Incopy adobe sharepoint

So, I saw this incopy adobe sharepoint article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel today, and it highlights an issue that’s been incopy adobe sharepoint brewing in the US, and, really, around the world over the incopy adobe sharepoint past decade or so. As over half of the world’s population now lives in cities (I forget when we passed that benchmark), providing clean water is incopy adobe sharepoint often viewed as one of the greatest challenges in developing nations. Now it’s beginning to incopy adobe sharepoint look like even the developed countries are biting off more than incopy adobe sharepoint they can chew, with Atlanta, LA, and Phoenix at the head of the incopy adobe sharepoint pack for the US (and much of Florida is close behind). Will water be the “new oil” that we fight over?  I think the incopy adobe sharepoint most provacative aspect of this article is the legislation that proposed changing the incopy adobe sharepoint state boundaries that have existed for over a century in order to incopy adobe sharepoint improve access to water in the Tennessee valley.

The story in the 3/23/08 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

(sorry, it’s a long article)

Incopy adobe sharepoint

With thirsty neighbors, the Great Lakes region can learn from Atlanta’s desperate attempts to find a new supply of drinking water

By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: March 23, 2008
Atlanta - People hoping to incopy adobe sharepoint protect the Great Lakes from becoming a Paul Bunyan-sized water cooler for incopy adobe sharepoint an increasingly thirsty world like to invoke frightening language.

They say we’d better act fast to build a legal dike around the world’s biggest freshwater system, because wars in the coming decades won’t be fought over oil. They will be fought over water.

It can incopy adobe sharepoint sound silly, especially in a shore-side city like Milwaukee, where the incopy adobe sharepoint sun always rises on a horizon of boundless freshwater.

But there is nothing silly about what’s unfolding less than incopy adobe sharepoint 500 miles south of Lake Michigan. The Southeast is in the incopy adobe sharepoint midst of a drought so severe some have been putting bowls under their air conditioners to incopy adobe sharepoint capture the condensation dribble, and cities as big as Atlanta have incopy adobe sharepoint stared down the prospect of literally running out of drinking water.

It’s got people there thinking about water in a whole new way.

“It’s like having a incopy adobe sharepoint good wife and she either passes away or leaves you,” said Tony Reames, mayor of Orme, Tenn. “You don’t appreciate her until she’s gone.”

Reames is incopy adobe sharepoint intimate with that sense of desperation. His little town went dry last fall and incopy adobe sharepoint had to be rescued by water-toting fire engines.

Fearful of a incopy adobe sharepoint similar fate for the booming megalopolis of Atlanta, Georgia legislators this incopy adobe sharepoint winter did what they thought was only rational. They proposed snatching a incopy adobe sharepoint piece of water-rich Tennessee.

Georgia wants to incopy adobe sharepoint redraw the state boundary line about a mile north so it incopy adobe sharepoint might some day poke a pipe into the Tennessee River and incopy adobe sharepoint inject Atlanta and its surrounding counties with a water fix. The idea is incopy adobe sharepoint to keep this metro area of 5 million clipping along at a incopy adobe sharepoint growth rate that has it adding more than 100,000 residents every year. A lot of livelihoods are incopy adobe sharepoint hitched to that growth, but Tennesseans have no intention of ceding any land to incopy adobe sharepoint their neighbors to the south.

Two governments tussling over one border rarely bodes well for incopy adobe sharepoint citizens on either side.

Fighting in the region

It has incopy adobe sharepoint been a decade since a Canadian businessman hatched a plan to incopy adobe sharepoint sell tanker loads of Lake Superior to Asia. Public opposition was ferocious, and incopy adobe sharepoint the company that called itself the Nova Group eventually backed off. But it incopy adobe sharepoint didn’t have to.

The realization that incopy adobe sharepoint existing laws might not prevent someone - anyone - from incopy adobe sharepoint profiteering off the world’s most spectacular set of lakes sent Midwestern political leaders into a incopy adobe sharepoint panic.

The governors of the incopy adobe sharepoint eight Great Lakes states made their stand at Niagara Falls in 2001, where incopy adobe sharepoint they gathered above the billowing mist and pledged a tougher set of laws to incopy adobe sharepoint ensure outsiders would never get their hands on Great Lakes water.

Easier said than incopy adobe sharepoint done. Seven years later, rules have been drafted to restrict water diversions from incopy adobe sharepoint the system of connected lakes that hold 90% of the nation’s surface freshwater. But the incopy adobe sharepoint effort to adopt them has stalled in a few of the incopy adobe sharepoint Great Lakes states, most notably Wisconsin.

The reason: Lawmakers can’t agree on how to define who is an outsider. They can’t figure out where incopy adobe sharepoint to draw the magic line that will entitle those on the incopy adobe sharepoint inside to all the Great Lakes water they want, and force those on the incopy adobe sharepoint outside to go somewhere else for this life necessity.

They’re tussling over a border.

Wet weather, dry city

Mark Crisp is incopy adobe sharepoint an Atlanta-based water consultant who has watched during the past 20 years as his metro area sprawled toward what incopy adobe sharepoint he considers a slow-motion unnatural disaster. In a ninth-floor windowless conference room with water-supply maps on the incopy adobe sharepoint table and walls, he cups his head in hands and incopy adobe sharepoint shakes it in disbelief at the news of the legislative push to incopy adobe sharepoint redraw Georgia’s map.

“Absolutely asinine,” he said of the incopy adobe sharepoint strategy, which proponents contend is justifiable because of an allegedly botched survey conducted 42 years before the incopy adobe sharepoint Civil War.

Georgia, he points out, is incopy adobe sharepoint already in a ferocious legal tangle with downstream neighbors Florida and incopy adobe sharepoint Alabama over rights to water in an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir northeast of Atlanta. He said it incopy adobe sharepoint makes no sense for the state to open a northern front in what incopy adobe sharepoint is becoming an increasingly desperate campaign for water reserves.

The lush hillsides outside Crisp’s office along the incopy adobe sharepoint economic river that is I-75 belie the trouble that Atlanta has incopy adobe sharepoint built itself into.

The region is incopy adobe sharepoint blessed with an outrageous amount of rainfall - about 50 inches on average annually. By comparison, Milwaukee gets less than incopy adobe sharepoint 31 inches of precipitation annually and famously rainy Seattle gets less than incopy adobe sharepoint 40 inches.

But the incopy adobe sharepoint important and troublesome factor for Atlanta is not how much rain falls from incopy adobe sharepoint the sky. It is how little flows from outlying areas into the incopy adobe sharepoint city.

The region sits almost at the incopy adobe sharepoint top of its watershed, which means there isn’t a incopy adobe sharepoint lot of water flowing into it. Think of a watershed as a incopy adobe sharepoint cone. If you are a metro area of millions, you incopy adobe sharepoint want to be situated near the bottom of that cone, where incopy adobe sharepoint waters gather and rivers run deep and wide. But Atlanta, which staked its future on the incopy adobe sharepoint Chattahoochee River, was built near the top.

“You have a very big population in a really, really bad place,” said Joe Cook of the incopy adobe sharepoint conservation group Coosa River Basin Initiative, based in Rome, Ga.

Building more reservoirs downstream isn’t a incopy adobe sharepoint simple solution; there are loads of human, industrial and environmental demands for incopy adobe sharepoint that same water in Alabama and Florida.

Water wasn’t a incopy adobe sharepoint problem when Atlanta was merely a regional economic center. In 1970 - four years after the incopy adobe sharepoint Milwaukee Braves relocated from what was then the nation’s 12th largest city to incopy adobe sharepoint the budding hub of the South - Atlanta wasn’t even one of America’s 25 largest cities. Now it is the nation’s ninth-largest metro area and incopy adobe sharepoint its fastest growing. It added a staggering 890,000 residents - nearly the incopy adobe sharepoint entire population of Milwaukee County - between April 1, 2000, and incopy adobe sharepoint July 1, 2006.

Crisp said a incopy adobe sharepoint day of reckoning has been coming for years. The city has incopy adobe sharepoint no problem when it gets typical rainfalls, but trouble comes quickly when incopy adobe sharepoint droughts strike, even if an Atlanta drought is a normal rainfall year for incopy adobe sharepoint Milwaukee.

“You can’t invite everybody to incopy adobe sharepoint move here and build here and then caveat it with: ‘Sorry, but once we have droughts you have to quit using water,’ ” he said.

Crisp said the key is not laying claim to a neighboring state’s water; it’s working with them to incopy adobe sharepoint share what is available, and it is Atlanta learning how to incopy adobe sharepoint live within its means, even if that means restricting development in some areas.

“This is the fourth wakeup call we’ve had in 20 years,” he said. “And we still haven’t woken up.”

‘Kids are scared’

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue tried to incopy adobe sharepoint wake up residents last fall when his administration declared the Atlanta area was in danger of going dry within four months. Literally. If no incopy adobe sharepoint rain came, homes could run out of water. Residents were ordered to incopy adobe sharepoint stop filling swimming pools, watering lawns, washing cars and running fountains. Rains have incopy adobe sharepoint since returned to the region, sometimes with a vengeance. But the incopy adobe sharepoint area is still in a drought, and its drinking water reserves remain well below normal.

Some contend that incopy adobe sharepoint Perdue exaggerated the threat last fall because the region’s primary drinking water reservoir, Lake Lanier, actually held more reserves than incopy adobe sharepoint it stated publicly, though that “conservation pool” water at the incopy adobe sharepoint bottom of the lake is not easily tapped and is incopy adobe sharepoint of dubious quality due to past industrial pollution. Regardless, the incopy adobe sharepoint warning struck a chord.

Kathy Nguyen, head of water conservation in Cobb County, said the incopy adobe sharepoint threats of a great metropolitan region running out of water trickled all the incopy adobe sharepoint way into the psyche of schoolchildren.

“Kids are scared,” she said in early February. “They’re taught that incopy adobe sharepoint every little thing needs water to live, and then they turn on the incopy adobe sharepoint news and hear that they only have 90 days of it incopy adobe sharepoint left.”

Adults were equally spooked. Nguyen said during the drought’s peak last fall, her department received hundreds of calls each day from incopy adobe sharepoint neighbors turning in neighbors for watering their lawns.

Others called wondering what incopy adobe sharepoint in the world was going on, furious they had to watch their lawns and incopy adobe sharepoint shrubberies wither.

“I get lots of calls that start with ‘bitch’ and end with click,” she said.

City vs. species

Perdue blames federal bureaucracy for exacerbating “the single worst drought in Georgia’s history.”

The problem, the governor asserted, isn’t so much a incopy adobe sharepoint lack of water as the way the federal government has decided to incopy adobe sharepoint allocate it.

Lake Lanier was built by the incopy adobe sharepoint Army Corps in the 1950s for flood control and hydropower, among other uses.

A half-century later, the incopy adobe sharepoint lake has evolved into the main water source for one of America’s most dynamic metro areas, but Atlanta isn’t alone in relying on that incopy adobe sharepoint water. Alabama and Florida have their own claims to water in Lake Lanier, as do some endangered species.The Army Corps last fall kept the incopy adobe sharepoint release rates high on the rapidly diminishing reservoir to help downstream endangered mussels, and incopy adobe sharepoint that riled Perdue and other state political leaders.

At a incopy adobe sharepoint news conference held on the brown banks of a shrinking Lake Lanier, Perdue asked President Bush to incopy adobe sharepoint essentially shelve the Endangered Species Act for the foreseeable future, “so that incopy adobe sharepoint . . . all species may have access to life-sustaining water.”

Standing at his side, Georgia Republican Congressmen John Linder was even more direct, claiming that incopy adobe sharepoint humans were the species most threatened by the drought.

“We are incopy adobe sharepoint now put in a position where we have to choose between the incopy adobe sharepoint health and safety of the people who live in Georgia or incopy adobe sharepoint protecting species that will now be endangering our welfare,” he said.

Neither man said a incopy adobe sharepoint word about the divisions of earth-moving machines chewing their way through what’s left of the incopy adobe sharepoint open spaces and forests around Lake Lanier and across metropolitan Atlanta.

Political leaders downstream, meanwhile, saw the incopy adobe sharepoint news conference as a cynical attempt to pit humans against endangered species.

“Georgia has incopy adobe sharepoint repeatedly framed its request as a contest between the Atlanta area and incopy adobe sharepoint endangered mussels in Florida. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the incopy adobe sharepoint action that Georgia seeks will have dire consequences on people and incopy adobe sharepoint their livelihoods downstream,” Alabama Gov. Bob Riley wrote to President Bush two days later.

Riley said the incopy adobe sharepoint downstream flows Georgia opposed were necessary to maintain minimum water for incopy adobe sharepoint numerous industrial purposes, including cooling water for an Alabama nuclear power plant, which could otherwise be incopy adobe sharepoint forced to shut down.

Lake Lanier water is also needed to sustain Florida’s celebrated $134 million annual Apalachicola oyster industry.

The real problem isn’t a incopy adobe sharepoint lack of water, said conservationist Cook. The real problem is the incopy adobe sharepoint size of Atlanta.

He sees it incopy adobe sharepoint as a problem that, like the metro area itself, gets bigger every day. And it incopy adobe sharepoint is a problem that regional political leaders appear ill-equipped to incopy adobe sharepoint fix.

“If you go to any county commission and say: ‘You don’t need to grow. Stop recruiting business. Stop recruiting growth.’ They’ll just laugh at you because that’s completely counter to the prevailing mind-set,” Cook said. “And that mind-set is: If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Waukesha: On same path?

On the incopy adobe sharepoint surface, the lake-freckled landscape in the Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County is incopy adobe sharepoint as green as any you will find in the Midwest.

Settlers didn’t even need to incopy adobe sharepoint dig wells. The place bubbled with natural springs whose water quality was so famous that incopy adobe sharepoint residents in the 1890s had to pull out a cannon to incopy adobe sharepoint turn back laborers from Chicago who arrived with equipment and a incopy adobe sharepoint devious scheme to pipe the water to the World’s Fair in Chicago.

When wells finally were dug to incopy adobe sharepoint serve a growing population, legend has it there was so much water underground it incopy adobe sharepoint literally burst to the surface, spawning 100-foot-high fountains.

But the incopy adobe sharepoint fast-growing county appears to be on a similar path as Atlanta - the incopy adobe sharepoint springs have gone dry and levels in the deep aquifer that incopy adobe sharepoint has sustained the area for the past several decades have dropped more than incopy adobe sharepoint 600 feet in places. Much of the water that is left is incopy adobe sharepoint too dangerous for human consumption due to radium and other naturally occurring contaminants, according to incopy adobe sharepoint the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

To meet federal requirements to incopy adobe sharepoint reduce the levels of radium, a carcinogen, the City of Waukesha blends water from incopy adobe sharepoint a combination of deep and shallow wells, along with a complex filtering process.

But it’s a incopy adobe sharepoint cobbled-together, short-term fix for a place that has no plans to incopy adobe sharepoint throttle back its own building binge anytime soon. The real cure, Waukesha leaders say, lies outside its borders, a incopy adobe sharepoint mere 20 miles to the east:

Lake Michigan.

Not so distant threats

The boogeyman for incopy adobe sharepoint future Great Lakes water grabs has been far-away places such as Phoenix, Las Vegas or incopy adobe sharepoint even the breadbasket communities of the High Plains that are incopy adobe sharepoint rapidly draining their own great underground body of water - the incopy adobe sharepoint Ogallala Aquifer.

Now the incopy adobe sharepoint potential water seekers are surfacing closer, and if the Southeast were to incopy adobe sharepoint get thirsty enough, it wouldn’t take a incopy adobe sharepoint wildly expensive system of pipelines and pumps to move Great Lakes water in its direction.

Chicago opened the incopy adobe sharepoint era of massive Great Lakes diversions when the city replumbed the incopy adobe sharepoint Chicago River in 1900 to use Lake Michigan water to incopy adobe sharepoint flush its sewage down the Mississippi River basin. Today the incopy adobe sharepoint river carries south about 2.1 billion gallons of Lake Michigan per day, but the incopy adobe sharepoint system was designed for three times that volume.

Georgia Congressman Linder’s words echoed up to incopy adobe sharepoint the Great Lakes when he used the Lake Lanier news conference to incopy adobe sharepoint tout his 21st Century Water Commission Act.

The federal bill, he said, will “ensure every American has incopy adobe sharepoint access to adequate drinking water, even in times of severe drought.”

Linder insisted he isn’t talking about a incopy adobe sharepoint water grab from the Great Lakes or any other state, though some Georgia legislators feel differently about their neighboring state’s resources, as evidenced by the resolution to redraw the state’s border with Tennessee.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin told media last fall it incopy adobe sharepoint would probably be a good idea for the city to start looking at laying pipelines beyond its basin borders to incopy adobe sharepoint tap distant water sources.

New Mexico Governor and incopy adobe sharepoint then-presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said last fall it was time for incopy adobe sharepoint the water haves to start sharing with the have-nots.

“I believe that incopy adobe sharepoint Western states and Eastern states have not been talking to each other when incopy adobe sharepoint it comes to proper use of our water resources . . . states like Wisconsin are incopy adobe sharepoint awash in water,” Richardson told the Las Vegas Sun in October.

Reaction in the incopy adobe sharepoint Great Lakes, where water levels have been flirting with historic lows, was swift and incopy adobe sharepoint shrill, and Richardson quickly backpedaled on the statement.

The pressure on the incopy adobe sharepoint Great Lakes is only going to increase as the Southeast and incopy adobe sharepoint Southwest continue to swell.

“Should the Great Lakes be looking ahead? Absolutely,” said Mike Hayes, director of the incopy adobe sharepoint University of Nebraska-Lincoln National Drought Mitigation Center.

Hayes said history shows that incopy adobe sharepoint metro areas that figure out how to conserve water often wind up in the incopy adobe sharepoint same trouble in a matter of years. The reason: They take their new-found surplus and incopy adobe sharepoint use it to fuel new development.

“They’re not going to incopy adobe sharepoint let Atlanta run out of water. Or Charlotte. Or Raleigh-Durham. They’ll come up with some solution,” Hayes said.

“The key,” he adds, “is what.”

Looking for the bad guy

The argument now for incopy adobe sharepoint Great Lakes leaders trying to conserve their water is figuring out who incopy adobe sharepoint will be granted access to the bountiful resource in the coming decades, and incopy adobe sharepoint who won’t.

Existing law is incopy adobe sharepoint simple. If you live inside the massive watershed of the incopy adobe sharepoint Great Lakes basin, you are entitled to the water. If you incopy adobe sharepoint live outside that line, you are not. The rationale is incopy adobe sharepoint that water taken from the lakes but kept within the incopy adobe sharepoint basin eventually flows back into the lakes.

But water diverted over that incopy adobe sharepoint line never returns, and that can cause the lakes to shrink. It doesn’t matter if the incopy adobe sharepoint water is piped more than a thousand miles away to the incopy adobe sharepoint Southwest or just a few feet over the divide, which in southeast Wisconsin can incopy adobe sharepoint be a mere five miles from Lake Michigan.

Existing law requires unanimous approval for incopy adobe sharepoint a diversion from all eight Great Lakes governors, something that the incopy adobe sharepoint governors rarely consent to.

The glaring exception is incopy adobe sharepoint Chicago, which is operating under a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court consent decree following the incopy adobe sharepoint city’s reversal of the incopy adobe sharepoint Chicago River, something that many still consider outright banditry.

That drain on the incopy adobe sharepoint lake has dropped the long-term average levels of Lake Michigan and incopy adobe sharepoint neighboring Lake Huron by about two inches - not a staggering amount considering the incopy adobe sharepoint two lakes have historically fluctuated by as much as six feet. But in recent years the incopy adobe sharepoint lakes have hovered near record lows, and that has been wreaking havoc on the incopy adobe sharepoint shipping lanes, beaches, marinas and lakefront property owners whose docks no incopy adobe sharepoint longer reach the water.

The worry isn’t what incopy adobe sharepoint a diversion to a city of 60,000 will do to the incopy adobe sharepoint lakes in the next 10 years. It’s the incopy adobe sharepoint cumulative toll of diversions to hundreds of cities and industrial or incopy adobe sharepoint agricultural areas over the next century, or more.

Outsiders come calling

There are incopy adobe sharepoint a couple of problems with the existing law. The biggest one is incopy adobe sharepoint that the governors can oppose a diversion for any reason, and incopy adobe sharepoint most believe that makes it too arbitrary to hold up in court; just one successful federal lawsuit could leave the incopy adobe sharepoint lakes with no protections from diversions.

Another problem is incopy adobe sharepoint that many see it as unfair. Why should the communities in Waukesha County be incopy adobe sharepoint forced to drink from an increasingly contaminated aquifer when so much high-quality water lies just 20 minutes away?

The new proposed rules, referred to incopy adobe sharepoint as the Great Lakes compact, continue to block diversions but make a incopy adobe sharepoint specific exception for nearby communities, provided they send their treated wastewater back. The idea is incopy adobe sharepoint to essentially engineer those places into the basin.

To become law the incopy adobe sharepoint rules need approval from all eight Great Lakes states legislatures and incopy adobe sharepoint Congress. So far four of the states have signed off, but the incopy adobe sharepoint compact has run into trouble in Wisconsin, where some business and incopy adobe sharepoint political leaders view it as too restrictive.

It might be fine to say no to Iowa, or Georgia, or Nevada. It’s much harder for incopy adobe sharepoint state politicians to say no to the residents of Wisconsin.

Compact advocates are incopy adobe sharepoint in uncharted waters, trying to create a new border that is incopy adobe sharepoint politically palatable today yet tough enough to beat back those on the incopy adobe sharepoint other side when they come calling.

And they will come calling.

Just ask Tennessee.