Samuel de Champlain was searching for a route to China in 1615 when he paddled into Lake Huron. Certain he’d found the ocean, the French explorer scooped up a palm full of water and raised it to his lips. It was fresh. Disappointed–and puzzled, because he’d never seen a lake so large–Champlain named his discovery la mer douce, the sweet sea.
For a long time the focus has been on outsiders who want water from the Great Lakes basin. When Perrier, the world’s most famous water vendor, came to Michigan’s Mecosta County in 2000 with a plan to tap a spring, some locals saw it as a plot to sell off the Great Lakes. Perrier wants to set up its pumps at a spring that feeds the headwaters of the Little Muskegon River, which flows toward Lake Michigan, and it plans to sell the water under the Ice Mountain label. “For a foreign company to come in here and make money for water, I am not for that,” says an indignant Terry Swier, a retired reference librarian who helped found Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation to fight Perrier. “I believe that the water belongs to the state of Michigan and the citizens, and it’s all connected. It belongs to all of us.”
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Michigan’s attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, worries that her state is moving too fast on the deal. Perrier has already received permits from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and has begun building its plant, but Granholm wants Governor John Engler to invoke the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, which requires all eight Great Lakes governors to approve any water diversion. “I am concerned that if you decline the opportunity for consultation in this case, you may send a signal that there will be little or no scrutiny of new or increased uses of Great Lakes water,” she wrote Engler last September. “This signal could trigger a massive water grab as users seek to remove Great Lakes water before such removals can be scrutinized.”
In 1985 this fear moved the governors to sign the Great Lakes Charter, a water protection pact that banned diversions that would have “significant adverse impacts” on the lakes. The next year, with the prodding of senators from Michigan and Ohio, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act, which made diversions impossible if any of the eight governors disapproved. Then four years ago a Canadian company called the Nova Group asked for permission to bottle water from Lake Superior and ship it to Asia. The province of Ontario said yes, but backed down when the rest of the basin governments protested. The “Nova incident” persuaded Great Lakes leaders that they needed even stricter laws to control diversions. Last June the governors joined with the premiers of Quebec and Ontario to sign a new agreement, Annex 2001, which makes it clear that the waters are a resource, not a commodity. Annex 2001 doesn’t prohibit diversions, but it sets a high bar. “Under the new binding agreement, a community has to show that there’s no significant adverse impact, and you have to show there’s an improvement to the water,” said Jeff Edstrom, then senior policy director at the Council of Great Lakes Governors, which is headquartered in Chicago. The council hopes to see the new regulations written into state, federal, and provincial law within three years.
Hapless Lowell looks enviously at Crown Point, which is only ten miles away but can drink all the lake water it wants because it’s inside the Great Lakes basin. Lowell’s situation is so bad that local officials have decided to make another appeal to the governors. They were turned down in 1992 because they hadn’t looked at every other option for drinking water. Now they believe they have. Dal Corobbo promises to send Lowell’s wastewater back into Lake Michigan: “We will somehow, some way, find a way to put it back.”
Half of that now runs into water pipes, half goes into the Chicago River. That amounts to 2.1 billion gallons a day–enough to fill more than 2,100 Olympic-size swimming pools. And the city still flushes its sewage down the Sanitary Canal and on into the Mississippi.
