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Great Lakes Water Compact could have far reaching consequences for Midwest
Passes Senate awaiting Assembly approval
By Carlo Albano
“The last 120 years of Midwest and Canadian history finds human activity poking, prodding, and diverting water from the basin and watershed to be transported to places as far away as Asia,” said Annin.
Representatives of Midwest market and commerce organizations, social justice and environmental non-profits, members the Canadian government, and interested others met March 5 at The Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin to discuss the pending Great Lakes Water Compact.
Environmental journalist and author of “The Great Lakes Water Wars,” Peter Annin, outlined the primary necessity of a “modern and compact-binding world class system to protect this vital resource (the Great Lakes).” The thesis of his presentation focused on the role this body of water has played and will increasingly play in North America and the rest of world.
While the Great Lakes Water Compact is pending Assembly approval following its victory in the State Senate on Thursday, Annin considers Milwaukee at the “frontline of the Great Lakes Water War.” The boundary of the watershed that protects the basin and ground water surrounding the Great Lakes and nourishes life around it is dangerously close to the city and its shore. This is contrasted by a state such as Michigan, of which 99 percent of the state is part of the Great Lakes watershed.
The water tension of the Great Lakes is highest at the southernmost point of the body of water. It has brought Milwaukee, as a part of the watershed, into conflict with Chicago, which is dependant on the water supply but directly outside of the watershed (see picture below). Chicago is presently dependant on 2.1 billion gallons of Great Lakes’ water a day.
“The primary objective of the Great Lakes Water Compact is the balance of sound, environmental sustainability for the life-sustaining resource, and sound marketing and commerce through the venue of the present global economic competition,” Annin said. “Due to the diversity of needs in the surrounding states and provinces, such an international contract as the GLWC has not been easily agreed upon.”
Several other charters, annexes, and previous versions of water compacts have been neglected, distorted, or violated by one or a few of state local governments in the past.
“The last 120 years of Midwest and Canadian history finds human activity poking, prodding and diverting water from the basin and watershed to be transported to places as far away as Asia,” said Annin.
Since 1925, there have been eight Great Lakes water diversions that have taken the resource outside of the watershed, and 8 intrastate diversions that have transported water elsewhere within the watershed boundary.
Although the Great Lakes nourish over 40 million people at present, counties such as New Berlin and Waukesha that straddle the watershed boundary, continue to go without Great lakes water, despite their public plea for a maintainable diversion.
“If the Great Lakes Water Compact were already in action, these areas around the watershed would already be entitled to a share of Great Lakes water.” said Annin. “Within the present non-system compact, all areas must be in consensus before such an export is possible.”
The GLWC would require New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, to come to several consensuses within the limits and rules of water removal and use of the Great Lakes resource. Although these states and provinces would be better able to control the water dispersal of their own areas, any water going outside of the watershed boundary must undergo the permission of all contending areas to sign off on the deal.
During the panel session composed of Annin, Matt Moroney of the Metropolitan Builders’ Association of Greater Milwaukee, and Tom Ambs of the Wisconsin DNR, several concerns were cited by the audience.
“I understand that the Great Lakes Water Compact will impose limits and needed consensus.” said an attendant. “But the smaller diversions of water could bleed the Great Lakes with 1,000 thin straws,” rather than the few but vastly larger water exports that have occurred in the past.
Others find that the GLWC consensuses reached and maintained are not feasible due to the many political violations of past agreements that have continuously surrounded the Great Lakes as a resource.
Despite such concerns, the panel recognized that the Great Lakes region needs a modern, world-class water regulatory system that is internationally binding. Out of the one percent of fresh water on the planet, the Great Lakes produce 18 percent of that total. The potential burden of a hypothesized international water crisis by 2025 will only lay heavier on the shoulders of the Midwest and the frontline of the intensifying water war to the south of the Great Lakes, the panel stressed.
However, out of such responsibility comes opportunity.
The panel advocated that with the GLWC on the line, the Midwest lead the way in order avoid being permanently in the transition of past industrial economy and present global economy.
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