The loss of the Great Salt Lake would be an environmental disaster with health and economic effects far beyond Utah’s borders. The state is taking action, but critics say it’s not doing enough.
By Leia Larsen | The New York Times and The Salt Lake Tribune
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.
Editor’s note: Leia Larsen is a reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune. She spent a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining the intersection of politics and environmental issues.
Three years ago, when Utah’s Great Salt Lake was at its lowest levels, state lawmakers were alarmed enough to try what may be impossible: save the lake from drying up.
If Utah succeeds, it would be the first place in the world to reverse a saline lake’s decline. The salt lake — the largest in the Western Hemisphere — once covered an area larger than Rhode Island. Today, more than half its water is gone. About 800 square miles of lake bed sits exposed, baking in the desert heat, sometimes billowing toxic dust plumes across the state’s urban core.
“Fast crises often get more attention than slow crises,” said Brian Steed, the state’s newly appointed Great Salt Lake commissioner, tasked with developing a strategic plan for the lake. “And in this case, it’s been a slow crisis until 2022, when we realized how dire the situation was.”
That year, Joel Ferry, then a lawmaker in the Utah House of Representatives, called for emergency action, saying the depleted lake was an “environmental nuclear bomb.” A flurry of bills overhauled water laws dating to the pioneer era.
But the measures the state is pursuing will take decades to reap results, if ever. Critics now say the pace and scale of the efforts must greatly increase. What is at stake, they warn, is a public health disaster, the collapse of an ecosystem that supports millions of migrating birds, and a devastating blow to the state’s tourism, skiing, mining and real estate industries.
The effects would reach far beyond Utah. Minerals from the lake are used in America’s beverage cans and in fertilizer for much of the world’s organic fruits and nuts. The lake’s brine shrimp eggs support a global seafood industry. Dust laden with arsenic and other heavy metals could blow across other states. And as climate change intensifies drought across the West, it would also bring accelerated evaporation of the lake.
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