A History of Conflict and Cooperation over Freshwater Resources
The Great Lakes Water Wars By Peter Annin Island Press, 2018, 343 pages Reviewed by David M. Freedman
The five Great Lakes of North America hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water. More than 40 million Americans and Canadians live in the Great Lakes Basin (GLB) and depend on its water-based resources. There has been economic pressure on the eight Great Lakes states and two provinces to share this resource with other regions, and that pressure grows as freshwater elsewhere becomes scarcer and dirtier.
I live in the GLB, so it was with excitement and dread that I read The Great Lakes Water Wars. It is not about military wars, but the legal and political struggles around protecting the Great Lakes freshwater resources by regulating in-basin use and out-of-basin diversion.
Peter Annin is director of the Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, and a former Newsweek reporter. In Great Lakes Water Wars, he describes several failed schemes to divert Great Lakes water for huge profits, including:
The Ogallala Aquifer diversion, proposed in 1982,which would have required that water move uphill from Lake Superior to Yankton, South Dakota.
An attempt by a Canadian entrepreneur in 1998 to ship freighters full of Lake Superior water to Asia.
Not good ideas. Water usage in the GLB was already “nearing the sustainable yield” in 2007, according to a review of Annin’s book in the Natural Resources Journal of the University of New Mexico School of Law in that year. We don’t want the Great Lakes to end up like Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area and 75 percent of its volume since 1960, due to diversion and climate change.
So In 2008, the U.S. Congress approved the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact after it was ratified by the eight Great Lakes states. The Compact governs how the states must protect the resources and prevent unwarranted diversions.
For example, Waukesha, Wisconsin, lies just outside the basin but within a county that straddles the basin, so according to the Compact the city had to get approval from all eight state governors to divert water from Lake Michigan – and then after using the water it must treat it and return it to the lake. Waukesha applied for a diversion in 2013, and it was approved by the Compact Council in 2016.
A Lesson in Diplomacy
Whereas Cadillac Desert, a 1986 book by Marc Reisner that chronicles the dam-building orgy of the 1900s in the American west, might be a cautionary tale of wanton exploitation, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a lesson in far-sighted diplomacy.
I wonder if the Great Lakes Compact will survive when drought- and flood-stricken areas of the country start demanding access to “our” water resources. Will the federal government dictate a more “equitable” water distribution scheme? Or will the GLB states gain enough power, partly as a result of migration away from the stricken areas into the fertile GLB over the next few decades, to resist central authority over the resources?
Annin deals with some of these questions in his final chapter, “Who Will Win the War?” I will quote from the University of Denver Water Law Review (November 10, 2019):
"[Annin] examines how the compact drafters likely did not consider industrial water use as a potential issue, and how corporations may have found a loophole in the straddling community exception under the compact’s language. Annin concludes by discussing the uncertainties surrounding this issue, and how the compact will hold up to future issues in the Great Lakes water basin."
About the reviewer Dave Freedman has worked as a financial and legal journalist since 1978. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
© 2020 David M. Freedman Illustration: Wikimedia Commons, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers