If you saw Syriana you know. Laws get broken, spies tortured, and princes assassinated over oil. Imagine what we’d stoop to if we didn’t have enough of something really important, like water.
In Arizona, according to an e-mail sent to me by independent research scientist Alan Christopher, “groundwater reserves are draining at a steadily increasing rate that mirrors the rate of population growth. Even though the groundwater reserves in some areas are enormous, continual pumping eventually drains them. This has already happened at higher elevations in Arizona, where towns are now trucking in water because their wells have run dry.”
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That’s why last month the eight states and two Canadian provinces of the Great Lakes basin signed a compact to raise the drawbridge. You can think of this compact as responsible stewardship. You can think of it as our midcontinent OPEC making sure that the water we control–20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply–stays in our control. You can think of it as the basin guarding against betrayal from within–some staggering rust belt metropolis inking a deal to fill a mile-long tank train.
“Today the economics are not there to say ‘We’re going to take all the water in the Great Lakes and ship it to Phoenix and Vegas,’” Todd Ambs, water division administrator of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, told the New York Times last August. “But water’s not getting cheaper. Twenty-five, 30, 40 years from now, the economics are going to be different. We’ve got to have a system in place to deal with that.”
These decrees permit Illinois (i.e., Chicago) to divert as much as 3,200 cubic feet a second from the Great Lakes basin. That’s much less than the 10,000 CFS flow the old Sanitary District of Chicago, which built the canal, had in mind, but it’s a lot–roughly a third more water than flows each year into the greater Phoenix valley from the Salt, Verde, Agua Fria, and Colorado rivers put together.
Then there’s the fact that for more than a century commerce has developed around the man-made reality that water flows away from Chicago. The Sanitary and Ship Canal is a busy federal waterway lined by communities such as Lockport that would not take kindly to seeing the canal disappear.
