The Corn Latitudes

Illinois, we were told back in 2015, has water to burn, so to speak. As I write this in April of 2026, central Illinois is currently suffering what climatologists call Moderate to Extreme Drought with annual precipitation shortfalls in some counties ranging from eight to sixteen inches over the last year. Streamflows on major rivers like the Sangamon and Illinois are at near-record lows after a year that ranked as one of the top twenty driest years in Illinois history.

 

Just sayin’.

 

“It’s time we started cashing in.” So sayeth Richard C. Longworth in the Chicago Tribune recently. Longworth, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, was talking about Illinois’s abundant water. He noted that factories of all kinds located in water-short places such as California and the Southwest need most what Illinois has a lot of —water. “[S]ome far-sighted people,” Longworth assures us, “see it as the ticket to economic rebirth.”

 

Well, some far-sighted people see right-to-work zones as the ticket to economic rebirth or compulsory prayer as the ticket to moral rebirth. Both notions prove that the problem with being far-sighted is that you can’t clearly see things that are up close. For example, Longworth wonders, “What if Chicago didn’t have Lake Michigan?” Of course, Chicago doesn’t have Lake Michigan. The State of Illinois owns the lake bottom land that abuts it, but withdrawal of the water in the lake is limited by a compact between the eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces. That compact ratifies Chicago’s theft, beginning in 1900, of lake water to flush its polluted rivers; today the city is entitled to claim about 767 billion gallons of water a year and no more, for various purposes, including drinking water for nearly 200 communities including the City of Chicago.

 

Based on projections by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning,

Illinois’s demand for Lake Michigan water could exceed the currently available supply by the year 2050. Illinois could ask to increase its diversion, but any future diversions sought by one state are likely to be approved only if all Great Lakes states are allowed to do the same. That’s not merely a political problem;  not even the Great Lakes are bottomless. Yes, a few of the next-100-years climate models used at the Illinois State Climatologist Office project higher Lake Michigan levels, but most show lake levels dropping. (According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, lake water levels in January 2013 already were at an all-time low.) Longworth posits the universal use of technologies that return every drop of water used by industry to the lake as clean or cleaner than it was when it was removed. Alas, making clean-and-return a condition of development is costly, and likely to force industry to turn those covered wagons around and head back west.

 

Longworth is not alone in touting Illinois as an inexhaustible fountainhead. The other day Jim Schultz, the new head of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, told a legislative committee that his message to California manufacturers will be, “Come to our state, I’ll give you our water. We have unlimited water.”

 

I assume he was just talking, although if anyone would dare give away a natural resource it would be a Raunerite. Such a statement is arrogant; Schultz’s assertion that we have unlimited water is just plain wrong. Sure, it seems that way compared to California. But the water Schultz is offering other states would come from the Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio rivers, and river supplies are even more problematic than Lake Michigan’s. The Mississippi in 2013, remember, fell so low that barge navigation was all but impossible.

 

Nor do these Pollyannas reckon with climate change. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller noted in a recent blog post that the nine most drought-endangered states includes several, such as Texas, that are competing with Illinois for business. But climate scientists have been warning for years that Illinois’s capital city is going to have weather like Texas’s capital by the end of the century if trends continue at their current pace. 

 

Even now surface water availability in Illinois is highly variable from season to season, year to year, decade to decade. An 18-month drought in the 1950s left Lake Springfield shallow enough to walk across; only more efficient water use in the years since has prevented a recurrence. What if back-to-back severe droughts happen? Even lesser droughts occurring one after another can sap a local water system dry before it has a chance to recover from previous ones. While such events have always been possible during the Euro-American interregnum, it seems likely that they can, and thus probably will, become more severe or more frequent or both.

 

Illinois, the heartland of mud, go dry? Maybe not so far-fetched; Illinois used to have “limitless” forests, game, and fish too until it didn’t anymore, thanks to heedless exploitation. The happy fallacy that Illinois has unlimited water spares public officials having to contrive policies to manage it. If Illinois follows the example of water-short places like California or Australia, water will come to be regarded as a public, not a private, resource, with water bought and sold in markets regulated by the state under laws designed to return to the public a fair share of the revenue earned by exploiting it.

 

If it doesn’t? It is unlikely that Illinois will become a new Dust Bowl, but if it isn’t, it will be because nature, not government, exceeds our expectations. ●