- Welcome everybody to the 2015 MEEC.
My name is Rebecca Clark.
I'm also on the WAE Board.
So, we were really lucky to get our first speaker,
Peter Annin, who's done some amazing work.
If you haven't read his book,
"The Great Lakes Water Wars," it's really tremendous.
And for those of you that are here from the general public,
I'll give you a little more background about Peter
'cause it's kind of impressive.
I'm a little humble here.
A veteran conflict and environmental journalist,
Peter Annin spent more than a decade
reporting on a wide variety of issues for Newsweek.
He specialized in covering domestic terrorism
and the radical right, including the bombing
of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City
and the Branch Davidian stand-off outside Waco, Texas.
He spent many years writing about the environment,
including droughts in the Southwest,
hurricanes in the Southeast, wind power on the Great Plains,
forest fires in the Mountain West,
recovery efforts on the Great Lakes,
and the causes and consequences
of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
And I had a chance to read Peter's book.
And what I thought was really interesting
when we were communicating,
he wanted to make sure that I understood
that he was a journalist and not a scientist.
He's not an expert on climate change or whatever,
but in reading his book, I don't know what they teach you
in journalism school, but it really came off to me
like the scientific method, you know.
He really gives you a hypothesis.
He goes to all different sides.
He traveled the world looking into this issue.
So, I think you're really gonna get a lot out of it.
So, please welcome Peter Annin.
(applause)
- Thank you, Rebecca.
Hello everyone.
Good morning, it's a pleasure to be here.
I always start my talks with a audience poll
to check the Great Lakes-ness of my audiences.
(audience laughs)
Clayton, my fellow Northland colleague
has been through this a few times.
But, if everyone will just indulge me,
stand up if you have visited
at least one North American Great Lake.
Very good.
Remain standing if you've visited two.
Three?
Four?
And all five.
All right, very good.
We're not done.
Stand if you have immersed yourself
in at least one North American Great Lake,
(audience laughs)
accidental or intentional, it doesn't matter.
(audience laughs)
Two, immerse yourself in two?
Three?
Four? (audience laughs lightly)
And all five.
These are the diehards!
(applause)
What I love about that poll,
it shows the magnitude of the basin.
And it also shows that Lake Ontario
is a long way from Wisconsin, too.
(audience laughs)
So, the thesis of my talk today
is that the Great Lakes region, the North American continent
and the entire world are all entering
a period of increased water tension.
Those tensions are primarily driven by water scarcity,
and they're going to put increased pressure
on water-rich regions of the world
like the North American Great Lakes.
So, consequently, there's been a collective agreement
among the water intelligensia, if you will,
on the Great Lakes region.
That the region needs a modern, binding,
world-class water management system
to protect this globally significant resource
as we enter a period
of increasing international water insecurity,
and that is the Great Lakes Compact,
which we're gonna hear more about today.
But, first let's quickly review the global water picture,
which is grim and predicted to get grimmer.
There's a lot of water on the grade school globe,
but only 1% of that water is accessible,
drinkable, fresh water, just 1%.
800 million people around the world
lack access to clean drinking water today.
Two million people, mostly children,
die annually from unhealthy water conditions.
And according to United Nations,
two-thirds of the global population,
two-thirds of the global population will be suffering
at least intermittent water shortages by the year 2025,
just ten years down the road.
In my opinion, the most egregious example
of water mismanagement on the face of the Earth
has occurred in the Aral Sea watershed in Central Asia,
not a very well-known part of the world
here in the United States.
But you can see, we're just north
of Iran and Afghanistan there,
sandwiched between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest
inland water body in the world.
But starting in 1960, the Soviet Union
embarked on a massive, collective, kind of classic
communist agricultural irrigation program
to make the desert bloom in Central Asia.
By tapping into the freshwater rivers that fed the Aral Sea,
the Aral Sea being a naturally brackish,
or semi-salty, system.
So they tapped into the large rivers that fed the Aral Sea
and then sent that fresh water
through a far-flung collection of irrigation canals
and pipelines, again, to make the desert bloom.
And the desert did bloom,
but at great cost to the Aral Sea's ecosystem.
This is a photo I took of the bottom of the Aral Sea today,
when I visited the Aral Sea a few years ago
with a delegation, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1960, there was a teeming fishery here,
ferry boats taking people to Kazakhstan,
back to Uzbekistan, fishing trawlers passing overhead,
40-50 feet depth of water.
Now, today, all directions of the compass,
as far as the eye can see, no water.
As a Great Lakes guy, it was a very chilling place to visit.
So the farmer's gain was the fisherman's loss.
This is a photo of the famous ship graveyard,
it's called, in Muynak, Uzbekistan.
Once one of the largest fishing ports
in the former Soviet Union, it now takes five hours
driving in an SUV to get from Muynak,
the old water's edge of the Aral Sea,
to the new water's edge.
Five hours of bumping along
on the bottom of a former great lake.
And so the Aral Sea has lost more than 90%
of its volume and 75% of its surface area since 1960.
And there's been a bit of a controversy
about the fact that I include an Aral Sea chapter in my book
about the Great Lakes water diversion controversy,
'cause people who haven't read my book
assume that I'm arguing that this is what's going to happen
in the Great Lakes region.
And that's not why I included a chapter
on the Aral Sea in my book.
But, what I found that as a journalist
traveling around the Great Lakes region,
speaking with water managers, scientists,
environmental advocates and others, almost to a person,
every expert I interviewed referred to this Aral Sea
as this touchstone in the Great Lakes
water diversion debate.
And yet, to a person, none of them had been to the Aral Sea.
And so as a journalist writing about this issue,
I decided it would be a good public service
to go to the Aral Sea, in one short chapter
write what happened there, and let the citizens
of the region decide for themselves
what the relevance is between the Aral Sea situation
and the water politics situation in the Great Lakes region.
However, I did bring back one key,
personal take-home message, which is,
having been to the Aral Sea
and seen what has happened there roughly in my lifetime,
I don't believe one can credibly stand on the shore
of a North American Great Lake today
and argue that these lakes are so vast
and so massive that they're invincible.
In fact, what the Aral Sea situation shows
is that despite the magnitude,
these large water bodies are indeed vulnerable to over-use.
Okay, that's a quick look at the global water picture.
Now, we're zeroing in on the North American continent,
specifically with this slide,
the lower western 48 U.S. states.
This is a map published by our own federal government,
the U.S. Department of Interior,
predicting potential water supply crisis areas
by the year 2025, that same year
that the United Nations zeroed in on.
It's a little washed-out,
don't worry about the state boundaries,
what matters here is the color.
The color-coding is a classic color-coding scheme
where the conflict potential over water,
according to the federal government,
is moderate in the areas that are yellow,
substantial in the areas that are orange,
and then highly likely in the red areas.
The only state on this map
that doesn't have color-coding on it
is the state of South Dakota.
Every other state, literally every other state
in the lower western 48,
according to our own federal government,
has at least a moderate potential
for water supply conflict in ten years.
And as you can see, the map is also awash
with orange and red coloring, as well.
So let's hit some of the specific hot spots,
not only in the lower western 48,
but the whole lower 48 here.
Starting with the Klamath River watershed
in southern Oregon/northern California was the scene
of a very tense Endangered Species Act water
conflict that almost became violent
and required federal intervention about 15 years ago.
Central Valley of California is sort of going through
a biblical drought today,
which we've heard about for a long time.
And despite the increased rains they're getting
with the El Nino year that we're having here,
they're a long way from getting back to normal.
The Colorado River watershed,
probably the most famously over-subscribed watershed
in the country.
The compact that carved up the supplies of water
in the Colorado River watershed in the 1920s
happened to be drafted at what's turned out to be
a time of excess precipitation in that watershed.
So, the states have a claim to more water
than flows through the watershed on an annual basis today,
which is why the river regularly does not flow to the sea.
The Rio Grande River between the United States and Mexico.
The treaty over water in that watershed is a source
of continuing tension between those two countries.
Apalachicola-Flint River Basin in the Southeast.
Georgia, Florida, Alabama have been suing each other
in court for more than 15 years
and can't come to an out-of-court settlement.
The Potomac River in the Washington, D.C., area
was the scene of a major Supreme Court case
over water issues in the last decade.
And then the Ipswich River outside of Boston
regularly runs dry during the summer lawn-watering season.
And so if you look at those circles,
those circles create an arc of water tension
on the south side of the Great Lakes Basin.
And it's that arc of water tension
that tends to drive the Great Lakes water diversion debate,
sometimes accurately and sometimes inaccurately.
And we'll talk about that more later.
The other thing that drives
the Great Lakes water diversion debate
are these two massive engineering schemes
from the 1960s that argued
for literally re-plumbing the North American continent.
On the left, we have the North American Water
and Power Alliance plan, which is an American plan.
On the right we have the Grand Canal
proposed distribution system which is a Canadian plan.
Roughly around the same era,
both sides of the international border here
on the North American continent.
On the NAWAPA plan, they're very similar
and yet very different.
So the NAWAPA plan, the idea was to dam up
a bunch of Arctic rivers in Alaska, Yukon,
Northwest Territories and send that water
down into something that they called
the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia,
a 500-mile artificial reservoir, and then sending that water
throughout the lower part of the continent.
They actually were going to kick water
to the Great Lakes at that time
because the Great Lakes were going through low water levels.
So, to increase the geographic support for NAWAPA,
they thought they'd kick a little bit
of water to the Great Lakes region.
But the ultimate goal was to send this water
down to the American Southwest
which is where the Ralph M. Parsons Company
that developed this plan is based.
And then the other plan,
the Grand Canal proposed distribution system,
if you look up in Hudson Bay up in northern Canada there,
there's a little red line in crossing James Bay
in the southeast corner of Hudson Bay.
And the idea behind the Grand Canal system
is you put a big dam where that red line is.
And then over a time, the large Arctic rivers
feeding James Bay would turn that
from a saltwater system into a freshwater system.
And then you send that water
down into the northern Lake Huron.
I guess reverse the flow of the St. Mary's River.
So you'd send that water
not from the Lake Superior into Lake Huron,
but from Lake Huron into Lake Superior.
Then you'd send the water outside the western end
of Lake Superior to the Canadian prairies
and then down into the American Southwest
and ultimately northern Mexico.
Huge engineering marvels, these plans,
which happened to occur at a time
of rising environmental consciousness
in North American, also fiscal consciousness.
These are hugely expensive projects.
They had influential supporters,
both the United States and Canada at the time.
But ultimately, they fell under their own financial weight,
their gargantuan-ness and also the controversy
that occurred from the, you know,
the environmental opposition to this.
Nevertheless, these plans are out there.
You can still find fans of them on the internet.
And the concern is that,
under a period of crisis or whatever, these sorts of things,
or parts of these things, might be dusted off.
And that we would have a problem at least
in all over the continent, really,
from an environmental standpoint
when you think about how that would be re-engineering
so many important watersheds in North America.
Okay, we had a quick global look,
and we had a quick continental look.
Now, zeroing in to my favorite part.
We're zeroing on the Great Lakes Basin itself.
Focus if you will on this black line
which circles the five Great Lakes.
This is the Great Lakes watershed, the Great Lakes Basin.
Think of it like a soup bowl rim around the Great Lakes.
And rainfall, snowfall and groundwater recharge
that falls within that soup bowl rim
is the secret to water sustainability
within the Great Lakes Basin.
To the north goes the Hudson Bay.
To the west, of course, to the Mississippi.
And to the East to the Atlantic Ocean, which is,
of course, ultimately where all Great Lakes water goes
except for a few diversions, which we'll talk about.
Note if you will how far the basin line is
from the lakes' shoreline in some areas of the watershed,
and how truly remarkably close the basin line
is to the shoreline in other areas of the watershed.
It's these areas where the basin line
is closest to the shoreline where water tensions
in the Great Lakes region are highest.
And we'll talk about some hot spots.
But first, let's talk about
some really cool Great Lakes stats.
Nearly one-fifth of all the freshwater
on the surface of the Earth is in the Great Lakes Basin.
One-fifth of all the fresh surface water on the planet
in the Great Lakes Basin, a remarkable statistic.
That's enough water to cover
the lower 48 states in nearly 10 feet.
But the key statistic today is that only 1% of the water
in the Great Lakes Basin is renewed annually
through rainfall, snowfall and groundwater recharge.
Just 1%.
So, think of the lakes as a gift
from the glaciers 10,000 years ago
depositing this water bank account
in the Great Lakes region.
And then you have this 1% of water interest
that flows through that bank account on an annual basis.
And then, of course, the secret is that
we're not consuming more than that 1%
on an annual basis where then we'd have to dive
into the principal of our water bank account.
And scientists tell me we're not even close
to consuming that water, that 1% of water,
renewal in the Great Lakes Basin,
but that we could do a better job
of accounting for that water
at this crucial time in water history.
Where I argue the last century was a century of oil,
oil being arguably the most important
natural resource of the last hundred years.
I believe that by the end of this hundred years,
water will usurp oil as the most important natural resource.
You have 20% of it here, fresh surface water on the planet.
We need to have a real good gauge
on where we are on consumption
on both sides of the international border.
And we're not quite there yet.
So, it'd be good to see us
working a little bit harder on that.
And then this is really kind of fascinating too.
The regional economy in the Great Lakes region
is the world's fourth-largest, $4.7 trillion,
according to the Bank of Montreal.
That's not just within the soup bowl rim,
but it's all eight Great Lakes states
and the two Canadian Great Lakes provinces
on the other side of the border.
So, this is that same Great Lakes Basin map
with black arrows on it.
And these black arrows represent
all the human poking and prodding
that has occurred in the Great Lakes Basin
over the last 200 years or so.
According to the International Joint Commission,
which is an international entity
formed by the governments
of Canada and the United States
to resolve transboundary water disputes
all along the U.S.-Canada boundary.
According to the IJC,
there have been eight inter-basin diversions
in the Great Lakes region, so those diversions
that pierced the soup bowl rim,
pierced the watershed line,
either taking water out or putting water in.
And there have been some massive diversions
into the Great Lakes.
And also according to the IJC,
there have been six intra-basin diversions.
Those are diversions that artificially transport water
from one Great Lake to another
within the watershed line, such as the Welland Canal,
which bypasses Niagara Falls,
so salt water shipping vessels can access the upper lakes.
The biggest, baddest, most controversial
Great Lakes diversion of them all is in downtown Chicago,
the Illinois Diversion at Chicago from 1900.
Why is this here?
So, you go back to the late 1800s,
the Chicago Fire torches much of the downtown area.
The city embarks on this massive effort to rebuild itself.
It becomes this booming metropolis
of about a million people out on the prairie.
And it's growing so fast that the city's infrastructure
can't keep up with the growth.
So you have unregulated outhouses around town.
You have sewage moving through the streets in some areas.
Today, it's really hard to imagine the magnitude
of the stockyards on the south side of town.
Thousands of animals, dealing with the waste
of those animals before they're being slaughtered.
Then you have the slaughterhouse waste.
You have anecdotal evidence in the historical record
of the Chicago River running red with blood.
Famous tributaries still called Bubbly Creek
of the Chicago River system today.
It's called Bubbly Creek 'cause at the time,
it had so much nutrient loading in it
that it was bubbling like a wetland will do
sometimes when you're paddling across it.
Bubbly Creek would crust over with filth,
and chickens and cats would run across
that crust of filth on Bubbly Creek.
So again, we're talking about the kind of pollution that,
fortunately, in North America,
we really don't see any more today.
But then you've had these massive summer,
particularly, storm events, would then flush
all that filth out into Lake Michigan.
Boat captains and fishermen would come
into the wharves in downtown Chicago
with alarm on their face,
because this massive sewage slick
would be getting very close
to the city's water intake structures
which are still visible today two miles offshore,
off Navy Pier.
And so the city was paranoid
that it was going to pollute its own water supply
because of the way it was managing
or mismanaging its water.
So, it embarked on a massive,
really remarkable, again, engineering feat,
a Panama Canal-like canal
that took lowering the grade of the upper stretches
of the Chicago River and then connecting it
to the Des Plaines River, the Illinois River
and then the Mississippi River.
So the idea was to take all that sewage,
have the Chicago River flow backwards.
And then, again, into this canal,
into the Des Plaines River,
Illinois River, Mississippi River.
The plan was to flush Chicago's sewage to St. Louis.
(audience laughs)
Missouri was not thrilled and filed suit
in the Supreme Court to try and stop this.
After a long, drawn-out legal battle, the justices,
and I'm oversimplifying, as you might imagine,
thousands of pages of Supreme Court testimony,
that they, since it was proven in court
that sewage was dumped in the Mississippi River
upstream of St. Louis from other entities,
the justices couldn't tell whose sewage was whose,
so they let Chicago off the hook.
(audience laughs)
So, that embarked on a century of litigation
that rules over the Chicago Diversion today.
And it is the most litigated and controversial diversion
in the Great Lakes region, the longest-running active file
in the Michigan attorney general's office,
and probably other similar A.G. offices
around the Great Lakes Basin.
It's currently controlled by the U.S. Supreme Court,
setting its size at 2.1 billion gallons
of Great Lakes water every day
flows through the Chicago metropolitan area
to the Gulf of Mexico, 2.1 billion gallons,
or 3,200 cubic feet per second of water.
According to the IJC, this one diversion
lowered water levels on Lakes Michigan and Huron,
which hydrologically-speaking are considered to be one lake
because of the gap between the upper
and lower peninsulas of Michigan,
this one diversion lowered water levels
on those two Great Lakes by 2.5 inches.
Lake Superior is the largest lake
by surface area in the world.
Lakes Michigan and Huron combined are even larger.
This one diversion lowered that massive surface area
of water by two-and-a-half inches.
So, you can see why this would be so controversial
to people who are worried
about Great Lakes water diversions,
'cause if this was replicated a half a dozen times,
you'd be dropping water levels
on the Great Lakes by more than a foot.
And water levels matter in the Great Lakes,
not just for the environment, but also for the economy.
You have ore freighters that are,
giant ore freighters that are taking ore
from the mines of northern Minnesota
and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
to the steel mills in the southern parts of the lake.
During the low water periods
that we seem to have been coming out of,
we had low water for about 15 years.
We've had a couple years now of more moderate,
or average, water levels.
During low water periods,
there's sort of a water level inflation on that iron ore,
because they have to reduce the amount of water
in their holds when they have low water levels
to get through the shallow connecting channels
between the various Great Lakes.
So, this isn't just an environmental issue,
it's also an economic issue of great importance
in the Great Lakes region.
So now, the Chicago Diversion,
the canal that I talked about, is this artificial connection
between the Mississippi River watershed
and the Great Lakes watershed.
And it's become a vector for invasive species transfers.
So, all the Asian carp that you've heard about
potentially entering the Great Lakes?
This is the primary area where people
are concerned that they're going to be.
And this is a photo that I took
of a Corps of Engineers facility here
that has a series of underwater electric fences
right here in the canal
to try and keep Great Lakes invasive species
from ending up in the Mississippi River watershed
and also trying to prevent
Mississippi River invasive species, like the Asian carp,
from entering the Great Lakes watershed.
So, there have been calls now,
because of the invasive species,
to think about re-separating these two massive watersheds
in the Chicago metropolitan area.
There have been two different studies that have been done,
one in 2012, one in 2014.
And they estimate that re-separating
those two watersheds in different ways, shapes and forms
would range in cost from $9 billion to $18 billion.
The annual estimated value of the fishery alone
in the Great Lakes region is $7 billion.
So you could see that how that,
just to give you a sense of how that $9 and $18 million
one-time expense might add up.
But we're a long way from actually ever doing that.
And another thing too is that the people
in the City of Chicago would remind you
that Chicago would not be the global city that it is today,
7 million people in the major metropolitan area there,
are dependent on this water diversion.
And so there's the trade-offs
between this water diversion controversy
and the benefits that a place like Chicago has had
because of this grandfathered, if you will,
controversial diversion that they have.
So, that's a controversial U.S. diversion
from the first part of the last century.
This is a controversial Canadian diversion proposal
from the last part of the last century.
And that is the Nova proposal of 1998
out of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
This was a plan to ship 158 million gallons
of pristine Lake Superior water to Asia in tankers.
The idea, this was an era before Fiji water,
the idea was to create a global market
for Lake Superior water all over the world
by shipping it all over the world.
And they saw where kind of bottled water was headed.
And so this could not be stopped
by anti-diversion laws in the United States or Canada,
at the time, and it became enormously controversial.
You had environmental advocates
on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
Politicians on the both side of the U.S.-Canada border
were holding press conferences
in opposition to the Nova proposal.
Not necessarily that this one tanker diversion
would lower water levels on Lake Superior
to an alarming degree.
With the water diversion controversy,
it's all about precedent.
It's all about legal precedent.
And the lawyers, in particular, were rattled
by the Nova proposal because,
A, they had actually received a permit
from the province of Ontario before it came public,
so there was no public hearing process to vet this,
and so they already had the permit, and, B,
if you're talking about setting international precedent,
if you can send Great Lakes water to Asia,
the lawyers argued, where couldn't you send it.
And so it was seen as this shattering of any kind of,
you know, precedent issues
because of where, ultimately, the water was going to go.
So as I said, a super, highly controversial,
the International Joint Commission held listening hearings
all over the Great Lakes Region.
And you had soccer moms come out, you know,
guys in suits, you had hardhat guys,
you had children who wrote crayon drawings
on behalf of the Great Lakes and handed them
to the International Joint Commission commissioners
who were holding these listening sessions.
And so the Canadian response
to the Nova proposal was quite swift.
They convinced the Nova group,
the Nova group was completely caught off-guard
by the controversy, by the way.
They had no idea what they were,
what they were stepping into.
And so, they agreed to withdraw their permit
to divert Lake Superior water to Asia under one condition.
If anybody ever changes their mind,
the Nova group would be first in line
to divert Lake Superior water to Asia.
And then, Ontario passed provincial legislation
banning diversions from the Great Lakes
and other major watersheds.
And then Canada's federal parliament passed legislation
banning diversions from the Great Lakes as well.
On the U.S. side of the border,
things moved a little bit more slowly.
We had a gathering at Niagara Falls,
which was referred to as the Annex 2001,
or the Great Lakes Charter Annex.
And it was in 2001, that was the year it happened,
which is, hence the name.
And the governors met there with the provincial premiers.
And the governors and premiers released
what they called a road map
for a new water management system.
So, the Nova group was this sort of trigger
of this new last straw, if you will,
for the politicians to get together and start thinking about
a new water management system in the Great Lakes region.
They envisioned a binding agreement, such as a compact,
that would require a return flow
for any limited water diversions
that might leave the soup bowl rim,
that might leave the basin.
They were envisioning that you'd have to send it back.
Clean it to Clean Water Act standards
and send it back, which was a new idea.
You'd have to prove that there'd be
no adverse environmental impacts.
And they gave themselves a self-imposed three-year deadline
to release this new water management system.
It actually took 'em four years.
In December 2005 meeting in Milwaukee,
the Great Lakes governors,
Council of Great Lakes Governors,
released the Great Lakes Compact which is a ban
on new Great Lakes water diversions with limited exceptions,
which we'll talk about in a minute.
It required states to regulate in-basin water use,
create a new uniform standard for judging water withdrawals,
which there really wasn't before,
and then, conservation would be required
on any water diversion applicant.
Groundwater and tributaries were considered
to be part of the basin.
Controversially, the Illinois Diversion
was specifically exempted.
And then the compact is an agreement
on the U.S. side of the international boundary.
Then the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec
agreed to adopt mirroring legislation
on the Canadian side of the international boundary,
thereby enveloping the Great Lakes Basin,
despite the fact that it's bifurcated
by an international boundary
in the same water management rules and regulations.
Super complicated, super difficult to negotiate.
So what's the compact status today?
To my surprise, pretty swiftly it moved,
for a compact to be implemented,
it has to first be adopted by the legislatures
in the states that are relevant to the compact.
So, all eight Great Lakes legislatures
had to adopt the compact.
Then it moved on to Congress,
which adopted it overwhelmingly.
And then President Bush signed it in 2008.
The companion agreement, mirroring the compact,
was adopted by Ontario in 2007 and Quebec in 2009.
So, it's really this remarkable bipartisan agreement
on the U.S. side.
And then when you consider the agreements
on the Canadian side,
it's really kind of a global model now
in transboundary water management.
So, now we're getting into some of the nitty-gritty
and some of the complexities that are in the papers today.
Many of you heard about the Waukesha water diversion,
which there were public hearings about
this summer in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Racine.
So, what happened was,
and I'm going to slow down a little bit here,
'cause this is where it gets complicated.
And it's also very important for the public,
especially in the state of Wisconsin,
but throughout the Great Lakes Region,
to understand what's going on
with Waukesha's water diversion proposal here.
When the drafters of the compact
were getting into the nitty-gritty details
of this complicated document,
they knew that they had two kind of weird scenarios
that they were gonna have to deal with.
One was what's called a straddling community,
literally a town that sits
right on the edge of the watershed.
And part of that town,
take New Berlin which is a suburb of Milwaukee,
which is a real example that I'm going to talk about,
New Berlin sits right on the rim and it's the side of town
inside the Lake Michigan watershed,
inside the Great Lakes Basin was drinking
wonderful, pure Lake Michigan water.
The side of town that was outside the Great Lakes Basin
was drinking treated,
but naturally contaminated groundwater.
It had radium in it, radioactive element.
And so, what the compact authors wanted
was for a community
that had a public health problem like that
to be able to apply for an exception clause water diversion
under the straddling community exception,
so that they could divert water
just to the other side of town
that had a public water supply crisis,
treat that water to Clean Water Act standards,
and send it back,
proving that they had a strict conservation program,
there'd be no adverse environmental impacts.
And, as I said, then return the water
to the Great Lakes Basin.
And so that's the straddling community exception clause.
New Berlin was the first test case of that.
And it really sailed through without controversy.
Governor Doyle signed off on it.
Under a straddling community exception clause,
only the local governor alone would be the one
who would approve or disprove
that straddling community exception clause
under following the rules and regulations
as interpreted under the Great Lakes Compact.
So, that's exception number one.
Exception number two
is more controversial and more complex.
It's called the straddling county exception clause.
And under a straddling county exception clause,
you're dealing with a county
that straddles the Great Lakes Basin line.
You have a community, however,
that's clean and clear outside the Basin
that has a public health water issue
can apply for a Great Lakes water diversion, as well.
However, because it's clean and clear outside the Basin,
but within that straddling county, it has a higher bar.
A straddling county water diversion applicant
requires the approval of all eight Great Lakes governors,
from Minnesota to New York.
So, that's a super high-bar difference.
It still has to agree to return the water
back to the Great Lakes Basin,
treat it to Clean Water Act standards before it comes back,
have a conservation plan, no adverse environmental impacts.
And that is the exception clause that Waukesha falls under.
And it's the first time this exception clause
will have been tested under the Great Lakes Compact,
which is why it's so controversial
and it's getting so much attention.
I had a meeting with the DNR yesterday.
The application is proceeding.
Probably, the next news we're gonna have on this
will be in early December.
We'll get to questions in a minute.
No surprise that there are questions about Waukesha.
So, you're going to hear a lot about Waukesha.
There will be a decision about Waukesha sometime in 2016.
And the eight Great Lakes governors
will get together, and they'll vote.
And all it takes is one no vote from one governor
anywhere between New York and Minnesota,
and Waukesha is out of luck.
You're never going to have (laughs) a break
from Waukesha, however, because both sides have hinted
that if they lose the Waukesha vote
that there'll be litigation.
So, like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act,
Endangered Species Act,
the compact will likely be refined in the court system
through years of litigation
over the Waukesha water diversion situation.
Like I said, we'll get to questions in a minute.
I just want to hit on climate change.
And as Rebecca said, I am not a scientist.
I've interviewed a lot of scientists for my book.
And the role I play as a journalist,
but also at Northland College as a communicator,
is trying to simplify things,
sometimes to the discomfort
of scientists that I've interviewed.
And I apologize to any scientists in the room.
But climate change is one of these issues which,
educators and communicators,
we struggle with all the time,
particularly with the general public.
But let's talk briefly about climate change
in the Great Lakes Region.
And then we'll open it up for questions here.
So this is really neat.
This is the same place on Lake Huron.
It's a U.S.G.S. facility near Roger City, Michigan.
And the photo on the right was taken
by the U.S.G.S. in 1986
during historic high water levels on the Great Lakes.
The photo on the left was taken by me in 2006
during this period of low water levels
that I referred to earlier,
15 years roughly from 1999 to 2014,
we had low water levels, historically low in some cases,
water levels on the Great Lakes.
Water levels on the Great Lakes, to human frustration,
fluctuate widely and naturally.
And that's the way the lakes have worked
for before recorded time.
And the difference between the all-time high
and all-time low water level on Lake Michigan,
for example, is six vertical feet.
That's the natural variability in the lake.
And so if you're on a cliff, that's six vertical feet.
But if you're on a gradually sloping beach,
that six vertical feet can translate
into a hundred yards of difference
between where the water is today
and where the water was when I was a kid.
And if you have a pier or if you're a marina operator,
those changing, or run an ore freighter business,
those changing water levels
can be a real frustration for humans.
But it's important for us to realize
that that's part of the natural system
in the Great Lakes Basin.
And you know, when you came,
these period of low water levels,
the low spots become heavily vegetated.
And then those become important stopover points
for neotropical migratory birds and waterfowl, et cetera.
And then always, the water levels come back up,
and that vegetation gets inundated.
And that sort of bird nursery, then turns into a fish nursery.
And that's part of the whole cycle.
And what was really kind of interesting
is that when you had the first periods
of low water levels in 1999-2000,
you could see people out crawling around
in that shoreline vegetation.
And those are botanists who are looking for rare plants
that only bloom during low water levels
that they could see them in person
as opposed to in a text book.
And so there are people who really wait
for these low water levels professionally.
And there's wildlife, too, that benefit from them.
Nevertheless, it's really a headache for humans,
and that's certainly understandable.
But it's important for us to realize
that natural variability is a key part
to the ecosystem of the Great Lakes Basin.
The question is, above and beyond that natural variability,
how will climate change impact this water level fluctuation,
the overall water level quantity situation
in the Great Lakes Basin?
There've been a bunch of studies.
And originally when I wrote my book in 2006,
the latest research was suggesting that water levels
in the Great Lakes could drop
by an additional five feet by the end of this century.
Other studies suggested maybe only dropping a foot.
The more recent studies suggest
that we might kind of be, might be a wash.
We might be a little bit closer to where we have been.
I think we're going to continue to see more studies.
The scientists tell me that the global research
on climate change is easier than sort of narrowing down
into specific regions and making predictions
in a more finite, local level.
Nevertheless, it's going to be a really important issue
for those of us in the Great Lakes region to watch,
because it's all about water levels here.
And then it's also about water quality.
And one of the key things is that, you know,
as you might see in my last bullet-point here,
2013 National Climate Assessment predicts
that Lake Michigan sewage overflows
will double by 2100 due to storm increases
and ferocity and repetition.
So, climate change, big deal in the Great Lakes.
This is my last slide.
The bottom line, like the rest of the world,
the Great Lakes Region is entering this period
of increased water tension, which is a surprise
to many people because we live in
such a water-abundant area.
Water-starved areas near and maybe far
will continue to look to the Great Lakes for help.
The prior system of water management
was unpopular and quite dysfunctional.
It's been replaced now with this new, modern,
binding world-class water management system
that's designed to protect
this globally-significant resource for perpetuity.
And we've now reached this historic turning point
with the Waukesha water diversion application.
You know, will this new paradigm
that's been adopted reduce water tensions
as we deal with this water diversion applicant, increase it,
and will the document be changed overall
in the process moving forward?
It's gonna be a really interesting next twelve months
regarding Great Lakes water diversion issues.
You've been a really attentive audience.
Thank you very much.
(applause)