The answer from the perspective of U.S. law is that those who live around it along with future generations do.  This is the central premise of Public Trust Law that holds local residents to be the owners of surface water and their elected officials as the trustees of this valuable legacy.  The decisions that elected officials make about shared water should benefit the public and ensure its viable future.

Indigenous traditions do not see water as something that can be owned by the public or by anyone else.  Instead water is a life-giving mother and a relative who sustains you and whose health you treat with great care.  From this perspective, water, fish, trees and other living things are relatives who should not be harmed or commodified.

Whatever your perspective on water, it is something on which your life depends and your community requires for self-protection and future possibilities.  By reclaiming it, you can assert your right or your relationship with water and engage ways of preserving it and adopting practices of mutual benefit.

Lake Michigan and sources of drinking water across the planet face three main perils:

1. Industrial pollution (also known as point source pollution): pours in through a pipe or when a factory or refinery malfunctions and spills.  The Clean Water Act limits the piped pollution that factories can dump in water.  Although we are rarely informed of them, spills are fairly frequent.  This can lead to chemical exposure and public health risks about which the public knows little.

A group of Lake Michigan surfers, for example, became sick through exposure to hexavalent chromium from an U.S. Steel factory spill. They took matters into their own hands and initiated a struggle with the corporation to limit its pollution of Lake Michigan.  

2. Runoff (also known as non-point source pollution): You may have noticed the changing nature of rainstorms.  Due to climate change, precipitation can take the form of a rain event in which a high volume of rain falls in a short period of time and overwhelms the built environment. Think of the trash and the oil slicks on the street, rain can wash this into your drinking water. 

An even more serious form of runoff comes from industrial agriculture, which looks to eke the highest yield and profits out of the lowest investment. This occurs largely through the application of fertilizers that spur growth with concentrated nitrogen and phosphorus. As the building blocks of life, nitrogen and phosphorus cause plants to grow rapidly. When the rain carries them into bodies of water, they fuel harmful algal blooms that can make water undrinkable and inaccessible.

When it comes to animal agriculture, we are seeing the rise of Concentrated Area Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where meat and dairy products are produced by concentrating the highest number of animals in the smallest area. In order to keep yields high, these animals are often pumped with antibiotics and steroids. Furthermore, untreated animal urine and feces run into rivers and lakes, contaminating drinking water and contributing to harmful algal blooms. You can also learn more about CAFOs and advocate to keep CAFOs out of your watershed.

3. Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO): Rain meets underground with the water used in homes and businesses when there is a combined sewer system like in Chicago. When all the water sent down the drain meets with water from a rain event, it can quickly exceed the caverns and quarries built to hold it. There is nowhere else for the water to go but up into streets and basements or out through outfall pipes into the river and lake. During severe rain events, a plume of untreated sewage can feather out from the Chicago River into the Lake Michigan water supply.

We can keep water clean through regulation of pollution at the federal, state, city and neighborhood levels. Although environmental regulation has recently been politicized, the signature Clean Water Act was born of bipartisan agreement that safe water benefits everyone.  Resist a deregulatory agenda that looks to confer yet more money to a handful of industrialists at the expense of the greater good. States have the right to implement water regulations that surpass the federal Clean Water Act. It is high time to do so around the Great Lakes!