Wednesday, October 31, 2007
News / Chicagoland Our Precious Essence
Posted by Whet Moser on 10.31.07 at 10:11 AM
The southwest is having trouble making the desert bloom with strip malls and industrial monoculture, something that's back in the news after New Mexico governor Bill Richardson mouthed off to the Las Vegas Sun about how Wisconsin has way more water than it actually needs. Mike Miner covered the issue last year, and noticed something that the Tribune either missed or is too terrified to mention now that Mayor Daley is trying to sell, lease, or tax anything he can:
The big question, says [Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation attorney Jim] Olson, is who pays? He thinks that since Chicago has rights over Great Lakes water no other state or city has, in giving them up it would be acting more clearly in the basin's interests than in its own. So it should be rewarded. "The rest of the basin would have to negotiate with Chicago to help pay for this," he says.
Translation: if you're going to decorate your post-capitalist hellscape with our water, be prepared to deal with the city that's too corrupt for casinos.
The people Miner talked to seemed to think that piping water two-thirds of the way across America would be more expensive than desalinization. Westerners are also encouraged to recycle their water (not that Chicago can really talk about recycling stuff).
But if we can't make money off it, we can at least be dicks about it.
"You can move to Chicago or Milwaukee or Detroit or any one of many lovely communities that are up here in the midwest and actually have the benefit of having water for their populations." [Todd Ambs, water division administrator of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources]
We ripped a hole in the Great Lakes and we don't even care! How do you like them apples?
Comments (3)
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There SEEMS to be a lot of water in the Great Lakes, but, since the Great Lakes were created by a one-shot deal (retreating glaciers), almost every drop taken out of the Great Lakes has to be replenished by rain or inflow. We are currently using MOST of the water available from the Great Lakes system, which includes aquifers that range under the Great Lakes states. Governor Richardson should be thankful we allow bottled water companies to deplete our water resources and send bottled water to his desert state. /A lot of the water Chicago takes out of Lake Michigan could be put right back in if we re-reversed the flow of the Chicago River!
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Actually, Whet, I kind of think being a dick about it is defensible. Why should the upper midwest subsidize the movement of its people to warmer, drier areas? The Southwest is just engaging in special pleading, like the man who kills his parents and pleads for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan.
