Think we have a drought problem? Not only is the Northland suffering from a lack of snow, but Lake Superior is disappearing. It still contains 10 percent of all the Earth's fresh surface water, but the lake's water level is nearing a 100-year low.
So the timing couldn't be better -- and more urgent -- for a historic agreement between Great Lakes states that would help protect the vital resources of all the inland seas.
A week ago, the Minnesota House Environment and natural Resources Committee unanimously passed a bill approving the compact. With approvals expected this legislative session from other House and Senate committees, Minnesota is positioned to be a leader in an effort to restrict diversions of large amounts of Great Lakes water to arid regions. Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana and Illinois all can follow Minnesota's lead, with Congress following the states' approvals, and the president's signature following congressional action. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec already have pledged to adopt the same policies.
The compact would ban most efforts to export Great Lakes water to areas outside the lakes' drainage basin. The basin includes Duluth, Superior and much of the Northland. The pact also would require Great Lakes states to regulate water use and to establish standards for water withdrawals. That means the states, through the compact, would decide together which water withdrawal requests are allowable and which ones could be harmful.
The possibility of doing irreparable damage to the Great Lakes inspired the compact. In 1999, a Canadian company tried to export Lake Superior water to Asia. More recently, proposals were floated to ship Great Lakes water to China, to pipe it along Interstate 35 to Texas and to divert it to ethanol plants in Minnesota's farm belt -- everywhere but keeping it in the lake.
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Yet those sorts of proposals have to be taken seriously, even if the vastness of Lake Superior "can make the lake seem invulnerable," as Allison Wolfe of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy told Forum Communications' St. Paul bureau last week.
"But that would be misleading," she said. In reality, the lakes naturally replenish only 1 percent of their water supply each year, according to the Minnesota-based Save Lake Superior Association. That suggests any major diversion of water could have a major negative impact.
And you can bet proposals to divert the water won't be going away any time soon. Not with America developing more and more in areas barren of water sources, including desert-like regions in Arizona and Nevada.
We can also learn from the bad policies of the former Soviet Union, which allowed the drainage of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan -- once the fourth-largest inland water body -- to a quarter of its previous surface area in less than half a century. Though ecological and political differences make it unlikely the Great Lakes could suffer Aral's fate, "Giant lakes are vulnerable," Peter Annin, the Michigan author of "The Great Lakes Water Wars" said last year after visiting the Aral Sea. "They actually can be drained. They are not immune to human destruction."
But the lakes can be saved by human action -- with Minnesota, following through on the Legislature's action so far, positioned to lead the way.
