Those of us on the east coast have heard that the Great Salt Lake has receded to the verge of a public health crisis, including because toxins in the sediment that have been underwater for millennia may soon may soon be widely spread air pollutants. Today I had the opportunity to visit the rapidly shrinking Great Salt Lake and hear from leading experts about what might be done about it. Much of what I heard surprised me. More importantly, some of the lessons learned in Utah are generally applicable to our still evolving response to our global climate emergency.
How much has the Great Salt Lake shrunk? In the modern era it has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its area. Of the 120 saline lakes on the planet, 100 are in decline and on average they have shrunk, on average, 60 percent. That means that as bad as things are at the Great Salt Lake, there are many other places where things are worse.
Contrary to popular belief, while a warming climate is a contributing cause of this decline, it is not the main cause. The main cause is that water has been diverted from the historic tributaries to the Great Salt Lake for other uses, primarily agriculture which is responsible for 72 percent of Utah’s water consumption. Those diversions have been occurring since Brigham Young arrived in Utah in the 19th century.
Why does the shrinking of the lake matter? Well, in addition to the public health threat posed to the southwestern United States by the toxins in the sediment, the increased water salinity that comes with the Great Salt Lake being smaller is toxic to the brine shrimp that are essential to the survival of the tens of millions of migratory birds that make the lake home for part of the year on their way to and from other places in North and South America. The rapidly receding waters also pose a clear and present danger to other economically important activities including mineral extraction and tourism. One example of the broad range of negative impacts of the shrinking lake — snow in the mountains has been proven to melt faster as a result of the deposition of dust from the lake, shortening Utah’s economically important ski season.
I was of the prior impression that people in Utah didn’t appreciate the magnitude of the crisis at hand. I was wrong. The fact is that the Utah Legislature has taken numerous actions in recent years to reverse more than a century of momentum in the wrong direction. As a result of these actions there is cause for real optimism that the level of the Great Salt Lake will continue to rise though it will take decades to make lasting improvements.
And that brings me to the lessons of general applicability that I learned. As one local water law expert said, there is no silver bullet to end the Great Salt Lake crisis but there is silver buckshot. There is no one law that can be passed or one lawsuit that will be litigated that will immediately void the water rights that have resulted in Utah (and all of the other western states) using much more water than can sustainably be used. What the people of Utah have learned is that many interventions are necessary, all at the same time. And they’re implementing that lesson in real time. We all might consider whether we’re acting with the same ingenuity and urgency respecting our environmental challenges.
And I heard another important thing for the second time in a week. The biggest challenge in repairing the Great Salt Lake isn’t identifying what needs to be done. It is getting people to own what it will take to get water into the Great Salt Lake and why that matters. The necessary messaging is complicated because there is no one size fits all message and even if you’re doing it correctly, it isn’t immediately effective. I heard The Nature Conservancy’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, say something similar about decarbonization and resilience when she was in Boston last week.
The Great Salt Lake crisis became too big for the people of Utah to ignore. But their multifaceted approach to the crisis is impressive and left me wondering what we on the east coast might be able to do about our much different but equally serious environmental challenges, like the need to more quickly build renewable energy infrastructure and improve our resilience to GHG supercharged storm waters, if we acted with the same urgency.