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The Great Lakes Water Wars Spiral-Bound |

Peter Annin

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A fast-paced narrative about the people and underlying issues connected to the Great Lakes water wars

The Great Lakes are the largest system of freshwater lakes in the world and America's greatest freshwater resource. For over a century they have been the target of controversial diversion schemes designed to sell, send, or ship water to thirsty communities, sometimes far from the source. In part to protect the Great Lakes from overzealous entrepreneurship, the Great Lakes Compact was signed in 2008. Although the Compact fulfills that promise and ensures that Great Lakes water stays within the Basin, some would say it has only shifted the controversy closer to home. Now water diversion controversies of a different kind are some of the most fought-over environmental issues in the region. Will the water wars ever be settled?

Journalist Peter Annin delves deeply into the fraught history of water use in the Great Lakes region and recaps the story of the Chicago River diversion, which reversed the flow of the river, fundamentally transforming the Great Lakes ecosystem. A century later it remains "the poster child of bad behavior in the Great Lakes." Today, with growing communities and a warming climate, tensions over water use are high, and controversies on the perimeter of the Great Lakes Basin are on the rise. In this new and expanded edition of The Great Lakes Water Wars, Annin shares the stories of New Berlin and Waukesha, two Wisconsin communities straddling the Basin boundary whose recent legal battles have tested the legislative strength of the newly signed Compact. Annin devotes a new chapter to the volatile issue of the invasive Asian carp--a voracious species that reproduces at a disturbing rate--which is transforming the ecology of the river as it makes its way through the Chicago River diversion and ever closer to Lake Michigan.

With three new chapters and significant revisions to existing chapters that bring the story up-to-date over the past decade, this is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of the people and stories behind hard-fought battles to protect this precious resource that makes the region so special for the millions who call it home.
Publisher: Island Press
Original Binding: Paperback
Pages: 384 pages
ISBN-10: 1610919920
Item Weight: 1.3 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 1.0 x 9.0 inches
"For those who love the Great Lakes and seek to understand the politics of water, this book is a must-read. It depicts the threats to the lakes and tells the story of how local leaders and citizens came together to protect the waters from diversion and manage their use for the benefit of future generations."
-Bob Taft, former Governor of Ohio (R); and former Co-Chair of the Council of Great Lakes Governors
A veteran conflict and environmental journalist, Peter Annin spent more than a decade reporting on a wide variety of issues for Newsweek. For many years he specialized in coverage of domestic terrorism and other conflicts, including the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and the Branch Davidian standoff outside Waco, Texas. He has also spent many years writing about the environment, including droughts in the Southwest, hurricanes in the Southeast, wind power on the Great Plains, and the causes and consequences of the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico.

After his time at Newsweek, Annin became associate director of the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, a nonpartisan national nonprofit that organizes educational fellowships for midcareer environmental journalists. In September 2006 he published his first book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, which has been called the definitive work on the Great Lakes water diversion controversy, and received the Great Lakes Book Award for nonfiction in 2007. From 2010 to 2015 Annin served as managing director of the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative, which targets the interrelated problems of invasive species, land use, and climate change, focusing on their synergistic impacts on water resources.

In 2018, Annin published an extensively revised and updated edition of Water Wars which was recognized with a Great Lakes Leadership Award in Communication Excellence from the Great Lakes Protection Fund in 2020.

He currently serves as director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and a master's in international affairs from Columbia University in New York.