Our Story
My wife has a favorite morning mug. It’s terracotta colored, has a little green logo involving a leaf, and the words “do something” under the logo. It’s a basic mug, the way our morning routines work means I’ve seen this mug a lot and over the years it grew into something more than an empty gesture.
At first I thought “uh, cute mug. Maybe she’ll let me use it”. But at the same time, it really got me thinking about how humans are messing up our planet and how it’s affected me personally.
One year, I visited the Grand Canyon and learned that the Colorado River doesn’t reach the ocean any more because it’s being completely diverted for agriculture. Some produce watered by that river is sold in Toronto grocery stores. Then last year, Toronto was smothered in forest fire smoke for the first time, ever. It’s become normal now for whole towns and even small cities in western Canada, where I was raised, to be burnt down by forest fire.
As I write this, my family and I are preparing to vacation at a cottage. We spent a lot of time researching our options this year because previous cottage shorelines had unexpected algae blooms ruin any hope of swimming or fishing. I used to fish in nearby Toronto lakes, but the last time I visited, there was just green water with a few dead fish floating in clumps of algae.
“Do something”. I kept seeing the mug every morning and as climate change affected me personally more and more, this mass produced, tiny mug somehow became louder and harder to ignore.
Like everyone else, I thought “But what can I do? I am but one human of billions”. I kept telling myself that every time I saw the mug. But it rang more and more hollow each morning. It was also something I tried to shrug off, I came up with several perfectly reasonable excuses to not do something, such as: “it’s so and so’s fault”, or “so and so needs to come up with a plan”, my go-to, “I don’t even like people”, the low hanging fruit “it’s too late anyways”, and the always safe “I’m just one person”, etc etc.
As it happens, I love walking my dog through the ravines in the city. They are amazing veins of nature that stretch across town, always lush and green in the summers and the perfect way to take a break from my life. But nothing lives in the waters that carve out Toronto’s ravines.
The creek at the bottom of the ravine nearest me has a few drainage pipes and sewer outputs in the three kilometers of its shoreline that I typically walk. Oftentimes I notice discoloration in the water and saw that usually came out of one of the drainage pipes. It was gross, sometimes the whole creek sudded up, like someone dumped a barrel of soap. The creek had different smells that accompanied the different water color. Sometimes the water was green, sometimes a dark gray, sometimes a creamy white, sometimes a more sinister dark red. Regardless of the color though, nothing lives in the water.
But sending a photo of the water to a city worker and expecting anything to be done isn’t realistic. Especially if the polluting happens intermittently. What’s more, municipalities and governments around the world don’t have a budget to combat water pollution in a significant way.
Coming up with a log of specific location, time of day, water color / temperature / other details, weather conditions, are what are needed to really build a compelling case. Having year round water quality data allows us to compare the same waterway year over year.
Imagine how powerful that information would be in trying to pinpoint where and when pollution is entering our water. I thought about how people could organize to put low cost water monitoring devices in our waterways to find exactly where bad water is entering our water.
Suddenly, I had something. It wasn’t going to save the world, but it was something. What’s more, it’s something I felt I could actually do; having an extensive background in being a nerd, working with teams of nerds, and deriving value from data.
I set out and began to build the system as I envisioned it. It will surprise no one to find out that I found obstacles at every step of the way. But I also found others that share my concerns, passions, and values and together we’re making a low-cost water monitoring system smart enough to find patterns in the water data and locate the source of problem water.
Our goal is to monitor every shoreline on the planet. It is a big ask and we’re only getting started. We need a lot of help in a lot of fields of expertise to see this through. If you’re looking to be part of a group of nature loving nerds and be active in bringing about change, we’d love your help.
Jason Spitkoski
Managing Director