Great Lakes

• In the U.S., most consumers take clean and available fresh water for granted, and water usually becomes front-page news only when there’s a crisis.
• But seeing water problems as only environmental disasters does not capture the deeply interconnected nature of water in our society.
• The edited text and video clips below convey one or two of the key points each speaker made.

Rosalyn LaPier, Professor of History, University of Illinois

• The Taos Pueblo, for example, spent almost an entire century fighting for the Blue Lake in New Mexico because it was a sacred site.
• They wanted to protect not just the lake but also the watershed of the lake, which they succeeded in doing.
• Read more:
  For Native Americans, a river is more than a 'person,' it is also a sacred place

Burke Griggs, Professor of Law, Washburn University

• Agriculture uses anywhere between 80% and 95% of the water that exists in the West.
• Rivers are just the icing on the cake of groundwater supplies, winter snowpack and reservoir storage.
• That in turn encourages them to pump more water to meet their bank loans and their other financial commitments.
• Most water rights have an annual limit, and if you allow more variability there, then I think that gets us a long way.
• Read more:
  Farmers are depleting the Ogallala Aquifer because the government pays them to do it

Gabriel Filippelli, Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences and Executive Director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute

• It showed that a lot of our water systems are not particularly resilient because we built them for 1920 and not for today or tomorrow.
• Flooding causes the redistribution of harmful algal blooms and pathogens like E. coli in waterways, which are very harmful.
• Unfortunately, a lot of water infrastructure is not built based on our understanding of water today.
• The US$2 billion upgrade to Indianapolis’ water infrastructure was built for the extreme rainfall events that we had in the year 2000.

Andrea Gerlak, Director at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Professor in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona

• Since the pandemic, we’ve seen South Africa make a large investment at the city scale around water access and sanitation.
• It’s been imperfect, but we’ve seen some pretty good developments made by Australia’s First Nations to achieve their appropriate water allocations through a legal process.
• In the U.S., Tucson has won awards for its green infrastructure and, along with Los Angeles, views stormwater as a resource.
• There are shining moments here and there, but there’s not any perfect package or perfect city.
• Andrea K. Gerlak has received funding from NOAA, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, Lloyd's Register Foundation, and Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation.