If you live in Ontario, you love the Great Lakes. We rely on them for work and play — for drinking water, for keeping plants and animals alive, for transportation, for recreation, for beauty. 

They’re important in the province, but also the region, the country and even the world: collectively, the five lakes and the St. Lawrence River make up the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem, containing 21 per cent of all available surface freshwater on the planet. They also support the world’s third-largest regional economy.

Which is why The Narwhal’s Ontario bureau is thrilled to become the fifth member of the Great Lakes News Collaborative, a group of news outlets working together to enhance coverage of the Great Lakes basin. Funded by the Michigan-based Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the collaborative was established in 2020 and has collectively already achieved a 47-per-cent increase in the number of Great Lakes and water-related stories published by the outlets. 

Although the first four members — Bridge Michigan, Michigan Public, Detroit Public Television’s Great Lakes Now program and Circle of Blue — are all based in the United States, they understand environmental issues affect people and nature on both sides of the border. We’re all paying attention to the Line 5 pipeline between lakes Michigan and Huron, high levels of phosphorus in Lake Erie and how to protect the lakes from wastewater. Our Ontario bureau already worked with Great Lakes Now, back in 2022, for a story on how ice loss on Lake Superior is affecting Anishinaabe fishing economies and practices.

Like The Narwhal, the members of the collaborative are small non-profit outlets doing big, important work. In 2022, they won the U.S. Water Prize for a series of news articles called Water’s True Cost, on the origins of the water infrastructure crisis in Michigan.
 

Being part of the collaborative will enable The Narwhal’s Ontario bureau to increase its coverage across the sprawling north shores of the Great Lakes, which encompasses about 1,900 kilometres along lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario. While Ontario will remain at the centre of our work, we’re over-the-moon to collaborate with a bunch of smart journalists stateside who care about the lakes as much as we do. We’re also amped to do more stories about cross-border conservation efforts, like scientists driving delicate piping plover eggs from an Ontario beach to a Michigan incubator. 

As Kelly House, an environment reporter for Bridge Michigan, points out, protecting the environment often requires action by multiple U.S. states and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. “When it comes to our shared Great Lakes water, issues affecting one part of our region affect us all,” House said. “We’re excited to partner with The Narwhal to give readers a fuller perspective on our region’s most prized natural resources.” 

Nature knows no borders and now, neither does our Great Lakes coverage.

Take care and make a splash,

Denise Balkissoon
Ontario bureau chief

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