How a Bolivian Woman Is Reviving a Dying Lake with Plants

(Bloomberg) -- Uru Uru Lake in Bolivia’s mountainous west sustained people for generations with its pristine water and abundant fish and birds. 

Then, starting in the 1990s, mining operations and plastic and trash from the nearby city of Oruro filled Uru Uru with toxic contamination in the time it takes a young woman to reach her 20s. 

What is that young woman to do? 

If it’s Dayana Blanco Quiroga, there’s a simple plan and a lot of work ahead. An Aymara Indigenous woman, she co-founded a movement — the Uru Uru Team — in 2019 to clean up the lake by hand.

The documentary, How to Plant a Lake, packs Blanco and the community’s epic challenge into a brisk arc. The film directed by Satomi Blair and CG Foisy is the winner of the 2026 Bloomberg Green Docs competition, earning its creators a $25,000 grand prize, announced Friday at the DOC NYC film festival. 

Over ten minutes, the documentary takes on a sweeping scale — the nearly drained, toxic 83 square-mile lake 12,000 feet above sea level; the blackened water and fields of garbage; the centuries-old history of the people living nearby, and the Uru Uru Team’s infinite task.

The independent filmmaking duo behind it drew on their eclectic background — visual arts, experimental theater and moral philosophy. 

Blair and Foisy operate 4Hawk Productions, the company they created to find and tell these stories. They traveled to Bolivia last year and met Blanco and her team, in collaboration with The World Around, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable architecture and design. 

The film opens with a 35-second, low-flying drone shot above a vast, spoiled and desolate basin. Overdubbed to these images is the sound of Blanco, short of breath, driving a shovel into earth to dig up dried-up marsh plants for transplanting to polluted areas where the basin still has water. There, they’re mounted atop handmade frames, removing heavy metals and fetid poisons from the water. The plants themselves retain the contamination — and must be cordoned off so animals don’t eat them.

In addition to pollution, the lake has faced other pressures, including drought linked to El Niño and climate change, which almost dried it out a decade ago.

“If tomorrow we have to tell them what happened to the water,” says Blanco Quiroga, referring to future generations, “at least we will be able to say that we fought for our lake.

How to Plant a Lake divides Blanco’s journey into eight steps. They range from digging to organizing, buying hazmat gear, floating root supports and the key to the enterprise — planting abundant totora, the reedy marsh plant that pulls pollutants out of the water as it grows. 

Another vital step: Enlisting allies such as Sebastian Acampante, an Argentinian designer and curator, who is there to provide guidance as a part of a mentorship program.  

“It’s been a long time since I was in front of such a deep, intimidating and profound silence,” he says, trying to comprehend the devastation before him. 

Directors Blair and Foisy, a married couple, have complementary strengths. Foisy’s background in music and sound enabled him to record the calls of the flamingos that remain at Uru Uru Lake and generate music from it through a synthesizer. With her background in theater, Blair makes sure every word and frame serve a film’s remit. 

“Satomi is so driven on story,” Foisy says. “She can find a story in anything.”