WATER WORLD! (Sustainable GREAT LAKES Laboratory)

RON DZWONKOWSKI

With water, state can boost economy and help the world

BY RON DZWONKOWSKI • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • March 23, 2008
Saturday was World Water Day, so designated by no less a body than the United Nations to call attention to the global water crisis. But you probably didn't even notice. And why would you? Hereabouts, we are relatively awash in the stuff that most of the people on the planet scrounge for daily.

While we worry about what low levels in the Great Lakes may mean for boat launching, people in much of the world would die, or kill, for access to a body of water the size of Lake Huron at its shallowest point of the last century.

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a column about a then-new book called "Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water," by Paul Simon, the former U.S. senator from Illinois who died in 2003.

Today, Simon's crisis is no longer coming. It's here, mainly because the world has done little about it. The global population keeps growing, but its sources of water for drinking and sanitation do not. Thousands of people die each day from dirty water, most of them children; one in five people around the world has no access to safe water.

And yet we invest far more resources looking for new pools of oil while continuing to waste or misuse unfathomable amounts of freshwater, which is much more essential to life. If you don't have oil, you walk. If you don't have water, you die.

And water tensions are building.

"Too often, where we need water we find guns instead," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the World Economic Forum. "Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon."

Now, the higher the profile of world water issues, the more interesting the world becomes for Michigan, since we are, after all, a pair of peninsulas jutting into the world's largest supply of freshwater. But short of selling it like oil, which we are not going to do, how do we turn all this water into economic growth?

By developing here the world's best methods for saving it. Water technology has become a $400-billion global industry. And in addition to that economic potential, the more Michigan can lead the way on conservation techniques, the less pressure there is likely to be to tap the Great Lakes. Saving water shows how we value it. The best way to keep unwelcome hands off your best resource is to be a good steward of it.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York -- the one in Ben Stiller's "Night at the Museum" movie out last summer -- has a special exhibit on the world water crisis running through May. A visit reinforced my view that the most effective water strategy is conservation -- saving every ounce, using every drop, reusing as much as possible.

Desalinization of sea water, which seems so logical given the expanse of the oceans, is expensive, uses lots of energy, and leaves piles of salt. There's a desalinization plant in Australia that's powered by 98 wind turbines, which answers the power problem but takes up lots of space and still leaves all that salt -- in a place that doesn't need it for the roads.

Water conservation is not rocket science.

Steve Safferman, for example, is a bio-systems and agricultural engineer at Michigan State University who's working on projects to show how water can be recycled on farms after the dairy barns have been washed down.

"We're doing water use assessments at food processing plants, too," he said in a conversation last month. "They don't think about water use because it's from a well, but pumping it up takes electricity, so there's a saving there, too."

And if agriculture officials from around the world are coming to Michigan to learn how to save and rescue water, that can only be a good thing.

The Brookings Institution think tank, in a recent report, describes the Great Lakes region as "the largest freshwater laboratory on Earth."

"The region has the opportunity to be the global center point for developing the new and needed ideas, tools and technologies and practices around freshwater use and management that can be shared and exported to the world," according to the Brookings experts.

This could be not only lucrative, but a flat-out good thing to do, too. Can the state that put the world on wheels now help it stay afloat, hydrologically speaking? That would be tapping both the natural and human resources here.

And next year, what better place to invite the planet in to observe World Water Day?

RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page. Contact him at dzwonk@freepress.com or 313-222-6635.