The Western US is having a water crisis that will directly affect millions of people as drought and climate change lower rivers and water tables and raise the price of water. Too many people are trying to use a diminishing water supply and some of them are taking far more than their share. While the crisis mainly affects people trying to share the rapidly declining Colorado River, Utah is having a full-blown emergency with the Great Salt Lake drying up for the same reasons the Colorado River is fading away. What can we learn from the Utah crisis?
Utah’s Great Salt Lake has no outlet and is the largest saltwater lake in the Western hemisphere. Water flows into the lake from streams from the Wasatch Mountains then evaporates in the hot sun with nowhere to go. The lake is a remnant of a much larger body of water that existed in the Pleistocene when the West was colder and wetter with glaciers in the mountains. Since 1983, when the Great Salt Lake over-filled with water from bulging streams that flooded freeways and subdivisions, the lake has been declining to the point where people today worry it could dry up completely in the very near future.
Today the lake is at its lowest point in modern history. Large areas of dry lakebed produce large clouds of toxic dust when the wind blows, and those clouds pollute Salt Lake City and its extensive suburbs where a million people live. Not only is the dust filled with poisonous arsenic and lead, but the drying lake could also threaten the skiing industry in Utah that depends on lake-effect snows in the Wasatch Mountains just east of Salt Lake.
The Great Salt Lake has been relatively stable for tens of thousands of years, supporting a huge population of tiny brine shrimp which in turn support 10 million migrating water birds that feed on the shrimp. With less and less water flowing into the lake, the salinity of the lake water is increasing to levels that will be dangerous to the brine shrimp. If the shrimp die, the lake will no longer support migrating bird populations which will have a ripple effect on specific bird populations across the Americas. Already, all bird populations in North America are in serious decline.
Great Salt Lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area since 2016. Without drastic measures to increase flow of water into the lake, it will continue to dry.
What’s the problem? Why is the lake drying up?
It turns out Great Salt Lake is fading away for the same reason the Colorado River is at its lowest level in modern history – overuse of water by agriculture and to a lesser degree by cities. Throughout the Southwest, hay and alfalfa farms are using most of the water from desert rivers like the Colorado and the Rio Grande. Research shows that 46% of the Colorado River’s water goes to watering feed crops for cattle. The same amount goes to growing cow feed in the Great Salt Lake watershed, even with explosive human population growth placing new demands on diminishing streams. Only 9% of the water in the Great Salt Lake watershed goes to urban uses.
At the same time, warmer temperatures caused by climate change increase evaporation everywhere including from the lake, from farm fields, and from mountain snowpack. Agriculture in the West needs 20% more water than it did 15 years ago because of evaporation.
North of Salt Lake, the broad Cache Valley has long been covered with alfalfa farms that produce feed for dairies. When Utah was a rural state with a small population, such farming made little difference. But with cities rapidly growing, even in the Cache Valley itself, the water thirsty cattle industry is taking far more than its share of water. The mountains produce about 3.1 million acre-feet of water per year. About two-million-acre feet go to growing cow feed.
Utah is Mormon country, and the Mormon religion tells its followers to have large families. Growing Mormon populations have been supplemented by many immigrants as the computer industry established new centers in Salt Lake City. Overall, Utah has the highest water consumption rate per capita in the West, and its cities waste water on lawns and inefficient buildings.
While all those Utah moms putting plastic jugs of milk on the breakfast table may seem to be the root of the problem, the actual issue is where dairy products are produced. Growing cattle feed in a desert during a protracted, possibly permanent drought makes little sense when large areas of the United States have ample water for growing thirsty crops like alfalfa.
Utah farmers protest that alfalfa farming is a critical economic activity, even as alfalfa fields are being bought up and covered with acres of houses build close together. Utah’s governor Spencer Cox is a republican farmer and rancher who dismisses Brigham Young University science that shows that Great Salt Lake could dry in five years. He calls that research a joke and says that we have more than twenty years to solve the problem.
Utah farmers agree and though they are deploying more efficient irrigation systems with state help, their system of water rights gives them every incentive to use as much water as possible. Ranching and farming are part of the mystique of conservative states like Utah, part of the identity of a conservative culture that is fast being replaced by outsiders and the cyber economy.
With agriculture and state government refusing to effectively address the clash between the old economy and the new with its huge economic and public health implications, lawsuits from environmentalists may force major change in Utah. Led by the Center for Biological Diversity and public health advocates, Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, recently sued the state saying that the republican dominated government is violating the Public Trust Doctrine by allowing Great Salt Lake to die.
The Public Trust Doctrine is a key pilar of American law. It holds that there things that are the common property of all people, things that are common to all and cannot be privately held. For example, breathable air, flowing water, democracy and the voting process. These are things that the government, at whatever level must maintain and protect as a core responsibility on an intergenerational level. The environmental attorneys contend that that Great Salt Lake is such a public trust.
The state of Utah appropriates water to agriculture and the lawsuit contends that the state must reduce agricultural water supplies so that adequate water flows restore Great Salt Lake to protect this public value. The lawsuit lays out specific amounts of water that should reside in the lake to preserve bird populations, stop toxic dust from afflicting urban areas, and protect industries like skiing and mining that depend on a healthy lake.
This is an old story. A few people engaged in an industrial activity threaten the broader interests of the society as a whole. In this case the alfalfa farmers are using more than their share of water to make money and help provide dairy products to people. They have powerful political allies which block an easy or obvious solution.
When livestock producers damage watersheds or the biological potential of public lands with their cattle, we strive to buy them out, so they are compensated to stop damaging the public trust. (Those buyouts are extremely difficult to achieve in our political system.) A similar approach may be needed to shut down ranching in the Cache Valley of Utah so that the public can have the water needed to fill the Great Salt Lake.
The Salt Lake Crisis is yet another example about how livestock production in the arid west is an inappropriate activity. Yes, some moms want to give their children cow milk but that milk needs to be produced in wet environments like Iowa or Wisconsin or Mississippi, not in a place with less than 10 inches of rain per year. Dairy and beef production throughout the arid west faces the same reality. It uses large amounts of water and needs to be moved elsewhere so that our increasingly scarce waters can go to people, wildlife, and the sustenance of our common natural world.
