Good to the Last Drop?

By Erik Ness

Wisconsin, long rich in water, ponders a new era of scarcity.

Six days before Labor Day, 9:50 a.m., and Dave Baker is already sweating through his work shirt. Today's projected high is ninety-two degrees, and the asphalt at Noah's Ark Water Park in Wisconsin Dells is quickly filling with cars, each one disgorging pilgrims robed in towels, anointed in sunscreen. Baker pilots his cart among the growing crowds with a task of singular importance: prime the pump, turn the spigot, and keep the water flowing. Entering the Jungle Rapids pumphouse, he flies from power box to flow valves as the array of pumps and filters and PVC thrums to life. He shimmies down a ladder through a hole in the floor and the sound escalates. Then he's gone, off to the next attraction.

When the park is finally at flood stage — five million gallons in thrall to recreation — Baker shows off one of the six on-site wells that make it all work. It's remarkably small; in fact, the moving parts for “America's Biggest Water Park” probably wouldn't fill an average house. Shear away the scaffolding and its filigree of turquoise fiberglass and you're left with six holes, twelve inches wide and 150 feet deep. It's a testament to the simplicity of the formula: water plus gravity equals fun plus profit.

I put my hand on the wellhead to feel the water surging within and ask Baker if he believes anyone at the park really thinks about where all this liquid refreshment comes from.

“No, not really,” he replies.

After all, what's to think about? Wisconsin is seriously wet, with ample coastline along both the mighty Mississippi and two Great Lakes, a bounty of fifteen thousand inland lakes, thousands of riparian miles, endless soggy acres. What we know about drought you could scribble on a Dells postcard and send to Denver or Los Angeles, signed Alfred E. Newman: “What, me worry?”

“It's when you're most complacent that you're most vulnerable,” warns Curt Meine MS'83, PhD'88 of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. For the better part of two years, Meine, along with his colleagues, Michael Strigel MS'94 and Shaili Pfeiffer MS'01, has helped shepherd a statewide brainstorm called Waters of Wisconsin (WOW). Guided by an all-star committee, including five UW-Madison faculty members and ten alumni, the ongoing process has involved thousands of citizens, and is painting a portrait of both promise and peril for the state's storied waters.

One of WOW's more symbolic achievements was prodding officials into declaring 2003 the Year of Water in Wisconsin, coinciding with the United Nations's International Year of Fresh-water. But no proclamation can match the power unveiled when the rain won't fall. Noah's Ark may live by deluge, but elsewhere in the Dells, the grass is a sere brown. It barely rained in August, and many farms in the southern part of the state are officially in drought. The Wisconsin is more a river of sand than water. Lake Michigan's shoreline is approaching historic lows. Waukesha's water is radioactive, and a rancorous state legislature is slated to draw up new groundwater legislation this fall.

Scarcity is an unsettling notion in a state where water has always been taken for granted. But for the foreseeable future, it's the dominant paradigm in most of the world. Water can both create and destroy; the wisdom to benefit from its power comes only from following its course.

“With water, there are always new connections,” says Meine. “You can never fully account for them all, know about them all, or predict them all. You can't deal with water issues in isolation.”

The next time you flush an old toilet — the kind that flushes with authority — consider that you've just used up all the water that the World Health Organization says you need for the day. The UN is a little more generous, allowing an absolute daily minimum of 13.2 gallons. That's fifty liters — five for drinking, ten for preparing food, fifteen for bathing, and twenty for sanitation and hygiene. Still, millions of people in countries such as Gambia, Haiti, Somalia, Mali, and Cambodia get by on fewer than three gallons daily. Me, I've used about fifty gallons today, counting the laundry, dishes, cooking dinner, a shower, and our low-flush toilet. A dairy cow needs thirteen to fifty gallons daily, depending on her output. The manufacture of a silicon wafer requires three thousand.

If you live in Wisconsin, or someplace else where thirst is not yet an issue, consider yourself lucky. Worldwide:

• 1.1 billion people do not have access to potable water.
• 2.4 billion people do not have adequate sanitation facilities.
• Water-borne diseases fill half of all hospital beds and kill one child every eight seconds.
• Those of us in rich countries use ten times more water than citizens of poor nations, who often pay rates ten times higher.

These problems are not expected to get better. As a report by the BBC recently put it, “The present is dire: the future looks so grim it must be entirely unmanageable.”

Water issues in the United States aren't yet that grim, but water is clearly becoming a high-profile concern in many places:

• The East is coming out of a major drought, while the already arid West has been over-dry for nearly a decade. July was the hottest and driest in the Southwest in 109 years.
• Florida, Alabama, and Georgia fight over allocation of the Chattahoochee River. Virginia and Maryland bicker over the Potomac.
• Water-short California, which produces about half of the nation's produce, lost 15 percent of its yearly Colorado River allocation when it failed to meet a negotiation deadline.
• New York City holds its breath as a long overdue third tunnel designed to safeguard its ancient supply lines is years behind schedule.

Sitting lakeside with UW planning professor Stephen Born MS'68, PhD'70, the world doesn't seem quite so dry. A river rat by vocation and avocation, Born is approaching retirement with a fixed gaze on the mating habits of those aquatic insects favored by trout. What keeps him in the classroom is a desire to help revamp the state's outlook on water. With some interference from a cool Terrace breeze, Born relaxes into his pipe, and pops the bubble: “We're coming to a time when — even in wet climates — we're going to have to start looking at urban water management,” he warns. “We're going to have to give much more attention to conservation, to recycling, to augmentation of flows. We can't talk about managing groundwater without talking about managing surface water, and quantity is related to quality, and pretty soon it becomes a conundrum, because everything is connected to everything else. But how the hell do you manage it?”

It's a question that has vexed many. Wisconsin offers a good example of how even abundance requires stewardship, forethought, investment, and innovation. At the foundation is the public trust doctrine embedded in the state's constitution, which protects all navigable waters for the public. This protection has been fortified through 150 years of case law, and extends even to scenic beauty.

Beyond oft-cited Aldo Leopold '36, John Muir x1863, and Gaylord Nelson '42, Wisconsin is also the birthplace of limnology, or lake science, in the United States. The first limnology class was taught in 1900 at the UW and, by some measures, Lake Mendota is the most studied lake in the world. Appleton generated the world's first electricity from falling water. The Coon Valley watershed in southwestern Wisconsin pioneered soil conservation. State management of floodplains, lake cleanup, groundwater quality, and surface water are all national models. And Wisconsin was the only state to enact additional wetland protections following a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened 20 percent of previously protected wetlands for development.

Despite this foundation of leadership, precedent, and law, water policy in Wisconsin resembles Frankenstein: many working parts, and a few areas of monstrous dysfunction. For example, despite consumption advisories for hundreds of state fisheries, the state has been unable to regulate mercury emissions. Todd Ambs, who ran the environmental advocacy group River Alliance before taking on the water division of the state's Department of Natural Resources under Governor Jim Doyle '67, sees the faults in glaring relief.

“We have a train wreck coming in just a few years in some portions of Wisconsin,” he says. “In the Fox Valley, in Waukesha, we're running out of groundwater. Thankfully, in 75 percent of the state that problem is many years away. However, the general water quality challenges are immense.”

Just outside of Eau Claire, the sandstone face of Mount Simon rises nonchalantly above the river. Named after an early settler of the region who, among other things, harnessed the local water power, Mount Simon is the barest geological hint of a massive sandstone formation that underlies much of the Midwest. The rock is ancient, dating back some five hundred million years to the Cambrian days of the early Paleozoic Era. What we now call Wisconsin was located in more tropical climes, a shallow, coral-filled sea lapping sandy beaches and bays. Time passed: Cambrian to Ordovician to Silurian, Paleozoic to Mesozoic to Cenozoic. The sandy sea bottom was gradually covered and compressed into sandstone. In some ways, it's still a sea, a great underground sponge now filled with billions of gallons of fresh water.

“It's a wonderful aquifer,” says Ken Bradbury PhD'82, hydrogeologist for the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, part of UW Extension. “It's a thick sequence of sandstones that are very porous, very permeable, and very extensive.” Ranging from eight hundred to two thousand feet thick, it is hundreds, even thousands, of years old, and there is a lot of it. Indeed, if you brought all of Wisconsin's groundwater to the surface, it would cover the entire state to a depth of 103 feet.

This might seem an endless supply, but in southeast Wisconsin, it's being drained faster than the rain can replace it. Groundwater levels have dropped four hundred to five hundred feet during the last century, and are now declining six to seven feet a year. The deeper a well goes, the more expensive it is to pump. And Waukesha and nearly fifty other Wisconsin communities have discovered another cost: the deepest reaches of the aquifer contain dangerously high quantities of dissolved radium. The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the city to clean up its water.

According to Ambs, warped market signals help drive this emerging groundwater crisis: the more water that utilities pump, the more revenue they generate. “This is a fundamental flaw in an age of increasingly scarce resources,” he argues.

“It's not an acute disaster. It's an incremental disaster,” adds Bradbury. “It's been pretty much every city and village out for itself, and that's not a very efficient way to use the aquifer. The wells are sited for all the wrong reasons: where the city happens to be able to buy some land, where the city is planning to grow, and where the boundary is — none of which has anything to do with the hydraulics of groundwater.” Regional groundwater management, used in Florida to prevent saltwater encroachment, could optimize water use, save money, and improve everybody's water quality, he says.

But Waukesha has rejected this approach, asking instead for a pipeline to Lake Michigan to draw twenty million gallons a day. It's easy to see the temptation: over the horizon lies a full 20 percent of the world's usable freshwater. There's just one problem: Waukesha drains to the Mississippi, not the Great Lakes. Under the Great Lakes charter of 1985, the pipeline must be approved by the governors of eight lake states and two Canadian provinces, who must sign off on diversions of five million gallons or more. A significant amendment to the charter, called Annex 2001, is not complete, but it is expected to require review of even smaller diversions, and that significant withdrawals be accompanied by offsetting ecological restoration.

Waukesha's proposal was met with outrage in Milwaukee, where the average citizen is already wondering about the state of the lakes. Summer beach closings weigh heavily, as do low lake levels. Anders Andren, director of UW-Madison's Sea Grant Institute, says levels are cyclical, and beyond our control. Indeed, during the last four thousand years, the lakes have been as much as eighteen feet higher and perhaps fourteen feet lower. “We cannot really change the water levels in any meaningful way,” he says.

The good news in the Great Lakes is that the toxic problems of the past are abating. What remains are primarily legacy pollutants, leaching from forty-one so-called areas of concern, such as the lode of PCBs in the Fox River and Green Bay.

Of more urgent concern, says Andren, is the establishment of more than 160 invasive species in the basin. In this game of ecological musical chairs, the zebra mussel is already old news, with the even more troublesome quagga mussel now advancing in Lake Michigan. Every time a powerful new species washes through the lakes, it rebuilds them in its own image.

“They completely change the flow of energy, the flow of food, the flow of contaminants,” says Andren.

As big as they are — it takes 191 years for Lake Superior to replace its water, and ninety-nine years for Lake Michigan — the Great Lakes are vulnerable to the smallest things: the “just-in-case” fertilizer we put on our crops and lawns, where we pile our leaves. That's because no matter how small these actions, your neighbors are probably doing them, too, and it all adds up. This pollution is called non-point, because instead of one big, bad pipe, the pollution comes from everywhere.

“Our next big, big water-quality problem is to try to get some handle on [this] problem,” says Andren. “That's really difficult, because we have to make some painful changes in agriculture and in the way we keep our lawns.” But if we don't, he warns, the same problems that plague smaller lakes like Mendota — algal blooms, some of them even toxic — could bedevil Lake Michigan.

Non-point pollution is both behavioral and systemic: it's not only how you take care of your yard, but where it is, how big it is, and how well your community was designed to accommodate the water that flows off asphalt and rooftops. “To take care of water, you've got to take care of land use,” says DNR's Todd Ambs, referring to sprawl. “It really is all connected.”

An illustration: Last year Wisconsin approved some of the strictest runoff standards in the country, and has begun to invest $65 million annually for ten years to meet those standards. But given current growth patterns — the location, housing density, and design of new development — that $650 million investment will only maintain water quality.

If a currently besieged smart-growth law gets fully implemented, then the state might see gains in water quality.

Individual homeowners may be able to do more to alleviate the problem just by changing the way they garden. “Everything is landscaped to move water off of somebody's lot as quickly as possible,” says Nancy Frank '77, a green infrastructure specialist at UW-Milwaukee. If people started to see the value of keeping some or all of that water on site, they might begin to realize how water and land are intertwined.

“For too long it's been hidden, [so] we don't see the connection immediately,” Frank says. “We see these grates in the street, and we know that the rain water goes down the grate, but then we have no idea where it goes.”

Two particular battles shed light on the politics of Wisconsin's water. In 1985, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers extended regulatory protection to so-called isolated wetlands, arguing that even if they did not drain into a larger system, they were connected by the migratory birds that used them. In January 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this additional protection, opening an estimated one million acres of wetlands to development in Wisconsin alone. Though developers took quick advantage, conservationists of every stripe swung into action. Within four months, both houses of the legislature acted unanimously to protect these wetlands in Wisconsin.

This kind of consensus was conspicuously absent when Perrier came prospecting for a new source of spring water for its Ice Mountain label. The first site proffered by state development officials was just downstream from the Mecan Springs Natural Area, which the DNR had been safeguarding for years. When word leaked out, the reaction was strongly negative, and Perrier wisely backed off. Hundreds of other wells of similar capacity already operate in Wisconsin, but by the time Perrier was through studying Big Spring in Adams County, the opposition was intense enough to scare the company to Michigan.

Perrier essentially became a scapegoat, a victim of our failure to comprehensively manage water, argues planning professor Born. “Perrier is not an issue in and of itself,” he says. “It's a tip of an iceberg that speaks to the inadequacy in how we manage groundwater.”

To effectively make decisions in the future, he says, the state needs a larger framework that recognizes all of Wisconsin's waters as a complete system. “Not just an ecological system,” he explains, “but a competing system of users, a competing system of values, with people as part of the equation. The complexity is such that you can't solve the problems without dealing with it as an integrated system. How can we fashion our institutions, our rules, our policies, to address these kinds of complex questions?”

Regionalism is the only thing that can work, Born argues. “It's like having a problem in a marriage, and saying, 'I'm going to deal with it by myself,' ” he laughs. The solution isn't necessarily centralization and top-down decision-making, he says, but “finding ways of coordinating, communicating, resolving conflicts so that we can share both the bounty and the dilemmas.

“Conflict management is ultimately the key to water management.”

In an era of fiscal drought, it doesn't help that water will be more expensive. Since 1997, budget fights and shortfalls have taken 50 percent of the general- fund money used to enforce state water laws, even as regulatory tasks have grown to include the 1996 revision of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and new state stormwater standards. Additionally, the nationwide repair or replacement of drinking and wastewater facilities may cost as much as $1 trillion during the next two decades, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rain finally began to fall in southern Wisconsin in mid-September, bringing more than four inches during a single weekend — although, even with that, rainfall for the year was still be below normal. Friends, neighbors, and strangers all talked about the rain, and people walked the streets without slickers or umbrellas. More than once, I went outside, raised my face to the sky, and let the water wash away the worry. I felt a palpable weight lift from my heart, knowing I could relax about our trees, our potatoes, our lawns, and the stagnant Yahara River. Within twenty-four hours after the rain, everything shifted three shades deeper into green, and the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind took on softer, more luxuriant tones.

In dry country, rain is usually this kind of metamorphic event, as practically every living thing crowds through the window of opportunity and excess. Here in Wisconsin, the land of exuberant waterparks and fifteen thousand lakes, it felt like that kind of rain, signaling a change beyond the weekend forecast. But did it change how we think about water? Follow the water, and it will provide new answers.

“You're always synthesizing with water because you're drawing connections,” says the Wisconsin Academy's Curt Meine. “Can we find a new way to do things? Can we find a way to break out of the political battles of recent years? We have huge resources of people and scientific information. Can we bring the best science in the state to bear?”

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• Check out the current efforts in the Waters of Wisconsin project at the Wisconsin Academy.
• What's new in water studies? Find out at UW-Madison's Water Resource Institute.
• What makes water of the finest quality? The UW Extensioncan tell you.
• How should you celebrate the Year of Water?