Wednesday, June 29th
7:00‐8:00PM
 Madeline Island Museum

Free and Open to the Public

Water Tension and the Great Lakes Compact 

Speaker: Peter Annin, Director Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College and author of The Great Lakes Water Wars.   

The presentation delves into the long history of political maneuvers and water diversion schemes that have proposed sending Great Lakes water everywhere from Akron to Arizona. 

Peter Annin, Director Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College and author of The Great Lakes Water Wars.

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 the radical right, 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, forest fires in the mountain West, recovery efforts on the Great Lakes, 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 Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, a nonpartisan national nonprofit that organizes educational fellowships for mid-career 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. In 2007 the book received the Great Lakes Book Award for nonfiction. 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.

Since 2004 Annin has served as the volunteer executive director of Gull Rock Lightkeepers, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring Gull Rock Lighthouse, a storied Lake Superior light two and a half miles off Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University in New York.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Apostle Islands Area Community Fund.