When Peter Annin, director of the Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College, was completing research for an updated version of his book The Great Lakes Water Wars, he discovered a detail about Great Lakes water diversions that had gone unnoticed for eight years. According to his findings, the…
…At issue with both Waukesha and Foxconn is an exemption that allows limited diversions outside the basin for “a group of largely residential customers that may also serve industrial, commercial, and other institutional operators.” Waukesha, a city of 70,000 west of Milwaukee, lies fully outside the basin but is within…
…to send water over the basin to Mount Pleasant, largely to supply the $10 billion Foxconn Technology Group manufacturing complex currently under construction. Authors of the compact, privately, can’t agree on whether the DNR’s decision to approve water for Foxconn satisfies requirements of the agreement, said Peter Annin, author of…
Governors from all eight Great Lakes states had to sign off before Waukesha, Wis., could siphon water out of Lake Michigan. When Foxconn Technology Group wanted to dip a straw into the lake for its new electronics factory west of Racine, the Taiwan-based company had to undergo a rigorous legal…
Island Press will release the second edition of Peter Annin’s The Great Lakes Water Wars later this fall. The Great Lakes Water Wars, originally released in 2006, is considered the definitive work on the Great Lakes water diversion controversy. In this new and expanded edition of the book, Annin explores…
…test came in 2010 when Waukesha applied for a straddling county diversion. Waukesha agreed to return 100% of the water, yet more than 11,000 comments streamed in, the vast majority of them opposed. In 2016, the Great Lakes governors unanimously approved Waukesha’s diversion of 8.2 million gallons per day, but…
