Letter to the editor: water

Letter to the editor: water, Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 27, 2015
Author: Barbara Draper

Take a lesson from Waukesha, and guard our lakes and rivers

Thank you for running the front-page story (“Great Lakes water spigot tightening,” Aug. 26) about Waukesha, a town in Wisconsin “once famous for its bubbling natural springs.” Alas, no longer. Now Waukesha is known as the town that let its God-given clean aquifers become contaminated and didn’t clean up its act. Instead it went into wishful thinking: The city could take water from the Great Lakes.

Let’s make “Waukeshaing” a verb, meaning “to let your state’s or city’s clean aquifers become contaminated and hope a new clean water source bails you out.”

Are we Waukeshaing in Minnesota — famous for our 10,000 lakes, famous as the keeper of the headwaters of the Mississippi River and Lake Superior — when we allow oil pipelines and oil trains to run through our 10,000 lakes and over the Mississippi to refineries located at the head of Lake Superior?

Are we Waukeshaing when we allow large-scale agricultural runoff to contaminate our lakes and streams?

We, the keepers of the Great Lakes watershed.

Barbara Draper, Minneapolis