HOUGHTON – Water has always been crucial to Michigan’s economy, says John Austen, providing blue highways for voyageurs and ore freighters and waterfront homes for the heavy industry that drove growth for most of the 20th century.

Austen, director of the Michigan Economic Center and president of the State Board of Education, spoke Tuesday at Michigan Tech as part of World Water Day celebrations.

Tomorrow’s state economy should also float on the crests of Great Lakes waves, he said, using the state’s greatest resource in new ways – as a focus for water-based research and development and as an aesthetic resource for cities in the future.

“The Great Lakes are a huge engine for sustaining our economy, here and in the world,” he said, noting that one in five Michigan jobs is directly involved with the state’s water resources.

Michigan Tech civil and environmental engineering professor Noel Urban introduced Austen. Traditionally, Urban said, Michigan has looked at water as a resource for consumption, with a focus on short-term economic results. Austen, he said, has been involved in research, advocacy and educational leadership that points the state in a different direction, toward sustainable use that can still drive the economy.

“He’s led the idea of blue economy, which is a multi-state idea,” Urban said.

The key to this new blue economy, said Austen, is cleaning up the damage done by past generations. Years ago, he said, he was part of a study that considered the economic value of cleaning up the Great Lakes.

The study found each dollar spent on cleanup returned $3 to $4 in future economic value, he said. That information has encouraged government to invest in clean water, even in lean economic times.

That’s one area water research comes in, he said. Michigan already has several academic water research centers, he said, including Tech’s own Great Lakes Research Center.

Those centers are educating the professionals at the forefront of commercial water-use research, he said, like the engineers developing Whirlpool’s net-zero water use kitchen appliances in Benton Harbor.

They also do much of the key ecological research themselves, working on ecological protection and crucial water-use problems like the California water shortage.

“You all are solving all the world’s problems, right here,” Austen said. “People ask me about these things and I say, ‘Don’t worry, Tech’s working on it.'”