U.S. Water News Online
TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan-- Environmental writer Peter Annin recalls staring in fascinated horror at what had been the coast of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, now a desolate wasteland strewn with scrub brush and corroded hulls of abandoned fishing boats.
He had heard ominous references to the Aral disaster while studying the U.S. Great Lakes and wanted to see it for himself.
Once the world's fourth-largest inland water body, the Aral has shrunk to a quarter of its previous surface area in less than half a century -- the result of a Soviet-era decision to divert rivers feeding the sea to promote farming in that arid section of central Asia.
The former Newsweek magazine correspondent's book, "The Great Lakes Water Wars," is scheduled for release in mid September. The Aral Sea serves as a warning about the Great Lakes, he said.
"It kind of defies the bounds of the mind to grasp how dire the ecological situation is there," Annin said in an interview. "When you're standing on the bottom of a sea bed where there should have been water 45 feet over your head, and instead there's none as far as the eye can see, how do you describe that?"
Ecological and political differences make it unlikely the Great Lakes will suffer the Aral's fate, but the tragedy still conveys a warning, Annin says: "What it showed to me in a very surreal way was that these giant lakes are vulnerable, they actually can be drained. They are not immune to human destruction."
His premise is that an era of warring over the Great Lakes is under way -- and will intensify as the global water shortage worsens. The lakes' future and the region's way of life hang in the balance as leaders grapple with the challenge of preserving what amounts to nearly one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water, Annin writes.
The book comes nine months after representatives of the eight Great Lakes states signed a compact to ban most diversions of water outside the drainage basin, require each state to regulate water use and establish a regional standard for large-scale water withdrawals. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec pledged separately to adopt the same policies.
But the compact still faces an uphill climb, needing approval of legislatures in each state and the U.S. Congress to take effect.
Annin's idea for "The Great Lakes Water Wars" took hold after a Canadian consulting firm called The Nova Group ignited a firestorm in 1998 by proposing shipments of Lake Superior water to Asia. Covering a public meeting in Chicago, Annin was struck by the depth of feeling as ordinary citizens described what the lakes meant to them.
"I just thought, 'Wow, this is really an enormous and complex issue,"' he says. Looking into it further, he concluded it was "so massive, so emotional, so complicated a topic, it seemed to be a natural book."
Noah Hall, a Wayne State University environmental law professor and one of Annin's sources for the book, says he initially considered the "Water Wars" title hyperbolic but changed his mind after reading it.
"Peter documents over 20 years of fights over Great Lakes water and clearly shows that those fights were just the first round of what's going to be many long battles," Hall says.
Communities around the lakes are facing either depleted or contaminated groundwater supplies, or both, Annin said.
"This is where the tensions are going to lie in the foreseeable future," Annin said.
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