By Ron Meader, MinnPost

First of two parts.

At long last the precedent-setting bid by Waukesha, Wisconsin, to draw drinking water from Lake Michigan is formally in line for approval by all – or rejection by at least one – of the governors whose eight states make up the Great Lakes Compact, including Minnesota’s Mark Dayton.

This is a very big deal and the outcome couldn’t be more in doubt, according to Peter Annin, who you could fairly say wrote the book on conflicts over our continent’s most precious freshwater resource: “The Great Lakes Water Wars,” published in 2006.

I reached Annin, a former Newsweek correspondent, at his new office at Northland College, where he is teaching and also working on a second edition of  “Water Wars” – necessarily a complete rewrite, he said, in order to address the work of the compact since its inception in 2008, and especially “the super-historical moment in Great Lakes water management” that the Waukesha decision will occasion in the next six months. For more visit MinnPost.