Great Lakes could be region of troubled waters, writer warns

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Former Newsweek correspondent Peter Annin covered some of the country's biggest stories of the 1990s, including the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas; Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City; and the capture of the violent Montana hermit Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. But none of these tales captured Annin's attention as did the pitch by an obscure Canadian company to haul away Lake Superior tanker by tanker to Asia at a rate of about 150 million gallons a year. That 1998 proposal sank after a public outcry, but it got Annin thinking about the Great Lakes and the prospects for future diversions. It got him thinking: Somebody should write a book about this. "The Great Lakes Water Wars" is now in stores and receiving good reviews as an excellent primer for getting up to speed on what could be one of the region's most important - and contentious - issues in the coming decades. Annin spoke with reporter Dan Egan from Annin's office in Madison, where he is an associate director of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=527553