Will Mormons Save the Great Salt Lake?

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One of America’s most unique ecological landmarks is disappearing. The Great Salt Lake, once the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere, sticks out on maps of the United States as a large spot of blue in the West – a vast inland sea larger than Rhode Island and nearly ten times saltier than the ocean.

The lake’s silent expanse of still water is surrounded by northern Utah’s dramatic mountain ranges. The early American explorer John C. Fremont described the region as surreal yet sublime, “one of the wonders of nature.” But a view of the valley from the mountains today reveals a shrunken lake and parched patches of dried lakebed.

A drying lake has many consequences. It harms the 12 million migratory birds that rely on the lake’s ecosystem to rest, refuel, and breed during their transcontinental journeys.

It also poses economic threats. Lake evaporation provides important snowfall for the region’s multibillion-dollar ski industry, and the lake sources nearly the entire U.S. supply of magnesium – an ingredient in aluminum alloys used for technologies such as cell phones, laptops, and aircraft. Additionally, tiny brine shrimp from the lake are used to feed 45% of the table shrimp sold worldwide. Each of these industries will suffer or collapse without a healthy lake.

But perhaps the most daunting consequence of the lake’s decline is its effect on human health. The dry lakebed is laced with arsenic and other toxic metals that are kicked up by wind and carried to communities along the Wasatch Mountain Range, where more than 80% of Utahns live. The pollutants can cause or intensify respiratory illnesses – especially in children – and have also been linked to heart disease, reproductive dysfunction, and cognitive impairment.

Similar stories are playing out across the world as saline lakes collapse at a rapid rate. The Aral Sea in Central Asia has dwindled to a tenth of its size, Lake Urmia in Iran is down to 5% of its natural volume, and the Dead Sea is a shrunken remnant of its original size. In each case, human agricultural consumption has primarily caused the collapse. No imperiled saline lake anywhere in the world has been rescued.

In Utah, the fate of the Great Salt Lake is unfolding within a unique religious and political context. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often called the Mormon Church) is headquartered in Salt Lake City, only a few miles from the lake, and members of the faith have an outsized share of influence in state government.

Utah’s Mormon political majority now has an opportunity to become pioneers in saving a saline lake. To be successful, Mormons must navigate disparate strands of their own cultural history, including agricultural roots, ecological doctrines, and the persistent tension between individual rights and the collective good. The trailblazing Mormon ethos is at a crossroads.

“I always remind people that we’re in the midst of a crisis, not on the brink of one,” said Ben Abbott, a watershed ecologist at Brigham Young University who studies the lake. “We’re already seeing dust clouds emanate from the lakebed, blowing out across densely populated neighborhoods on windy days. It’s really frightening, especially since air quality is already bad here.”

Often blanketed by a grayish-brown haze rivaling Mexico City’s notorious smog, Salt Lake City and its suburbs rank among the nation’s most polluted cities for both ozone and short-term particle pollution. Researchers say breathing Utah’s air on bad days is the equivalent of smoking five cigarettes. State lawmakers have taken small steps to reduce Utah’s household and industrial emissions, but these measures do nothing to address the pollution coming from the lake.

The lake reached its low point in 2022, having lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area compared with its average natural level. Scientists feared the lake’s ecosystem would collapse. But two consecutive winters of heavy snowfall gave the lake a needed drink.

Water levels have risen significantly but still sit more than five feet below where experts say a healthy range begins. Along with the large patches of lakebed that remain exposed, the political will to create permanent solutions has begun to dry up. “We’re in a better place ecologically with the lake but in a worse spot politically,” said Abbott. “We’re losing our urgency. If we don’t reduce our water consumption quickly we could end up right back where we were two years ago. We can’t let that happen.”

Abbott’s Mormon faith fuels his fervor for promoting “responsible stewardship over God’s creations.” He believes that “God has entrusted us with this corner of the earth. We need to take care of it and the people who live here.”

Like other imperiled saline lakes, the Great Salt Lake’s decline – though exacerbated by climate change and a Western megadrought – is mostly human-caused. Farmers and municipalities divert water from the rivers and streams that flow toward the lake, allowing vast farmland and lush lawns to soak up much of the water the lake relies on.

The agriculture industry, which consumes the bulk of Utah’s water but contributes less than 1% to the state’s GDP, has taken heat for the lake drying up. Some say farmers should grow less alfalfa, a sturdy but thirsty crop used to feed livestock. But farmers view their profession as a major part of Utah’s heritage, which they wish to pass on to their children.

“Farmers are the ultimate stewards of the land,” said Spencer Gibbons, CEO of the Utah Farm Bureau. “Utah farmers want their family businesses to be generational, so they see the importance of protecting the land and their water.” Many Utah farmers are descendants of the Mormon pioneers who first irrigated the valley. They have inherited their water rights from their ancestors and want to hold on to those rights.

Long before houses, highways, Kentucky Bluegrass, and alfalfa fields covered the valley floor, the dry landscape of the Salt Lake Basin was mostly home to native grasses. Small groves of cottonwood trees grew near the rivers and streams that flowed from the mountains to the lake.

The Mormon prophet Brigham Young first emerged from the Wasatch Mountains in 1847 after his long trek from Illinois. He looked across the valley and told his followers it was “the right place” – the exact land shown to him in a vision from God, where Latter-day Saints could find refuge from years of persecution in the East.

With his downtrodden people in tow, Young’s Moses-like journey to the promised land echoed the popular narrative of America’s Puritan origins: religious outcasts colonizing a wild, untamed land in pursuit of religious freedom and political autonomy.

A secluded, arid valley in the mountain West was an ideal place for Mormons to establish their self-sufficient theocracy. They almost immediately began digging ditches and canals to water crops. Under Young’s efficient governance, they quickly scaled up their operations, proving to be masterful and innovative irrigators.

Mythologized narratives of the American West portray rugged individualism as the backbone of Western settlement. But Mormons survived, and eventually thrived, in their Western wilderness by focusing on collectivism, not individualism.

Today, Utah’s mostly Mormon legislature oversees a thriving economy in one of the most affluent states in the nation. But a dry lakebed could undermine all that success.

When Owens Lake, a much smaller saline lake in California, disappeared in the 1920s thanks to upstream diversions that went to Los Angeles and nearby farmland, the dry lakebed eventually became the largest human-caused source of dangerous PM10 (particulate matter with a diameter of 10 micrometers or less) emissions in the nation, forcing many nearby residents to move.

If Mormons fail to save the much larger Great Salt Lake, they could be forced to flee – this time as refugees of their own making – leaving the dirty air that envelops their promised land.

Luz Escamilla hopes to avoid such a drastic outcome. A devout Mormon herself, Escamilla immigrated to Utah from Mexico as a teenager in the 90s. She now serves as the Democratic minority leader in the Utah State Senate. Her home district borders the lake in West Valley, a historically redlined area that remains one of the poorest, most diverse, and most polluted zones in the state.

Escamilla’s youngest daughter was diagnosed with asthma at three years old. “I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the air quality here,” Escamilla said. “It breaks my heart because as an adult you can make choices, but in her case it’s just where we live. I chose to stay; she got asthma, and now I have to live with that.”

The choice to stay centered on community loyalty. “I’m privileged enough that I could leave. But most people in my district don’t have that choice. The future of the Great Salt Lake and all that fugitive dust directly affects their lives, and they know that. But it can also feel like an abstract problem to them when they’re working two or three jobs just to pay rent and buy food.”

Escamilla is focused on passing legislation to reduce emissions from the vehicles, factories, and rail yards that pollute northern Utah. Knowing those gains will be erased without better water management, she wants to help save the Great Salt Lake by incentivizing urban and rural water conservation through more aggressive, market-based solutions.

She will need help from her Republican colleagues, but some, including Gov. Spencer Cox (himself a Mormon alfalfa farmer), deride mandatory federal air quality standards, criticize the “doomerism” of scientists studying the lake, and blame much of Utah’s bad air on forest fires and winter inversions rather than human activity.

Despite the “urge to become cynical,” Escamilla remains hopeful, insisting that the lake can be saved without demonizing farmers.

“Our agriculture friends are so critical,” Escamilla said. “We need to work with farmers to save the lake in ways that also benefit them. That includes sometimes subsidizing them for what they might be losing.”

Citing her faith, she said, “We are charged to protect Mother Earth as a gift from God. In this case, that means conserving water, even when it’s hard to do.” Though environmentalism is seldom preached from Mormon pulpits, Escamilla’s conviction has doctrinal backing. Joseph Smith, the religion’s founder, transcribed a divine revelation stating that everyone is accountable to God as a “steward over earthly blessings” and that resources must be shared with the poor and needy.

The modern church directs its members to be “stewards, caretakers, and guardians” of God’s creations, and in 2023, church leaders announced a permanent donation of over 6.5 billion gallons of water a year to help replenish the Great Salt Lake. (The church donated 5,700 of their own “water shares,” meaning that when water flows from the mountains they won’t take possession of it but will instead let it flow to the lake.) In announcing the donation, Bishop W. Christopher Wadell noted that Brigham Young “advocated for water to be held as a public resource and not in private ownership.”

That Wadell would emphasize this point is striking. Mormon farmers today are proud to own water rights that have been passed down to them through generations. But when Young ruled Utah, he managed water as a communal resource. Only later did Mormons assimilate to the homestead-inspired legal practices of other Western states by adopting the system of prior appropriations, which allows individuals to own water rights on a “first in time, first in line” basis.

The lake has placed Mormonism at the intersection of a persistent American quandary: To what extent can individual rights impede the collective good? Farmers want to retain their legal rights to water. Escamilla wants to protect the residents in her district by protecting the environment. Both worldviews can find justification in Mormon heritage. But only one can mark the path forward.

“I’ve always tried to be a legislator for kiddos,” Escamilla said. “I go everywhere talking about children. I just hope that the future of these kids will motivate us to make changes.”

On a smoggy day in December, I visited Guadalupe Center, an elementary school in West Valley that sits only a few miles from the drying lakebed. Despite the day’s extra poor air quality, students still went outside for recess. “We pretty much send them out unless there’s a blizzard or rainstorm,” one teacher said.

I asked a group of fourth graders what they knew about the Great Salt Lake. “It’s drying up,” one said, “and the dust is really bad for you.” We briefly discussed the causes and consequences of a dry lakebed, but rather than depress them with scenes of toxic dust plumes descending on their playgrounds and neighborhoods, I changed the subject to the migratory birds that fill up on brine flies at the lake before taking off to Central and South America.

One of the students interrupted: “But wait,” she said, “people are fixing the dust thing, right?”

The answer to that question lies at the heart of this modern Mormon reckoning. Mormons can either ignore the dust or choose to be the first group to ever rescue an imperiled saline lake, helping Utah’s kids to breathe easy.