My Watermark is Speed River, Ontario.

I was born in 1971 in Guelph, Ontario which was another time of widespread social transition and my parents being activists, there was always a lot of "animated" conversations about complex issues at my house that were sometimes overwhelming for me as a young child.

It was also a time when it was considered socially acceptable and "safe" to let children play unsupervised in nature and so many of my formative experiences involved climbing trees to get a bird's eye view of my surroundings and wading knee-deep in the stretch of the Speed River about a block and a half from my home, looking for crayfish, catching minnows and experimenting with stream flow dynamics.

Now, my mother, father and brother have all died at very young ages of various cancers and I am a United Nations-recognized expert in environment and health working on policy and law issues for my local First Nations community.