The water levels of the Great Salt Lake have been steadily declining since the late 1980’s, driven largely by Northern Utah’s excessive water use which is experienced by the Lake as reduced water inflows from increasing upstream water diversions. This has created a long-term water deficit in the Great Salt Lake which if left uncorrected, will drive the Lake into further crisis until it is relegated to the same status as many other saline lakes around the globe – existing only in history and memory.
Public concern over the plight of the Great Salt Lake did not erupt until the Lake set two record low water levels within a 12-month period in 2021 and 2022. The world looked to Utah and many people sought leadership and clarity about what was happening at what we call the water sphere: the nexus of water policy and use, water development, and our aquatic ecosystems.
Americans from coast to coast – who are worried about climate change or those who love birds, or both – have been drawn to stories about the shrinking Great Salt Lake. Bird managers from across the Western Hemisphere look inside Utah and worry about the plight of the millions of migratory birds that travel from their home shores to those at the Great Salt Lake. People outside the U.S. who have seen the decline of saline lakes in their home countries look to Utah with skepticism about whether the Beehive State will succeed in raising Lake levels.
In the face of this global concern, many of Utah’s political leaders have failed to inspire the confidence that Utah will keep the Great Salt Lake from disappearing.
Utah’s governor called on Utahns to pray for rain. Although the subsequent controversy raised questions about religion and spirituality, that entire debate completely missed the mark of where our focus should be. The governor’s call for prayer isn’t the problem; it is his cabinet’s advancing of water diversion projects through official policy along with his failure to stand up to the special interests that are draining the Lake in the first place.
Utah’s governor represents a state with America’s highest per person municipal water use, and who is proposing some of the largest new water diversions in the country, one of which would take away the biggest water source to the Great Salt Lake: the Bear River. Diverting the Bear River could reduce the Great Salt Lake by two to four feet in elevation to provide water for the lawns of the Wasatch Front.
Proposed Bear River Development is a policy the Governor not only supports, but is actively planning to initiate permitting for as early as 2028. Some $60 million in sales tax funding is collected each year since the earmark went into effect in 2016, a piggybank for financing the further shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. A bill written by the Utah Rivers Council to redirect this funding toward Lake-saving activities couldn’t make it out of committee in the 2023 Utah Legislative Session.
Virtually every map of the United States shows the same shape for the Great Salt Lake that schoolchildren across the globe learn in geography. This shape is based on the Great Salt Lake at the widely-accepted water elevation of 4,200 feet above sea level, the Goldilocks Zone. This is the zone considered by scientists to be the elevation range needed to sustain the $1.3 billion Lake economy. This level is much higher than the Lake has been at over the last two decades and today’s water level has a much smaller total footprint than these maps depict. Today’s troubling era of low Lake levels means spiraling troubles for increased air pollution, fewer migratory birds and disappearing recreation.
In 2023, the Utah Rivers Council partnered with a Utah state senator to propose setting an official Lake level goal, a level that is represented in the millions of maps depicting Utah. As the Great Salt Lake raced downward, Utah’s governor called the new legislation to establish a minimum water level goal “a dumb thing” during his monthly press conference. He later told a crowd that he “didn’t need a number to tell [him] what level the Great Salt Lake should be at.”
Utah still has no official goal defining what success looks like at the Great Salt Lake, and no plan to raise water levels to match the representation on those maps of North America. Instead, legislators passed a host of new laws and policies over the last seven years that are designed to encourage and support new water diversions upstream of the Lake. This spells further trouble for this priceless aquatic ecosystem, the largest remaining lake in the American West.
It can be hard to read these words and feel optimistic. Yet, the truth is that it’s remarkably easy to solve the problems facing the Great Salt Lake. Each problem is an opportunity waiting to be solved.
We don’t have to fight the giant of climate change. We don’t have to stop farming. We don’t have to dry up every square foot of grass on the Wasatch Front. The simple solutions outlined in The 4,200 Project are the steps needed to move forward in restoring Great Salt Lake water levels.
If we want to save the Great Salt Lake we must raise water levels back up to 4,200 feet, the level widely considered to be the healthy zone where the Lake and all those who rely on it – human or otherwise – can be cherished for our future.
Restoring the Lake means that in addition to our actions to reduce our personal water use, we must hold our elected officials accountable for implementing The 4,200 Project policy measures to save the Great Salt Lake.
If we don’t hold our elected officials accountable for saving the Great Salt Lake, who will be at fault: our elected officials or ourselves?
