| SAVING THE SEINE Naturalists Rescue a Troubled Little River By Judy Waytiuk (Originally published Summer 1995, Nature Canada Magazine) Fair dealing sample of this article On a fall night in 1990, about three hundred people jammed a meeting room in a suburban south Winnipeg hotel. They had been called together by civic politicians seeking re-election, and one of the issues flowed past many of their back yards. It was a small river, in a delicate and vulnerable state. When the meeting ended, a small group stayed to talk. Over the drought summer, they had watched the Seine River. They saw tragically low water levels. The river stank because of that, and the garbage in it, in some spots piling up like a dam of junk. That was the beginning of Save Our Seine. The group, says its current chair and one of the founding members, Jean Dunmire, was activist from the beginning. They got a grant from the province to hire a student to find out why the river was in such poor shape. "As he studied it, we began to find out there were a number of contributing factors..." Judy Waytiuk has kindly made this historic article available for viewing in its entirety on her website at http://www.mts.net/~wordsink/seine.htm Thanks, Judy! |