The Great Salt Lake, largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, is rapidly dying from climate change and the drought that goes with it. Without major rescue efforts, it is estimated to have only five years left.
Such an eventuality would be disastrous, turning Salt Lake City and the rest of the Wasatch Front into a dust-and-arsenic-filled hellhole and triggering a mass exodus to other states.
Yet our Republican state Legislature refuses to face reality and do anything serious about it.
Do these business-oriented lawmakers and their patrons really not care about the health of this state and its 3.5 million inhabitants including their own progeny? Are they expecting the fabled seagulls of 1848 to return, this time not to devour crickets but to feast on poisoned dust, heavy metals and PM 2.5 particles?
It’s a mystery, compounded by the current flurry of development we see up and down the Wasatch Front. Why all this new construction if the entire Wasatch Front is doomed??
Given the apparent indifference of our legislators, we mere citizens can only speculate about the future of this beautiful state. For many, pessimism reigns. Many others seem to be in denial.
I myself am in that first group. Like most of our friends, my wife and I have even considered moving away.
Recently, however, I had one of those light-bulb moments where, as a Utah resident and activist for 33 years, a thought occurred to me: Maybe our state legislators are secretly counting on the federal government to come to the rescue. Such a move, while contrary to everything these states’ rights politicians stand for, would be in keeping with their closed-door style of decision-making.
Here’s why such a radical idea actually makes some sense: First, the Legislature says saving the lake could cost $32 billion. The state does not have that kind of money; the federal government does.
Second, the Wasatch Front contains various entities of value to the federal government and the nation as a whole. For example, there’s Hill Air Force Base, second largest U.S. Air Force base in the world; the NSA’s Bluffdale Data Center, largest in the nation if not the world; an R-1 research university and biomedical complex; and the “Silicon Slopes,” a burgeoning player in hi-tech R & D. The lake itself is a major international migratory flyway and bird refuge.
Also, Salt Lake City is a significant transportation hub, sitting at the crossroads of two interstate highways and intersecting rail lines, along with a newly expanded international airport.
These facts, in my view, would justify a federal rescue on grounds of preventing an imminent disaster – not unlike Boston’s $15 billion “Big Dig” project when Utah’s own Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts.
What could a federal rescue do? The main cause of the Great Salt Lake’s desiccation, apart from global warming, is alfalfa farming, which consumes some 68% of the lake’s annual water supply (while providing only 0.2% of the state’s annual gross domestic product!). But alfalfa farming is something apparently no state politician wants to touch.
So the obvious first step for the feds would be to reduce such farming via buyouts and/or modernization. Although these farmers have disproportionate political influence in Utah, the federal government has the resources and clout to override that, especially in such a crisis.
And I suspect that’s exactly what our state lawmakers have in mind. In effect, they may be trying to force the feds to do what they themselves, for political and financial reasons, do not want to.
Of course, this is all speculation. But in the absence of any apparent rescue plan by the governor and legislature, what else is there? What are we powerless citizens supposed to think, in the face of an existential crisis with our very well-being at stake?
Tom Huckin
Tom Huckin is an emeritus professor of writing and rhetoric studies at the University of Utah.