University Place

Water Tension and the Great Lakes Compact

– 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)