Globe environment reporter Martin Mittelstaedt's excellent article The Great Lakes Disappearing Act summarized succinctly the case of our shrinking Great Lakes. He rightly points to global warming and dredging in the St. Clair River as major threats to lake levels, noting that Lake Superior is setting records for low-water marks, and levels in the other four sweet-water seas are well below long-term averages.
We must also take seriously the burgeoning water demands of rapidly growing urban centres, both within and beyond the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River ecosystem, looking to the lakes as the solution to their water woes. Most publicized among these are recurring plans and propositions to move Great Lakes water to far-off places facing water shortages, such as large-scale diversion of water across the continent to the arid southern United States.
But demands from much closer to home are likely the bigger threat to the Great Lakes, since they appear much more feasible from an economic perspective. The strongest of these are coming from rapidly growing communities just beyond the basin boundary, such as Waukesha and New Berlin in Wisconsin, looking to dip into Lake Michigan to replace depleted local groundwater supplies.
To address these outside threats, a regional agreement known as the Great Lakes Charter Annex is slowly going through legislative processes in the eight Great Lakes states, Ontario and Quebec. Once enacted by each jurisdiction and approved by the U.S. Congress (no easy feat), this agreement would prevent access to the waters of the Great Lakes ecosystem by thirsty outside interests.
Rapid urban growth is also behind escalating demand for water within the Great Lakes basin. Provincial planning instruments in Ontario have designated many inland areas as "places to grow." By 2031, for! example, the population of York Region is expected to double ! and the Region of Waterloo to grow by 60 per cent.
Under a business-as-usual scenario, it appears Ontario is on a collision course with the Great Lakes. As these areas continue to grow, so, too, will the number of proposals for extending pipes to the lakes. Indeed, a number of Southern Ontario's sprawling inland urban centres, including the Region of Waterloo, York Region, London and Guelph, are pondering drawing more water from the lakes to supplement depleted local water supplies, either by constructing new pipelines or expanding existing diversions (London and York Region already divert water out of Lake Huron into Lake Ontario).
The disappearing act, initiated by global warming and St. Clair dredging, will simply be accelerated: not by massive diversion of lake water out of the basin but by a hundred thirsty straws consuming the lakes from within.
In many cases, these big pipe proposals have been on the books for some time. And therein lies the problem. They! are a 20th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.
While traditional water planners see the big pipe solution as a foregone conclusion — or an inevitable result of urban growth — experts say the greatest "new" source of water in the 21st century should come from greater efficiency and conservation. And new evidence supports this assertion. According to an article in the current issue of Alternatives Journal, in a typical Canadian urban centre, population growth of almost 75 per cent could be offset by a long-term commitment to water efficiency and conservation — in other words, without drawing any more water from our lakes, rivers and groundwater.
Commitments such as these are not pie-in-the-sky ideas. Calgary, for example, has committed to meeting the full water demands of its booming population through conservation and efficiency. The plan is to accommodate 500,000 more people with no new water. And the solutions make economic sense, too.! The Region of Durham's strategic plan is to invest $17.2- mil! lion ove r 10 years in water efficiency and conservation. Analysis shows that providing the same water services with new supply-side infrastructure would cost in the order of $125-million. With numbers like these, the case for conservation is clear.
To bring things back to the climate-change conundrum faced by Great Lakes communities, water conservation provides opportunities for both adaptation and mitigation of global warming. Because water conservation solutions, such as installing low-flow toilets and faucets or replacing thirsty lawns with native, drought-tolerant landscaping, are small scale and decentralized, they can be implemented incrementally and more quickly to adapt to the uncertainties of climate change. At the same time, conserving water is clearly far less energy intensive — and thus less intensive in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions — than pumping water over long distances, and treating it to drinking water quality standards, only to be sprinkled on! lawns or flushed down the toilet.
The long-term health of the Great Lakes depends on how Canada and the world tackles global warming and on finding a speedy solution to the erosion problems in the St. Clair River. But these efforts will be in vain if we fail to adopt practical, cost-saving methods to conserving Great Lakes water to offset the escalating demands of urban growth. This shift begins with every citizen of the Great Lakes basin connecting the water that flows out of their taps or flushes through their toilets with the lakes, rivers and groundwater that are the lifeblood of this global treasure.
Tim Morris is the national water campaigner for the Sierra Club of Canada. Tony Maas is senior adviser, freshwater policy, with World Wildlife Fund Canada.
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