I love the Great Lakes and walking along Lake Michigan.
I love the sense of peace and poetry the "big lake" stirs in me, the way it clears minds and opens hearts. I like looking at pictures shot from space and seeing Michigan floating smack dab in the middle of the Great Lakes basin.
In recent years I've come to worry about this magnificent watershed as loons and other birds die of botulism along our shores, as the Inland Seas schoolship pulls up algae from parts of West Bay, as zebra mussel shells pile up on beaches and crunch underfoot.
I feel uneasy as the world grows thirsty. The pressure to drain the Great Lakes and their aquifers will grow. The pitfalls of thinking about water as the "new oil" trouble me. The Great Lakes are a public trust to be protected, not a commodity to be mined, extracted, bought and sold.
It is easy to think this basin that holds one-fifth of the world's fresh water is eternal and unchanging, but that is not so. Such thoughts remind me of the area's first pioneers who believed Michigan's vast primeval forests were unending, and then proceeded to develop the technology to saw them down and haul them away in about 60 years, turning the north into a wasteland of stumps and cutover lands.
I don't want that to happen to the Great Lakes. I don't want to see it become our continent's Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest lake. Today this Central Asia lake has shrunk more than 60 percent since 1960 because of water diversions, pollution and the Russian government's decision to divert two feeder rivers into wide-scale irrigation projects. This has led to hotter summers, colder winters, shorter growing seasons and many other problems.
One of the frustrations for modern-day citizens trying to understand crucial issues is sifting reality from rhetoric churned up by spin doctors who want to make a profit from something that is part of the public trust, owned by the public and held in trust by governments, which have a perpetual duty to protect it.
Water law is complicated, but not that complicated if you remember the importance of maintaining the public trust doctrine and fighting any attempt to make water a legal "commodity." A conservation standard and a standard of no net loss to the Great Lakes basin also are important to any policy for regarding water removal proposals.
Something haunts me as I walk along Lake Michigan. I'm not sure our governments and representatives will safeguard this precious public trust unless the public adamantly demands it.
Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 933-1468.
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