The Manager of Consumer Marketing and Community Relations Programs with Manitoba Pork is confident a new exhibit at the Manitoba Museum will help get the general public more involved in addressing the environmental problems being faced by Lake Winnipeg.
In March the Manitoba Museum, Winnipeg’s largest museum, opened its new “Lake Winnipeg Shared Solutions Exhibit.”
Susan Riese, the Manager of Consumer Marketing and Community Relations Programs with Manitoba Pork, one of the partners in the development of the exhibit, says the goal was to build awareness of the issues faced by Lake Winnipeg with regards to algal blooms and how the public can be involved in helping save the lake.
The centre piece of the exhibit is a computer simulator.
Basically it’s a simulation of the Lake Winnipeg water shed so it’s very interactive, it’s all computerised and it allows you to explore the different options that one can make in terms of solving some of the problems.
Then you get to see if you have had the desired effect, which is of course to reduce the algal blooms that cover the lake and then if those choices came at a price, was it a good choice, was it a balanced choice in terms of keeping the public happy and at the same time making sure it doesn’t break the bank.
Sometimes people think this is an easy fix, let’s just do this but meanwhile it’s going to cost billions of dollars that the province wouldn’t be able to afford so there’s pros and cons to all of the different options and creating an awareness, making people aware of what their role is in terms of things that they can do at home or at the cottage or what ever to help minimise the algal blooms in the lake.
Riese notes about 100 thousand people visit the Manitoba Museum annually, half of which would probably be school kids that are at the age where they’re starting to do critical thinking and decision making about their own actions and this display will help provide the information they need to make informed decisions.
