Conscious Choice: The Future of the Great Lakes

September 2007

The Future of the Great Lakes

By Gary Wisby

They want our water. Fast-growing, thirsty communities in the West, Southwest and farflung locales like China would love to get their straws into the Great Lakes.

The lakes hold one-fifth of the world’s — and 90 percent of America’s — fresh water. And as this resource becomes increasingly precious, pressure builds on its “owners,” eight states and two Canadian provinces, to share it.

To repel the threat, the region’s governors have approved a Great Lakes Basin Water Resources Compact. Also needed — and harder to get — is an OK from eight state legislatures and Congress. (Ontario and Quebec helped develop the compact and are sure to sign on.)

Lawmakers in Illinois and Minnesota have given the go-ahead, leaving six states to go. “Having 25 percent down is kinda nice,” said Cameron Davis, president and CEO of the Great Lakes Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Besides protecting access to Great Lakes water, the compact is needed because “there are no uniform, binding rules on water use,” Davis said. “That makes no sense.”

To justify keeping Great Lakes water in the region, the compact emphasizes conservation measures.

“Otherwise it would look hyprocritical on a regional, continental and global scale,” said Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars. “We can’t say ‘hands off,’ then turn around and use water irresponsibly.”

Although the Water Resources Development Act bans diversions from the region, most lawyers and state attorneys general think the federal law might not withstand a challenge.

Without the compact, Annin said, “the belief is that we’re one lawsuit away from a run on the Great Lakes.”

There already is what he calls a “grotesque precedent” for sending mass quantities of water out of the lakes’ basin. Thanks to the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900 — flushing a waterway that had become an open sewer — Illinois removes 2.1 billion gallons a day from Lake Michigan, enough to fill the Sears Tower five times.

An audacious proposal to re-reverse the river’s direction is part of a plan called “Growing Water.” It won first prize in the History Channel’s “City of the Future” competition for UrbanLab, a Chicago architecture firm.

“Instead of sending all the water to the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico, we would clean it and return it to the lake,” said Sarah Dunn, a partner in the firm.

It’s conceivable that correcting the river that runs backwards could be one of the measures taken to disconnect the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins.

Disconnection is necessary to close the revolving door that invites invasive species into both systems. One of the worst is the Asian carp, which threatens a $4.5 billion fishery if it reaches the Great Lakes via the river and Lake Michigan.

Reversing the river “is not impossible,” said Joel Brammeier, policy chief for the Great Lakes Alliance, who thinks “restoration” is a better term. “It should be on the table.”

Gary Wisby covered environmental issues for the Chicago Sun-Times for six years.

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