Worry about water

Michigan must lead in resource protection

June 14, 2007

The scenarios are ominous. Drought, human devastation, even war. All because of water, an essential element of life that is taken for granted around here because we have so much of it. Makes it hard to grasp the "worldwide frenzy to secure freshwater" that experts at Yale University say is already happening. Water, some say, will be the oil of the 21st Century -- highly valued, but also much in demand and coveted to a point of trouble.

Big difference: People lived without oil for a long time and probably could again, awful as that would be. But people cannot live without water. And so they will fight for it.

Michigan has to fight for it, too. No state has a greater stake in defending the resource.

Global experts now say that about one in six people around the world lacks access to clean water and many devote most of their days to finding or hauling it. Worse, some are near sources of water that have been rendered unsafe by pollution.

Even in the United States, where the average person uses 80-100 gallons of water a day, more than a third of the country is technically in drought, partly because so many people have chosen to live in areas where there is simply not enough water to support them.

What's this mean to Michigan, an economically hurting pair of peninsulas jutting out into 20% of the world's freshwater supply?

Probably that we can expect more interest in the Great Lakes, but for the wrong reasons. And certainly that this state should take a lead role in defending them -- from both pollution and diversion. If you are not aggressive about protecting a resource, how can you expect to be entrusted with it? Minnesota and the Canadian province of Ontario are already far ahead of Michigan in passing laws to guard the lakes against out-of-basin withdrawals. Illinois and New York are ready to act while the state with the most to lose has yet to take up this issue.
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