My Watermark is Lake Erie.

My earliest memory is of being 7 years old and being at my cottage in Ontario, and being told that I wasn't allowed to swim in the lake because it was too polluted. It was Lake Erie. That changed my relationship of water; I was looking at this immense, expansive water and knowing I couldn't even be in it.

Fast forward 20 years later, I remember being 23 years old on the West Coast of British Columbia. I was hiking with a First Nations friend and he leaned down and drank from the river. I said "no, don't!" and he said "why not?".

I realized I was in a place where it was okay to just drink the water. And that changed my work in the world and what I do, and my relationship with water. I realized that we should have this relationship with water, that we should be able to drink from the rivers, to fish in the streams, that water is life.