able to predict when and where the blooms will pop up next.
While blooms can occur naturally in late summer and early fall, overgrowth is becoming more common in Ontario’s lakes due to an excess of nutrients from agricultural and stormwater runoff, as well as leaching from septic systems. Blue-green algae overgrowth consumes oxygen in the water and blocks sunlight from underwater plants, making it impossible for aquatic life to survive. They can also be harmful to people and animals, releasing toxins that contaminate drinking water and cause illness.
But Avery would like to reduce blooms without adding clay or other substances to the water — although such methods have been used since the 1970’s, they can be quite inefficient, requiring “exorbitant amounts” to effectively clean the water. The nation received funding for a pilot project using Ottawa-based cleantech company E M Fluid’s EMF 1000, a machine about the size of a bedside table. Avery said the solar-panelled machine is “like a scientific research buoy,” which attempts to cut down on algae by aerating water to increase its oxygen content.
“It’s just allowing the system to do what it already does if it was receiving healthy amounts of oxygen,” Avery said, adding that nitrogen and phosphorus readings have gone down in some parts of the lake since the pilot began. Community members have noticed improvements, especially at Jocko Point in the nation’s east end, where no algal blooms have been reported in two years.
read more: https://thenarwhal.ca/nipissing-first-nation-wild-rice/