I'd love to see more people move to the northern Midwest, but please, do this Chicagoan a favor, don't move to a damn' ex-urb. They are draining resources, water, etc. just as fast as the Sunbelt. There are plenty of inner-ring suburbs and nice city neighborhoods available. No, you won't have a large yard or a sprawling McMansion with all new appliances built last year (but then again you won't have to heat it either), but why would you want that anyway? I continue to be mystified by people who are buying up these ridiculous homes. Granted, I don't expect everyone to want to live like me (in a lovely little apartment 3 blocks from the subway), but just moving to the Midwest will do nothing to solve these problems if we continue to plow our prairies to put up subdivisions while letting the cities and inner ring suburbs rot.

donna from central georgia, if it does get too hot one summer, come on up to mich. watch for the black flies, but compared to georgia skeeters, nothing. and our poisonous snake is not deadly.

macon, ga..the L &H restaurant...oooh. in the winter..

born and raised in kalamazoo, michigan, i know full what what "right-wingers" are and they aren't hockey players. southwestern michigan's also ground zero for dominionism and blackwater. i'm proud of my home state too and touchy about the water rights, but the end of this essay just comes off as painful shilling for the pleasant penninsula--and associated third coast.

also, honestly, toronto and chicago are only alike in landforms.

commenters who chose to take the high road and be gracious to all those greedy Southerners & Westerners who want their water. Let it be said from this resident of central Georgia that Atlanta would be far more likely to come looking to us for water first than to you, as 20 years ago our water authority had the foresight to build a huge reservoir. So while we suffered this summer in excessive heat and drought, and were operating under Level 2 water restrictions (odd/even outside watering restrictions/bans on daytime watering) we never really had water problems.

While I abhor the over development in Atlanta, it should be noted that as recently as 2002 we had a Democratic governor and Democratic Speaker of the House who had plans(the state had purchased the land) to build several reservoirs to supply the needs of the Atlanta Metro area, which is huge. When Repubs gained total control the plans went kaput and the land was sold/turned over to developers.

Our state suffered droughts as bad in the early 80's and in the 50's: difference: far less people. And Atlanta is not a monolith governmentally which is an immense part of the problem: there is little regional control as there are multiple and overlapping local governments;what there is must come from the state government which is largely controlled by special interests, i.e. business and real estate. Instead of sniping at each other, vis-a-vis water and other commodities, we should collectively root out the special interests with deep pockets which have thus far prevented government at all levels from planning for the commom welfare and longterm well-being of all of us.

In the short term, it would be nice if consuming water bottled commercially would become as unfashionable and restricted as smoking cigarettes.

Michigan's protectiveness towards the Great Lakes reinforces what I've often thought--especially after seeing that map in 2004 that divided North America into "United States of Canada" and "Jesusland." Culturally people in the upper Midwest and the Northeast have much more in common with Canadians than with sunbelters.

But the Sunbelt and its lifestyle--especially the massive automobile dependency of it--bodes poorly for Canada's water supply even if it doesn't get piped south. The Alberta tar sands, currently being exploited to produce synthetic crude oil, are voracious consumers of water. Each barrel of synthetic crude comes with about two or three barrels of seriously polluted water (not to mention the natural gas we have to burn to produce the oil.) A bunch of one-sided trade treaties "negotiated" in the 1980's make it very difficult for us to not supply the U.S. with gasoline. The motoring addiction of sunbelters is driving a goodly chunk of the massive pollution of Western Canada's water.

So, to all those poor folks in Georgia and Phoenix and Vegas who can't keep their big-ass lawns and golf courses watered: Fuck y'all. Your greedy, stupid way of life (not to mention your neanderthal politics) has already inflicted enormous consequences and stripped the resources from people far away. Maybe you thought Jesus would come back and make the whole issue irrelevant before the chickens came home to roost but it turns out you were wrong.

I take comfort in the fact that, with the popping of the last suburban housing bubble, it's the big-ass suburban bungaloids of the sunbelt who will feel the triple whammy of peak oil, climate change and a collapse in property values first and hardest. In the future there will be a lot of need for farm labourers and people to dig coal out by hand--you know, the hard and dangerous way, the way they used to do it back before there were massive oil-fired machines to strip away mountain tops--and it's nice to know that a self-created horde of destitute losers will be the first to have to go down into the hole.

All trains lead to Chicago...(check a map if you've forgotten where that is). There are direct lines in constant use from Baltimore/NYC/Boston to Chicago (and points in between) and points north from there. The claim that the upper midwest Great Lake States are dependent on shipped goods from the south/SW is uninformed.

Reading about Michigan's environmental problems makes me sick. I live in Minnesota and we have some drought, unrestrained city growth and the slow degradation of our state forests. Water pollution is alive and well from small communities dumping sewage directly into the rivers and streams. And of course, there is corn pesticide and fertilizer runnoff. Hello, Louisiana dead zone! Stil, Michigan I think has us 'beat.'

But the point the Michiganders are making about bottled water depleting the aquifer seems to be 'easily' avoidable, if a politician actually stood up to a corporation. Desani, which is made by Atlanta's Coca Cola company, is taken from public water systems in Georgia, and then sold in plastic bottles at a profit to people who think their tap water is bad. (!!) Pepsi does the same thing with their 'water' product - using public water systems. And now Michigan is allowing this to happen on a massive scale under thieir own feet.

This robbing of the public's water is also going on in India on a massive scale. Bottled water should be outlawed.