Three years ago when truck loads of foul-smelling material were dumped in a bog near her home, Belinda Manning was a stay at home mother and wife. It was when she started her research to find out more about what was going on at the bog that she became an environmental activist as well. This transformation may not have occurred if she had received straight answers to her questions from her municipal government in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia or from the provincial Department of the Environment. Instead she got a bureaucratic run-around that set her off to lead a community group of concerned residents and three years of intensive research. At the end of all this she emerged as an award winning environmentalist, a resource for university students studying environmental science and an influence in the way some government agencies react to concerns from ordinary people.

This show is the story of that struggle. It’s also the story of how a government department can react when it doesn’t trust the source of the complaint and that in the end can end up not protecting exactly what it was suppose to protect.

Baltzer’s Bog is a wet lands in Annapolis Valley. After Belinda and her neighbours raised their concerns, Dr. MartinWillison of the Departments of Biology and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax took a closer look at the bog.

Deep beneath the peat he and his students found a layer of ancient tree stumps, some nearly a meter in diameter. For scientists, this bog holds secrets that date back thousands of years. These ancient trees are sort of an archive of ten thousand years of information about what the weather and environment was like back then. Belinda and her friends had no idea of the environmental treasure they were trying to protect but it helped tremendously in their struggle.

The outcome of this struggle is still not settled, but Belinda would not trade the three years of hard work, frustration and satisfaction in unearthing the facts not only for the potential of saving the bog but also for the impact it had on herself.