Aug 5, 2008

Great Lakes Compact Finished. What Have We Done?

Well, it’s finally done. At least, it’s done in the Great Lakes area, so it’s now up to Congress and the president to give the final blessing.

“It” is the Great Lakes Water Compact, which has been in the making for 23 years or 10 years, depending upon who’s setting the benchmark. But surely, 10 years ago the eight states and two Canadian provinces bordering the Great Lakes decided it was time to agree among themselves about who could use Great Lakes water and how.

In early July, Michigan became the last of the eight states to ratify the compact. Because it crosses state and national borders, the compact needs federal approval.

Despite the long process of getting the compact, few people seem to be all that jubilant about it. There is great fear that the “wrong elements” will gain control. Environmentalists are still the fearsome force, because they are so fearful and conservative. Most people want to be able to use the water. Farmers want to be able to irrigate, and Great Lakes water-use issues tend to spill over into riparian and groundwater use as well. It is silly to live surrounded by water and act as it if were desert.

The uniqueness of the Great Lakes drives the issues.

In the arid West, people fight over dividing up the water that falls each year as snow and then melts, spawning huge rivers. The challenge is for everybody to use the water as much as possible before it dumps into the salty sea and becomes . . . useless. In the West, using up the water makes sense.

The Great Lakes are different. Yes, water falls into the watershed every year, abundantly, 30 to 40 inches of it. Yes, it all flows out, mainly through one exit, the St. Lawrence River. Yes, there seems to be plenty of water. People come from all over the world to watch it drop over Niagara Falls, and it’s never failed to do so.

Nonetheless, the Great Lakes are both a giant reservoir and a giant, flowing river. Much of the water in the Great Lakes – a fifth of the world’s fresh water – stays there for centuries. Major pollution events and major environmental mistakes that might affect a western river for a year could affect the Great Lakes for many years. And, to be truthful, there have been major errors in the Great Lakes.

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825 connecting Lake Erie with the Hudson River and the city of New York, people in the Great Lakes rejoiced at this avenue for expanded trade. The St. Lawrence Seaway, opened in 1959 after channeling the St. Lawrence River, was like the Erie Canal, but hundreds of times bigger. But with the trade have come unintended consequences.

Diversion and depletion

The provision of the Great Lakes Water Compact that is best known prevents “large-scale diversion” of water from the Great Lakes watershed. People in the Great Lakes region have worried that, as the population center shifts away from the rainy, chilly Great Lakes to the sunny, arid West, people will want to take the water with them. The compact forbids that.

But from the start of the debate, people have argued over smaller questions of what constitutes a diversion. Can farmers ship broccoli and apples, 90 percent Great Lakes watershed water, out of the watershed? Can Nestle ship Ice Mountain water in 16-ounce bottles? Can a tanker load up with water and ship it to Saudi Arabia? Can a farmer irrigate his land without worrying that the resulting evapotranspiration will generate vapor that leaves the watershed and falls as rain in Newfoundland?

Depletion and diversion are really not the same. Diversion – worrying about what watershed a drop of water falls in – is like worrying about which side of a mountain peak a snowflake falls on. No matter how many names we have for oceans, there is only one ocean and all the water goes there.

The key question is whether diversion leads to depletion of the Great Lakes reservoir. While it would seem simple enough to measure rainfall and outflow and determine how much water is available to be used – as is done in the West – the Great Lakes have a long and mysterious cycle in which water levels rise and fall.

The compact seems to say that diversion is, in and of itself, depletion.

In all the states and provinces except Michigan, only part of their area is in the watershed. By agreeing to the compact, they agree not to take water from the Great Lakes watershed and move it into other watersheds, even to communities or farming areas in their own states that might benefit from it. These states – much more than Michigan – are committing to a huge sacrifice to stand against an interbasin water transfer – a diversion – that doesn’t mean much to anybody unless it in fact results in depletion of the Great Lakes. How worried should we be if vegetable growers in central Wisconsin were to use Lake Michigan water and then divert it to the Mississippi River watershed?

Nearly a century ago, the city of Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River so it now flows out of Lake Michigan and to the Mississippi River. It did that for a practical reason. The city uses the river for sewage disposal, and can do it without polluting the big lake it sits on. That sounds smart, but it’s still not popular, and the compact will make sure that never happens again.

Water quality

The compact addresses two things that really are important: What comes into the Great Lakes from the ocean and what goes into the Great Lakes from the activities of people here.

We have had lots of bad examples to learn from:

After the new seaway was built, lamprey eels swam up from the ocean and parasitized and depleted the native trout. That led to the explosion of trash fish like alewives that died and ruined the beaches and spawned management efforts, including the introduction of salmon to replace trout to eat alewives.

Zebra mussels came into the lakes in ballast water from foreign places and altered the ecology of the lakes, filtering out the food supply supporting the base of the existing food chain. They clog pipes, cling to boats, cut your feet.

The goby and dozens of other carp-like trash fish also came in with ballast and are now displacing species important for food and sport fishing, including the salmon.

The era of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides has left a legacy embedded in the lake bottom silt.

The states’ industries – automobile, electrical generation, chemical – have polluted the lakes with mercury, polychlorinated biphenyl, dioxins and hundreds of other petrochemicals nobody knows how to remove.

The compact makes it clear that people want to make wiser decisions in the future about the Great Lakes. In that sense, the compact is not the end but the beginning. Each state and province is already embarking on new water regulations to carry out the agreement.

Farmers in the Great Lakes watershed now must worry about these next steps. Since groundwater and flowing surface water in the watershed all feed into the Great Lakes, the compact sets the stage for greatly increased regulation governing extraction of water from wells and streams.

What would help is a better hydrology model that scientifically addresses depletion questions. Unlike the West, we can’t just use all the water that’s in the river. But that leaves unanswered the question: How much can we use?