“Do you know how hard it is to be ideologically so out of touch with reality that you’ve concluded Michigan could run out of water?” former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told a Michigan state chamber of commerce gathering in 2005 after he learned there was a controversy in the state about allowing bottled Great Lakes water to leave the basin. His audience chuckled. Nobody in the room that day, apparently, made mention of the Aral Sea, the Ogallala Aquifer or Waukesha’s once “bottomless” mineral springs.
