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Friday, November 16, 2007
Environment - "Indiana should OK compact to protect the Great Lakes"
From an editorial in the NWI Times yesterday:
With so much attention to Lake Michigan water quality brought by scrutiny of the BP and U.S. Steel emission permits, the Indiana General Assembly should approve the Great Lakes Basin Water Resources Compact.This document sets policies governing the five Great Lakes. It protects the greatest natural resource shared by eight states and two provinces.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle last week made a major push for protection of the Great Lakes to become a national issue. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels should join this effort.
Doyle is asking not just the Wisconsin legislature but those in five other states as well to ratify the compact. Local environmentalists are making this one of their major goals as well.
People in Northwest Indiana who drink water from Lake Michigan tend to take that resource for granted. The lake, which is about half the size of Tennessee and has an average depth of 279 feet, has a lot of water in it.
But start diverting that water to areas suffering severe droughts, like Georgia, and or to the Southwest, and a precedent will have been set for consuming this important resource. That's why it's so important to make sure it's very difficult to divert water outside the Great Lakes basin.
Tom Anderson, executive director of the Save the Dunes Council, expects an increasing number of requests to divert water from the Great Lakes, which adds urgency to approving the Great Lakes Compact.
Environmentalists and industry have been meeting since 2005 to discuss issues like this and in 2006 agreed Indiana should move forward on the compact and include implementation language, which other states don't have yet.
"The draft language that came out does not cause serious heartburn for industry," said Kay Nelson, the Northwest Indiana Forum's environmental expert. That makes it easier to approve -- environmentalists and industry already agree.
Indiana should endorse this important agreement, including the implementation language agreed up by industrial and environmental groups.
Once it's ratified by the states and provinces bordering the Great Lakes, the compact goes before Congress. Speed it along its way.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 16, 2007 08:32 AM
Posted to Environment