High Country News: Utah is killing the Great Salt Lake

The Great Salt Lake is unique and uniquely fragile, utterly dependent on freshwater inflows to maintain its brackish wetlands, which are hotspots of biodiversity. Its significant degradation, much less its loss, would be devastating, not only to bird populations throughout the Western Hemisphere but to the $1.9 billion diversified local economy that it supports, as well as to the respiratory health of the nearly 2.7 million people who live in the four-county megalopolis known as the Wasatch Front — the vast majority of Utah’s total population of 3.5 million. Utah, an arid state, has the nation’s second-highest per-capita water use, behind only neighboring Idaho. Most municipal water is used to water lawns, golf courses, sidewalks, driveways and streets. Consequently, the lake has shrunk to nearly half of it's historical average, which not only raises salinity, which threatens ecosystems, it has exposed close to a thousand square miles of playa, or dry lakebed, to fierce winds. Those winds kick up dust laden with heavy metals and toxic compounds, both naturally occurring and derived from intensive mining and mineral extraction around the lake. Read MORE.