On both sides of the causeway, water stretched out as far as the eye could see. The car sped along, straight as an arrow. A loud rush of wind blew in through the open window, tangling up my hair and bringing with it the distinctive smell of salt. I sat up as tall as I could — at 11, I was still too short to sit without a car seat — and squinted out the window. It was my first time seeing this place, and I wanted to make sure not to miss a minute.
Yes, there it was, coming into view: the great clouds of brine flies rising off its shores, its rocks older than even the bottom of the Grand Canyon — Antelope Island, what the Gosuite called Pa’ri-bi-na, the elk breeding place. It sits in the middle of Pi’a-pa, “the great water,” also known as Ti’tsa-pa, “the bad tasting water.”
Great and bad-tasting indeed. The Great Salt Lake, “America’s Dead Sea,” is an extraordinary thing: a fossil remnant of the enormous prehistoric Lake Bonneville, host to the massive earthwork sculpture “Spiral Jetty,” and one of the saltiest lakes in the world. To me, it was also a playground. It’s one of the few places on Earth where you can find brine shrimp, a small translucent sea monkey that can survive in extraordinarily salty water. On my first trip to the lake, I took brine shrimp cysts home with me and kept them in 2-liter soda bottles on my shower floor until the stench of the salt lake induced my mom to ban brine shrimp pets permanently.
Millions of migratory birds make the lake wetlands their home, and on a lucky day, you’ll see a falcon wheeling regally overhead. The lake is divided by the causeway; the southern side is dominated by cyanobacteria, tinging it blue-green, while the northern side is dominated by dunaliella salina, creating a striking red-purple color. There is no waterway out of the lake: It loses water by evaporation, so it only gets saltier and saltier. Antelope Island is also one of the last places in America still home to wild bison. And once you’ve seen a sunset at the lake, with a great pink cloud rolling onto the snow-capped mountains, mirrored in perfect reflection in the waters, no other sunset will measure up.
In January 2022, my first time returning to Utah since the start of the pandemic, I took my college roommate to Antelope Island. He’d never been out west before, and I was excited to show him this extraordinary piece of American wilderness. But as we rolled down the causeway, it became clear that something was very, very wrong. Somehow, what I remembered as blue stretches of water had become dried-out salt with a thin crust of ice. As we drove on, both sides of the lake continued to be dried out. This wasn’t right — where had it gone?
My high school friend, who had agreed to take us there, told us solemnly that several bays of the lake were completely dry. In two years since I had last visited Utah, the lake had hit a record-low water level. “Why?” I asked her. “What happened?”
My friend hit the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “It’s the goddamn alfalfa.”
The freshwater that normally flows into the lake is being diverted on a massive scale. Much of the media coverage of the lake has focused on residential water use, but the statistics suggest that agriculture is the bigger culprit: According to Deseret News, “Research from the Utah Division of Water Resources states that municipal and industrial water use accounts for only 11% of water use in the Wasatch Front. That translates to approximately 1.3 feet of estimated decrease in the Great Salt Lake’s water level. Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for 63% of the area’s water use. Aka, a 7-foot drop in the lake’s water level.”
Of course, it’s politically difficult to ask farmers to stop using water if they depend on the food they grow. But that’s not the situation. Instead, most of this water is being used by alfalfa farms, which grow hay to export to the Middle East and China; some of the largest farms aren’t even locally owned. These sales bring some short-term benefit, but they suck up enormous quantities of water. This diversion is destroying one of America’s great landscapes — in addition to a very valuable economic resource.
Beyond its role in supporting one of the world’s few inland saltwater ecosystems, the lake is also responsible for 14% of worldwide magnesium and 35-45% of global brine shrimp production. It’s also vitally responsible for at least 10% of Salt Lake City’s precipitation through lake-effect precipitation, where the warm lake heats air, causing it to rise and form clouds and thus precipitation. In a state where the economy depends heavily on ski tourism, this snow is essential. In fact, when tourism, the brine shrimp industry, and salt extraction are taken into account, the lake generates $1.3 billion dollars per year.
And now? The brine shrimp may not be reproducing. The microbialites are dying en masse. The exposed lakebed dust blows onto the snowpack, causing it to melt faster and accelerating the vicious circle of drought. And the dust also may have high mercury and arsenic levels. Dust blowing across Salt Lake City will not only elevate the risk of asthma but could also raise the risk of cancer due to exposure to toxins. These dust storms won’t just be a little inconvenience — they will be a catastrophe. Think Dust Bowl; think John Steinbeck.
In March 2022, the Utah legislature finally took action by passing HB410, a bill devoting $40 million to protecting the lake, but the bill is still not a long-term solution to lake dry-up. It empowers a temporary conservation trust to acquire water rights to the lake for 10 years: An important step in the right direction, but one which needs to be expanded and made permanent. Other bills have removed the “use it or lose it” policy for those with water rights (another vital policy), as well as increasing funding for lake research and promoting coordination among water agencies. But activists insist that this action on the lake must be paired with action on the business side: Farmers must be incentivized to switch from alfalfa, grown for agricultural and grazing purposes, to food, and developments like the Bear River project, a dam which will drop lake level by more than four feet, must be stopped. The legislature must find other methods of meeting Utah’s increasing water demand: methods that will be sustainable in the long term.
Why hasn’t the Utah legislature stopped the Bear River development? Why, as my high school friend bitterly recalled, did Governor Spencer J. Cox post on his social media asking Utahns to “pray for rain” while continuing to encourage the diversion of lake waters? It’s true that the traditional pro-business attitude of the Utah government is imperiling the environment. But it’s also imperiling the economy. The lake is vital to Utah’s continued economic growth, as well as human health and well-being, which come with their own economic costs.
The organization Save Our Great Salt Lake outlines five steps to save the lake, some of which the legislature has begun to take action on, and others of which will require more action. The first is reducing the diversion of water and allowing more water to flow to the lake. The legislature’s devotion of $40 million to purchasing water rights for conservation is a big step in the right direction but should be expanded and made permanent. The second is opposing the Bear River development project. The third is an incentive: offering a lower water rate to farmers growing local food instead of alfalfa. The fourth is common sense and involves requiring developers to implement water metering, a goal partly reached by the passage of a bill on secondary water metering. The last is adjusting water pricing to reflect true cost: for example, by charging golf courses and large buildings higher water costs. Most importantly, all of these steps ought to be permanent instead of expiring after 10 years. The lake dry-up is not a one-time emergency, but rather an ongoing threat that must be continuously managed in the age of climate change.
Although some of these steps might be unpopular with affected businesses, they could help support local farmers and could even result in lower water prices for the average Utahn by shifting the cost of protecting the Great Salt Lake onto water-guzzling companies and luxury enterprises. Other solutions such as a new type of soil farming can turn the struggle to save the lake into an opportunity to build a more sustainable and more innovative farming economy.
The Great Salt Lake could become a familiar environmental story: a few people selling our collective future to make fast profits now. That’s what happened to the Aral Sea, and what happened to Owen Lake just 100 miles away in Los Angeles. But it’s not too late for the Great Salt Lake — and farmers of the Rocky Mountains region have a better record than one might expect on issues of shared ownership. The lake is remarkably resilient, just like the creatures that tolerate its extra-salty conditions, and if the Utah legislature takes lasting action to protect its flow of water, the Great Salt Lake can bounce back and provide centuries more enjoyment and value to humans and wildlife alike.
This article was originally written in March 2022.
Featured image by Ruston Jones is licensed under the Unsplash License.
