Rain always signaled progress, because along with the rain comes life. Now, however, the rain has come in torrents, together with hail, making us more cautious in planting our Totoras. This pause has been good in allowing us to strengthen other basic pillars of our project such as the local and global community’s involvement with our restoration project. The overarching long-term goal of the project is for the local community to care for Lake Uru Uru, and to showcase to the world our efforts in environmental restoration. We’re looking to establish key alliances around the world and for our solution to be implemented in other communities internationally.
These past months, in addition to continuing with the Totora plantations, we decided to focus on those two main objectives. For that, we started connecting more and more with the local community of Vito, especially, through our community school. Our approach towards the restoration of the lake blends our ancestral indigenous knowledge with scientific decontamination methods such as phytoremediation and bioremediation. We learnt that the only way to keep the community in line with our objective was to involve them directly in our actions. So, we decided to create an educational course, two hours every week, so the children can optionally and voluntarily learn about the work we are doing at the lake and their importance.
The course was given for the most part to fifth and sixth-grade students, mostly girls, who showed great interest in our work. We began by explaining to them the problems that Lake Uru Uru faces, such as bad odours and the plastic bags that end up on their patios. We explained that these are the products of the plastic and mining pollution that this sacred lake endures. We also gave the students a brief explanation of bioremediation: cattails not only survive in extreme weather conditions but also take in heavy metals like zinc, basically treating them like nourishment.
In this class, with the help of the participation of a biology teacher, she managed to explain the complete process involved in making the floating rafts a decontamination tool in a very practical and easy-to-understand way. We had students make microscopic observations of water and cattail samples. This proved to be the key to piquing students’ interest in lake conservation.
We have also received five visitors this year, made up of students and staff from Princeton University, where I am a current Sociology senior undergraduate student. The five amazing visitors had experience ranging from different disciplines such as Ecology to Economics, showed interest in learning more about our work and gained first-hand knowledge of the environmental emergency our region is experiencing. Thanks to the gracious funding of the “Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies,” these visitors successfully participated in some of our restoration activities, community clean-ups, and Totora-planting days. This was followed by an exchange of perceptions about the environment with local students. The culmination of these efforts was a joint talk in which Princeton students and locals discussed how to explain this problem more effectively and, more importantly, amplify awareness of it within the global context.
The meeting with the Princeton students has enriched the experience of the local community, but at the same time, it allowed the visitors to deeply understand some of the problems we are facing. Some of them decided to include this experience in their independent works by tackling themes such as environmental justice, the impact of climate change on indigenous communities, and nature-based solutions. Moreover, they promised to find a way to organize more initiatives which create visibility about this environmental crisis at the international level, creating support networks to involve more people in solving this problem.
This kind of collaboration is evidence that our work does not have only local repercussions, but it can also inspire others in other parts of the world. The possibility for Princeton students to include the case of Lake Uru Uru in their research and projects is a very important step in bringing this environmental emergency to the attention of the whole world. On the other hand, their willingness to get involved in solution design proves that this is not merely a community problem but requires an international collective effort.
With these initiatives, we seek to keep strengthening our mission of Lake Uru Uru restoration, joining the power of indigenous wisdom with scientific innovation. Besides engaging local and international youth in this process, we are training a new generation of leaders committed to the environment.
We are convinced that together, the active participation of local communities and global institutions can head toward a more sustainable future for our glacial lake and the entire Pachamama, Mother Earth.
Blog written by Gustavo A. Blanco Quiroga
