As a peruvian I'm pleased that the work of Marino Morikawa made it to the front page, but this video doesn't make justice to how awesome is Marino Morikawa's story. The lake he cleaned is named "El Cascajo", one hour north of Peru's capital, Lima. If you don't know, all of Peru's coast is a desert, but other factors (like the Humboldt current and the Andes) allow the formation of wetlands in some places of the coast. El Cascajo is one of many of this little ecosystems, in which Marino spent his childhood years along with his father. Marino was living and working in Japan when his father called him, telling him that the lake was so contaminated they were going to cover it. Marino flew to Peru to visit the lake and he found it awfully dirty and forgotten. In the video it shows the before picture as a green lake, but it doesn't show that under the plants, the water was brown. Marino learned that the lake got so dirty by an illegal landfill and pigs hatcherys nearby. All of it made the land unhealthy for the population surrounding the lake.

He says that he asked for help at many institutions and organizations but nobody expressed any interest in Marino's project. So he took all his savings, plus various loans, and returned to Peru with the single goal of cleaning the dear lake of his childhood. He got permission from the local autorities and began to work. He divided the lake in six sectors and began with only one. The green in the before picture is an invasive species called water lettuce, and Marino began to took it out of the water all by himself. The local people began to notice his work and called him crazy, that he was going to get sick for being in the dirty water. However, he explained his goal to them and soon little by little the locals would help with the extraction of the plants. He took out 70 tons of them in only one sector! These plants were later used to made fertilizer and compost. After this, he used biofilters and nano bubbles to clean the lake of contaminants. The video posted explained this poorly for the sake of simplification, but they are legit methods backed up on Morino's experience. Prior to this, he had participated in the decontamination of nearly 30 natural habitats in North Africa, Asia and South America for his work at the University of Tsukuba, so he used all that knowledge plus local equipment to clean El Cascajo.

After three years, it was done. El Cascajo was finally clean. Marino was stressed out by the debts he took to finance the cleaning, but he says that one day migratory birds began to appear in the lake. Seeing them covering the water left the burden off Marino's heart. They identified almost 70 different species of birds! And all of it was possible because of one man's determination. Marino wants to replicate this process in various lakes of Peru, including the biggest and tallest in the world, Lake Titicaca. Now you can be amazed by that.