People in Michigan rightly value their Great Lakes – and I am afraid they will get plenty of opportunity to prove it over the next fifty years.
It’s not just that the Lakes are in immediate danger – from overdevelopment of shorelines, agricultural runoff, and exotic nuisance species, among numerous other threats – but the demands on the lakes are growing, and so is their vulnerability.
Developing a public policy and investment strategy geared toward restoring past damage done to the Lakes and their tributary waters, and sustaining those unique natural resources for future generations, is essential to the economic competitiveness, environmental health, and cultural strength of West Michigan cities like Holland, Grand Haven, and Grand Rapids.
In other words, a modern Great Lakes agenda is crucial to the sustainability of the region.
If you are like me, being from Michigan means, more than anything else, an awareness of being from the heart of Earth’s great freshwater seas. Fully one gallon in five of the world’s accessible fresh water is contained in the Great Lakes Basin (“Accessible” means available for humans to use. The Greenland ice cap, for example, is made of fresh water, but is not accessible in any meaningful sense, nor likely to become so).
I am forever in awe of the splendor of the lakes. Laid down by the receding glaciers and youthful by geologic standards, they convey a powerful sense of our region’s cold vigor and northern mystery. A succession of peoples and nations have occupied the basin over the last 8,000 years; one after another they have vanished, but the lakes are still here.
Here in West Michigan, we urbanites draw our drinking water from the lakes. We also depend on the lakes for food – famously, whitefish and perch, salmon and trout; and for wild rice, cranberries, duck potato, ducks, and geese. We depend on the lakes less directly, but no less, for their impact on our orchards, farms, soils, and seasons.
Michigan shores have more lighthouses than any other U.S. state. Shoreline communities feature the arts, quaint Main Streets, beaches, and history. Farther out from shore, ghost towns, ghost ships, and weird mirages abound.
The lakes provide routes of transport and access for Great Lakes and oceangoing vessels and their products. They also power industry. But for most of us, the sporting and recreational values probably spring to mind first. The scenic and recreational values are huge.
The lakes exist now in the context of a growing national, not to say worldwide, water shortage – a circumstance which lends perspective to our local good fortune. Consider some of the following circumstances:
- Since 1950, world population has doubled, and water use has tripled. But the potable water supply has shrunk, with much of the world’s water contaminated by sewage or industrial pollution. Meanwhile, the United Nations predicts a world population of 9 billion by the year 2050.
- 80 percent of human illness today is traceable to contaminated water. Water-borne diseases by some accounts kill one child every eight seconds.
- 70 percent of the world’s water use is for agriculture. Millions of wells have been drilled for agricultural purposes, depleting underground reservoirs in dozens of countries. In the United States, most of our irrigation is provided from the Ogalalla Aquifer, but the depletion of the aquifer has permanently reduced the agricultural output of the southern Great Plains. Farther west, the Colorado River is sucked dry before it reaches the sea. Wherever you may look, water shortages today mean food shortages tomorrow.
- If we export grain, we are, in effect, exporting water. Countries like China and India, purchasing grain on the world market, are importing water from the rest of the world.
Trust me, we can be bullish about the economic prospects of water. It is a limited resource and we’re not making more. Analysts are already pointing to water technology as a conservative investor’s choice. Cast your bread upon the waters, as the saying goes.
It is the environmental and social prospects that worry me more. I have spoken casually to many westerners who see absolutely nothing wrong or inappropriate about piping Great Lakes water straight to the desert southwest, to support their sprawling populations and lush green front lawns. Their reaction is typical, and proposals of that ilk have already been made, and successfully shot down.
Much harder, though, is to turn away from the growing body of the world’s population that must regularly do without enough clean water to subsist. By some estimates, one in three persons worldwide will have insufficient water for daily life by the year 2025.
And as far as our lakes go, agriculture would be the coup de grace. The diversion of Great Lakes water to the west for irrigation, if it ever takes place, will strike directly at their continued existence. That is why it must not happen.
My first Lake Michigan crossing was in August of 1965, by car ferry at night. I was fifteen. My bicycle was tied to a bulkhead below decks. For almost two hours I stood under an awning near the salon, watching a thunderstorm chase us from Menominee all the way across to Frankfort. I remember thinking 'this is what it means to be from Michigan.'
That is where you come in, my Michiganian friends: hopefully as people who are aware, who think intelligently about sustaining the lakes, who oppose their waste and fouling and misuse.
If I had to reduce it all to one nutshell suggestion, I might just say that we should all come together and be conscious Michiganians – fierce defenders, and more than usually aware of that which makes us what we are: people of the Great Water.
Tom Leonard, the former executive director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, is a writer and independent consultant living in Grand Rapids.
Photographs:
Pristine shoreline south of Grand Haven
A freighter docked in Muskegon Lake
Beach south of Grand Haven
Photographs © Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved