Water security, even in the Great Lakes, can be complicated
April 7, 2026 - Stephen Gasteyer
MSU Sociology Associate Professor Stephen Gasteyer wrote this article for Crain's Detroit Business outlining water security risks in Michigan and other Great Lakes states. The original article can be found here: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/forum/cdb-forum-lake-erie-opinion-msu-20260323/
When I ask my students about water security risks in the U.S., they invariably want to talk about the desert Southwest states such as Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, where years of drought and water overuse have led to severe water supply shortages.
But did you know that the US Census estimates that almost 13,500 households in Michigan, and almost 120,000 households in the Great Lakes states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, lack access to complete plumbing facilities? In other words, they lack access to hot and cold running water, a bath or shower, or an indoor toilet. Research has shown that the vast majority of these households have substandard or inadequate infrastructure.
The late scholar Karen Bakker defined water security as “an acceptable level of water-related risks to humans and ecosystems, coupled with the availability of water of sufficient quantity and quality to support livelihoods, national security, human health, and ecosystem services.” For experts in the subject, achieving water security means thinking about water infrastructure and governance as well as supply.
Unpacking that definition can guide us to understand how to address water security in the Great Lakes.
Despite the abundance of water in our freshwater seas, this region is not immune to drought, flooding or threats to water quality and water quantity. Yet water is also a key part of the culture of the Great Lakes – where we swim, sunbathe, fish, hunt, boat. The Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes (which includes the peoples of the Anishinaabe three fires confederation of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, the Menominee, the Dakota and Lakota Sioux peoples), consider water to be part of their community, including serving as habitat for aquatic non-human relations that are critical to ceremonies.
Water security, then, is about mitigating the risks to water quality and quantity to maintain vibrant economies, and social, cultural and ecological integrity.
Risks to water quality
The Great Lakes region has struggled to control pollution of our waterways. Long-term studies document sporadic improvements in response to public health and natural resources crises such as typhoid outbreaks and fish kills. The Cuyahoga River burning because it was so polluted in the 1960s helped lead to the Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972 and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), signed by the U.S. and Canada in 1972 and most recently updated in 2012. They created mechanisms for water quality governance and regulation.
The GLWQA and the CWA have mitigated significant industrial pollution and its toxic legacy in the Great Lakes and tributaries, including treating sediment laden with PCBs and other contaminants. Still, legacy contaminants remain a concern both in surface and groundwater systems. Under the GLWQA, the environmental agencies in each of the Great Lakes states and provinces have designated 14 river systems in Michigan (43 in all states and provinces) as “Areas of Concern” because their contamination flows into the Great Lakes. Much of the contamination is from nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients, largely from agricultural runoff. Visible impacts on both the Great Lakes and inland lakes include harmful algae blooms.
At the municipal level, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has authorized 158 communities to use combined sewer overflows where combined storm water and sewage systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater directly into waterways annually. Individual household wastewater management presents a more insidious problem, as household septic systems are too often non-functional. Failing onsite wastewater can lead to contamination of waterways, but fixing the problem may exceed the financial capacity of individual homeowners.
Much more prominent in the news are risks to water quality from energy conveyance and production. Plans for pipelines, such as Line 3 (in Wisconsin and Minnesota) and Line 5 (which runs under Lakes Huron and Michigan), both of which would ship Canadien Tar Sands oil, have garnered significant opposition from Great Lakes Tribal and non-governmental advocacy organizations for decades because of the risk to water quality and ecological integrity of a spill.
Water quantity
Within the Great Lakes region, one might think water availability would not be a problem. But groundwater has been a growing concern. Proposals to export water from the Great Lakes led to the passage of the 2008 Great Lakes Compact. The Compact limits transfers of waters outside the Great Lakes basin, with notable exceptions for bottled water and to communities in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Groundwater, it turns out, is very important to the hydrology and ecological integrity of the Great Lakes. It is estimated 40% to 75% of residents in the region get drinking water from groundwater. Yet there is increasing competition and concern about overuse due to: 1) increasingly wet springs accompanied by dry summers, leading to increase in irrigation demand for agriculture; 2) mining for critical minerals, specifically though not exclusively associated with green energy mining; and 3) the siting of data centers around communities in the region. Advocacy organizations argue that without action to improve groundwater management, these trends could pose risks to water security.
On the other hand, flooding has been a disruptive reoccurrence in cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, in part due to aging infrastructure but also increasing precipitation as the climate changes. Flooding is also an increasing problem for farmers, who have increased drainage of farmland over time. While drainage is important, without mitigation measures it can increase transport of nitrate and phosphorus into waterways.
Water security and water for people
Water security must be understood as a way of ensuring water justice. Drinking water is conveyed through infrastructure. Wastewater infrastructure ensures that water used for hygiene does not poison downstream water and land. The Flint water crisis and extensive water service shutoffs in Detroit demonstrate that misguided political forces can hinder household water security.
For the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes, water is living and provides habitats for non-human relatives and a place for sacred practices. Water security, then, is not just about trade-offs between economic benefits. It is about how to repair and preserve the integrity of water as part of our culture.
We must not take water for granted or blithely presume that our gift of living in the glory and abundance of 20% of the world’s fresh water means we can be cavalier.
The governments of the Great Lakes must recognize our successes in reversing the despoiling of the Great Lakes in the early 20th century and take action to protect and improve the integrity of water for the benefit of ourselves and future generations.
Stephen Gasteyer is an associate professor of sociology, and affiliated faculty with the Michigan State University Institute for Water Research and the MSU Water Alliance. He has researched various aspects of water and society since the mid-1990s.