#1557 The Death of Great Salt Lake

The toxic dust that is exposed by declining lake levels represents a respiratory problem for the citizens of Utah. That dust finds its way to the snow fields in the mountains east of Salt Lake City, damaging the ski industry and causing the snowpack to melt. Sooner than ever before. I ask Scott Baxter how the world will react if Great Salt Lake dies, and how he will grieve the passing of this unique inland sea. All that and more on this week's Listening to America.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. On my recent trip to the Four Corners area, Canyon Country and the Colorado River, I had the good fortune to interview Mr. Scott Baxter of Salt Lake City. Mr. Baxter could almost be regarded as the Thoreau of Great Salt Lake.

Scott has been concerned for a long time with the drop in the level of the lake. In fact, unless there is a refreshing, the lake could die. What follows are some of the highlights of the two and a half hour interview I conducted with Scott Baxter in Salt Lake City. Scott, Welcome to listening to America. Most Americans regard Great Salt Lake as an interesting anomaly, a kind of smelly, useless lake out in the desert west of Salt Lake City.

Why do we care about its decline?

We dump all the treated sewage from the wasatch front into that lake. We have several mineral operations using evaporation to pull minerals out of the lake. Historically, there's been a lot of pollutants coming from major mines going into the lake, and it is a terminal lake, so anything that goes into it stays there. So it just collects all this stuff. And yet it still had this vibrant life out there. Basic in many ways. Based primarily on brine shrimp and brine fly, which are the food source for the 10 million migratory birds that come through each spring and each fall and rely on the lake.

And you know, everything out there other than the birds is uniquely adapted to live in that extremely harsh environment. They're called extremophiles, and the reason brine shrimp and brine fly do so well. They'd be easy prey for a lot of other invertebrates in the water, but none of those other invertebrates can live in the water out there, so they do well.

So through all these things we've done to the lake, and through the floods in the 80s and then the droughts. About the time I was born in 1960, 61, 62, it was going through a drought phase similar to this. Not quite as bad as this, but pretty similar. Everything we've done to the lake just kept ticking. You know, it would change every year, but it would still produce this amazing food source that would attract all these migratory birds. And in fact, it became a more important area for the migratory birds as other Saline lakes and similar areas failed in the country over the years. So birds like Eared grebe. We used to get a portion of the population, we'd get more and more of that portion of the population coming through the lake each year.

So it became more and more important from a bird habitat standpoint, and you know, we think of it as a desolate area that has nothing to offer. But actually, when you paddle out there a lot, there's always surprises. You know, it's hard. It can be miserable out there. It's a very harsh environment, but you always find these little surprises. In fact, on the circumnavigation that we did in 2021, it was hard, it was late September, early October, so days were short.

We're doing 30 miles a day and the first few days were in pretty rough waves, so it was hard work. We were starting before the sun rose and paddling right up until sunset to find a campsite and move on. And it was fatiguing, especially at my age. Matt Kahopka, who was with me, he was much younger, he was in his late 20s, an absolute outdoor athlete. He probably held up better than I did.

But it was hard work. But every time you'd just get wore down, you know, the lake would throw in those little surprises at you and add value to the trip. And even after 30 years of paddling on that lake, it's hard for me to go out there and not experience something new that I haven't experienced before.

It's the low spot that catches the water from the Bear River, the Weber River, and the Provo River, and Jordan River. The Provo River eventually becomes the Jordan River. So it's the low spot that catches that water, and the water never leaves. And that's why you've got the salinity out in that lake. The water that comes into the lake through the streams erodes rocks and whatnot, and brings minerals down from those rocks. And those minerals stay in the lake, and salt is one of the primary minerals that come into the lake.

That builds the rock structure that these algae are growing on, and that's the food source. Primarily for the brine fly brine shrimp have a little bit bigger mouth and they'll eat the floating algaes and whatnot, but the brine fly live on those structures. And you know, about five, six years ago, as the lake was receding, all of a sudden. These structures that I could see when I paddled over the top of them, they were coming out of the water, you know? And that's pretty exciting, actually, to be able to walk up and look at them and whatnot. But what happens when a microbialite's exposed to the air is?

It dies and we don't know how long it takes for them to grow again. When the water comes back, we know ones that were exposed and then inundated as the water came up temporarily in the spring and exposed again. Over the last few years, they have not shown any sign of growing again. But we do know that the ones that were exposed in the 60s were alive. As the lake came down again, because we were going down past the level where the water dropped to in the early 60s, nobody really researched that and watched that, so we don't know what that process is like.

There are groups such as Westminster, who has the Great Salt Lake Institute program. They've taken chunks of microbialites and put them into aquariums and basically imitate the lake. They're monitoring those to see how long it takes for that to come back. But when that food source collapses, it has a domino effect. When the brine fly leave, then that's the food source for an awful lot of your birds that are out there.

And that has an extreme effect. We lost about half of the microbialites in the lake. When the railroad causeway was built, initially there was a trestle going across the lake, and when they built the railroad causeway going across the lake. It cut off the north end of the lake from the south end of the lake. Essentially so, the water didn't mix, and there's no rivers that flow into that northwest side of the lake.

So that became very saline full saturation. When I paddle up there, the water's pinkish, it kind of looks like a raspberry lemonade. Because that's the cyanobacteria and algae that can grow there, it's a side effect of the life forms that can grow there.

But salt will form on the hair on your arms. Salt forms all along the edge of the kayak and your paddle high water mark. And if you're paddling very long out there, it actually forms on the bottom of the boat, creates a tremendous amount of drag.

You have to get out and scrape it all up and then continue on. So we lost a lot.

And that's all dry lake bed now, because the lake's dropped so far. But I paddled from Antelope Island up to Fremont Island with Matt just before our trip. And I hadn't been out on the lake all year, so the lake had dropped quite a bit since I'd been out there. And that's a six-mile paddle.

And in that six-mile paddle, I would say there was only a mile that was more than five feet deep below us and six miles of open water crossing. So it's getting pretty shallow.

But what magnifies it right here is lake effect snow. That same lake effect snow contributes significantly to the ski industry in the state. You've got the brine shrimp industry, it's not the only place that brine shrimp or brine shrimp sits or harvested.

There's salt lakes all over the world, but it's by far the largest place where brine shrimp are harvested. Seventy percent of the wetlands in the state of Utah are on the east and south side of the Great Salt Lake, and that creates an incredible area for duck hunting. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, one of the more famous bird refuges in the country, is popular, obviously with hunters, but with bird watchers all over.

I'm talking with Scott Baxter of Salt Lake City about the fate of Great Salt Lake. There's a great deal of irrigation in Utah, how much water is drawn out of the lake for that purpose?

So we are basically from every river that goes into the lake, the Bear River, the Weaver River, and the Provo and Jordan rivers. That we are taking water away from those rivers. For municipal use and for agriculture, the lakes Utah State did a really good study on this, and basically, the lake is about 11 feet lower than it would be if it wasn't for the water we divert for municipal and agricultural use, Agriculture is 70 or 80 percent of that water, so that's a big portion of the water that gets drawn off of the lake and a big contributor. So that becomes a hard thing in the West, where you've got a culture that has kind of put agriculture up there with the Greek gods for the most part. And you look at the Colorado River, they're caught in a similar situation, and again, we're taking a lot of water from that river for agricultural purposes.

You could argue that we over-engineered Earth's ability to contribute that much water, and that's a strong argument. But on the other hand, the laws have all been written, you know, the laws that were written in Utah and through most of the Western United States from the mid-80s. Essentially really protected the first user and really didn't protect water sources per se. In fact, it was illegal to not put water to beneficial use in Utah.

Yeah, there's a beneficial use policy and a first use policy, so the first use policy is basically protected. Groups, mines, ranches, large operations from having to share water with groups that would come in later on and want a portion of the water. It was protecting their business interests. Essentially, much of that isn't really a homegrown thing. It was funded and financed, and investments came from the East and even Europe, you know, where you have the people that have that kind of money to invest.

And so they got the original water rights, they really don't pay for the water, they couldn't pay for the water at the level that a home user pays for the water. And even come close to turning a profit with agriculture along the Colorado River, or in Utah, along the Wasatch Front. So the laws protect these individuals, and that's a challenge right now because the laws protect it. And agriculture is a basic form of production. You know a lot of things that a lot of us do for our careers, what I did for my career, that's just turning the dollar one more time, you know, in a month's period. Agriculture actually creates a base product, and it is fundamental to keeping the economy healthy, having a base product like that, so it has its place. But as we deal with climate change in this area, as we deal with the effects of the Great Salt Lake, that have been human-caused from taking water from the sources that go into the lake. At what time, at what point does that legal right change?

That legal right was created by man right, we gave him those legal rights and it was very logical at the time. But at what point does an alfalfa grower have the right to take water? That will result in the collapse of a natural treasure and a national treasure? At what right does that grower have the right to take water? That will create exposed lake beds and create dust storms with these heavy metals that we talked about, blowing into the Wasatch front, where two million people live.

You know, at what point is that? It's definitely a question from an integrity standpoint, but legally they have that right. But at what point does that right end? That's been the question all the way around the world. The Great Salt Lake's actually doing better than most terminal saline lakes in the world, but they all seem to have the same story. You have usually agriculture drying off more water than what's sustainable for the sake of agriculture. Normally selling their product outside of the country where the lake exists, and we do that here.

About a third of our alfalfa goes to China.

And eventually, the lake collapses, which creates a health hazard for the local people, an economic collapse for the local people, incredible hardships for the local people. And we've seen this happen time and time and time again around the country, and we've seen it happen on the other side of the Great Basin. As they started siphoning water off to feed Los Angeles as Los Angeles was growing, areas such as Walker Lake.

We saw the impact that that created. But that was different because we were dealing with lakes that are much smaller, with much less exposed dry lake bed, and populations that were much smaller. With the Great Salt Lake, we're dealing with a huge population and an incredibly large lake, so it's a different ballgame that's going around. It could be serious.

You know, it's easy to point a finger at, especially alfalfa growers, because alfalfa is a thirsty crop. It takes a lot of water, but in a lot of ways it makes sense. In the desert, alfalfa's roots go down 15 feet so they can capture water that other crops can't get.

If you're in a drier year, you can take a harvest from alfalfa, and you still had a harvest. You might not have had four or five harvests, but you had a harvest. And then you can stop watering it. It's quite drought tolerant and it leaves a ground cover that slows down the ground erosion, so there's a lot of reasons to consider alfalfa. But what we're doing currently doesn't work.

So it's like, how do you take those virtues of Alfalfa and create a system where it works? Where you can have the flexibility to change what you're doing with those farms based on the water availability.

Wild horses were being corralled and rounded up and treated really poorly to feed the dog food industry essentially. And she was opposed to that. And the bill that came out of that in the early 70s wasn't a good bill. Because it stopped that, but it stopped your ability to really do anything. With wild horses which don't have natural predators, you know, a mountain lion could take off a younger wild horse, but the wild horses live in the same area the cattle live in. And we've really, really, in my mind, unfortunately, but very validly, from a ranching standpoint, reduce the number of predators in those areas because they can take domestic livestock also.

So the wild horse is out there with no predator to keep its population in check. The populations grow enormously and then they overgraze the range, which leads to soil erosion, which leads to permanent impact on the range. So the politicians made that decision back in the 70s because school teachers started telling their kids to go complain to mom and dad. And the politicians were afraid to take that on, they made a bill that didn't work.

And now wild horses suffer because of it, the range suffers because of it, and we've got this mess that we can't deal with. And the only solution is really to round these horses up and put them on grasslands in the Midwest and pay exorbitant prices to have them fed the rest of their life. And that's not good for the wild horses either.

So we don't want a solution like that for the Great Salt Lake, we want a solution where the stakeholders are there.

Agriculture, it's not a big part of our economy, it's 2 to 3 of the economy in Utah. It's not a huge part, but it's an important part. And anybody that's dealt with numbers as big as a state-level economy knows that even 2 or 3 is a lot of money. It's a lot of money.

It's a lifestyle for these people, and it's a part of our culture, it's part of our history.

So the solution involves them. And I think agriculture can continue to go forward. We just need to change how we do it, and maybe we need to look at times when we subsidize agriculture that's not been set up.

Well, you know, we're doing a pretty big experiment right now. Because just recently, the state legislature changed the laws so that groups could lease water to allow it to go to the Salt Lake.

And that didn't go against the beneficial use policy, so it made it legal for that to happen. And they could allow water committed to the Great Salt Lake. And there haven't been too many takers on that. When it was first announced, Kennecott stepped up. And they did a short-term lease, which I think is still going for a couple more years at least.

Just last month, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints announced a tremendous amount of water shares that they're committing permanently to the Great Salt Lake. Nobody's done anything like that yet. That wasn't expected by a lot of people in Utah. The church doesn't have a reputation of being very environmentally oriented, but I think they saw the potential impact on the population.

I think there is some environmental orientation there that you really don't see. It's not a focus churches focus on. Well, you know, Mormon Church will focus on the mission of Christ, not the mission of environmentalists. But at the same time, they see social issues, environmental issues, as becoming part of that at some point. So it'll be interesting to see what that does if that will snowball.

They've committed to do more, they did a good job. They chose water that they had in an area that could flow through one of the prime wetlands. Also, so it will feed the wetland on its way to the lake. So you get double use there and they can do it real quickly.

One of the challenges with donating water to the lake is, how do you shepherd it to the lake? If a farmer four allotments up on the stream decides to let the water go to the lake, the next farmers, they're going to grab that water. Water is in short supply. It's not going to make it to the lake without some real effort to get it to the lake. And they put a lot of thought into this.

So I think it has a good chance of being successful. I think it will give us a chance to work through all those administrative things that are hard to work through. To make this actually work and make a difference for the lake to a short, small degree, I mean, it's really two or three percent of what's needed to really turn the lake around. But it's more significant than anything we've got. It's a good start.

They definitely are Darren Perry, a real good friend of mine, who was a past commissioner of the Northwest. Shoshone speaks on this topic, he speaks somewhere pretty much every night of the week, but he speaks on this topic probably two, three times a week. Now it's in high demand.

Hearing their viewpoints and their thoughts, we're getting more of the Native Americans represented in more areas. Ironically, the prime group, the prime task force they've put together to work on this lake has surprisingly, some really good, knowledgeable people. In fields where they have resources, they can pull on to really bring knowledge to the table. They don't have any Native Americans, and they're getting a little bit of heat for that and they should.

They should, you know, the Native American history here is amazing if you look at the wasatch front and go back to the Fremont era. Fremont were farmers, they farmed in this area, and they settled in the very same places that Mormon pioneers settled in when they came here. Because it was areas where you had water supply and good soil for farming. So every initial town that popped up in Utah was sitting right on top of an old Fremont village. Just north of where I live, in North Ogden, near Willard, where there's the North Marina for Willard Bay State Park.

That sits on one of the biggest Fremont villages that we had in this portion of Utah. It was a huge population and they eventually had to move out. Because the climate changed, they had ways to deal with temporary changes by moving around and whatnot with their farming. But the climate changed in a way that they couldn't survive anymore, so they had to move out. Which created a lot of warfare down in southern Utah, where they kind of moved back to their ancestral grounds to a large degree.

And that left a void. Here. You had one group of Native Americans, which we refer to as the promontory culture. It was pretty unique, probably more related to Navajo, quite frankly, than the tribes that you see in this area now. You still had hunter-gatherers wandering around, and then you had the Shoshone people, the Namek people that were moving from the Death Valley area across Utah that eventually came here.

And those pieces of culture from people from the promontory that stayed, other wanderers were here, and the Shoshone eventually coming here. It created the culture that we had when whites came into Utah. So you had the northwest Shoshone, from basically north of Salt Lake, going north up into southern Idaho. You had what we refer to as Utes that are really tempinogus, and they speak the same language as the Shoshone slightly modified dialect.

And you had them in the Provo area, and that was the culture then you had. If you get out to the west side of the lake, you had paiute, which is all those are shoshone, they come from the same root of people, speak essentially the same language.

And that was the culture that was here when we got here. So the reason they survived when the Fremont couldn't, is they became very good generalists. And they learned how to not just exploit farming, and, you know, bring in a few extra things to survive on. They learned how to take advantage of everything. So you could see them as the greatest environmentalists of all time, or you could see them as the most efficient exploiters of all time, because they would move.

They weren't nomadic, but they were hunter and gatherers, and they would move. And they take care of the pine nut, or take advantage of the pine nut harvest. They would go with their close relatives into Idaho and do salmon fishing, they'd even go with Eastern Shoshone and do buffalo hunts. But they harvested a lot of seeds, and seeds were not what most Native Americans really desired. It takes a lot of calories to process seed into something you can eat.

So it wasn't a calorie efficient thing. But they learned how to take advantage of all of those things and really find a way to live in this environment. We didn't do that when we came in as Europeans, we tried to modify the environment to fit us.

They learned how to fit within the environment. There's a lot we could learn there. The Fremont Indians, they came up from Arizona, southern Utah. The Fremont were the farmers that came up here, and so they farmed this country before we did. You know, everybody gives Brigham Young, the leader of the LDS Church that brought the people out here, credit for seeing the potential for agriculture here.

You know, that was seen by several trappers that came through the area before him. Quite frankly, looking at the streams coming off the mountains, saying, You know, with a little bit of effort, you could create some irrigation here and really have good agriculture. The Fremont exceeded at it long before we were here. And you know the homesteaders, they would homestead in areas, and there'd be like arrowheads all over the place around them. There's places by Boulder, Utah, where you can still see ditches that were made by the Fremont people.

So they were here and then they just completely disappeared because of the climate change they went through. But they were here and they were here in great numbers. They were not, they weren't nomadic people wandering around in small numbers. These were built societies with structures, with trading partners, with agriculture that were very established in the area.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking with Scott Baxter of Salt Lake City. It was John C. Fremont, the explorer, who first understood the nature of the Great Basin. Scott, What do you think, Brigham Young thought when he first saw Great Salt Lake?

It became a threat to people living around them. And they would do all of their. They're basically purchasing within the group, so it would disrupt the local economies and whatnot. And they had plenty of strife internally, too. When you look at the history of the LDS church, people that were attracted to that church at that time period were people that weren't really fitting in. Strong in society. One thing that attracted to them was the chance to have a new start, you know, to reestablish, to maybe be more of a part of society than they had been. In addition to the religious feelings that they had about the experience. So you attract a lot of poor people out of Europe, and you attract a lot of the poor people out of, especially the northeastern United States. And that's the group that he was dealing with. So they'd gone through these really bad experiences. And just like today, they're pretty disadvantaged people. So if they lose the house, they don't have any economic background or economic pillow to help them through those hard times. So he was looking for a place to move.

The other problem he was having was a lot of internal strife within the church, other people trying to take over leadership of the church. Polygamy, a practice in the church at that time, was just becoming visible and that became very controversial inside and outside of the church. So he was dealing with all those factors. So they looked in a lot of places, they were very interested in Texas. In fact, he sent a delegation to talk to Sam Houston.

Sam Houston wasn't interested in having an LDS church move there.

So when Fremont came through, he really came through in two different expeditions, and they got basically the journals of the Fremont expeditions. They became very interested in it and they worked very carefully with politicians that had access to these reports before they were even published. And they really pinpointed this to this area as being a primary area with potential that was basically not part of any other area that was going to grow. Because what Joseph Smith, and later Brigham Young, was really looking for is a place where they could grow the church without being thrown out again like they'd experienced before. So that appealed to them. So they actually left Nauvoo for this area before the maps of the Fremont expedition were even available. The maps did catch up with them in a place they called Far West, but they actually left before they had the maps. But they were publishing excerpts of that journal in publications, even in LDS publications in England, there were parts of that journal.

So they were getting everybody primed up and saying, Okay, we're going to move one more time, and this time it's going to work. We're not going to have to build and leave it again.

They knew that it's hard to change a lot of people. They were trying to get people geared up, saying this is going to work, you know. It was an incredible migration of people coming over here and it was for the most part very successful, especially considering the lack of funding that was available for it. So it was a major change. And yet Fremont had a huge, huge impact on that, in fact, a couple of years after they got here, Fremont. Presenting again to a group in Congress, he talked about how valuable his expeditions were.

Play his role of marketing himself. And he even commented, You know, and the Mormons got one of the best parts, he said. I found all these things and the Mormons got one of the best parts. And you know, that comment actually happened. At the same time that the first LDS group explored the lake, they were in a small wooden boat they'd made, called the Mud Hen. And Albert Carrington Carrington Island on the Lake is named for him. They were doing their first exploratory river up the lake. So they went down to Jordan and over to Antelope Island and up to Fremont Island, and then to Promontory Point and back.

They were only out five or six days, I think they planned on taking two weeks, but they'd had enough. At that point. They decided farming was easier than being a sailor. But yeah, so Fremont had a huge, huge impact on that.

Fremont did go out to Fremont Island. that's why it's named after Fremont, it's had some other names and a rubber raft, a rubber raft made from India. And then he went on north again, but he came back around from the south and came into the area that's now Provo Utah Lake, an experienced Utah Lake.

And he knew the elevation of the Great Salt Lake, because he did the work to peg the elevation, he was accurate. I don't know if he did Utah Lake, but he kind of pictured the two lakes being connected. But he never saw the south end of the Great Salt Lake, he never saw the north end of Utah Lake.

And Brigham Young even mentioned that that confused him because he was led to believe from the Fremont Journals that those two lakes were connected. But you're right, the Great Salt Lake, he knew that that was a dead lake, in fact, the mud hen. Before they did their trip on the Great Salt Lake, they went up to Utah Lake because these were pioneers.

You know, they just came into Utah, they started making that boat right after they got here, and more people were following them. They needed food sources, and they knew that Utah Lake was a good fishery. Again from the Fremont Expeditions.

So they were very interested in going to Utah Lake, so they explored Utah Lake first and actually had a very bad day fishing there. They didn't catch much.

And you know, the expeditions, we didn't send people on expeditions to go out and find rare species of animals. They were sent out here to find resources that could be exploited. I mean, and he was the same, so yeah, you know where? He's kind of our grandfather of the Colorado River, he's also the one that really pushed use of that water for irrigation.

So the big question was, Yeah, you found this big river, but it runs through a desert. can anything grow there? So the example of the Mormons being able to grow crops on the wasatch front was huge. To him. To say yes, this can happen, this can be successful. I'm not a meteorologist, but that's what they tell us.

That's what they tell us. That will definitely make it decline. In fact, we've had a significant amount of, surprisingly significant amount of lake effect snow just the last month. But I think the reason for that? A lot of these dry lake beds do have water on them now, so you do have water evaporation happening there. Because we've had a very good winter.

So you do have kind of an expanded surface. It's not going to last long, but I think it is adding some additional snow to the lake, effect snow. But yeah, so we're in this declining resources situation, you know, having been a guide and still spending a lot of time in the outdoors. There are several things you look at to say, when are we in trouble? And one of those things you look at is when you have fewer good choices to make.

When your options become more and more selective and not as broad, you know you're starting to get into trouble. And that's time to really sit down and say, okay. Do we have the resource to push through this with the options we have available, or is it time to back up and try something different and gain more resource or more options? So we're getting into that point right now, we're pushing all of our water systems to the max.

Development's very big in Utah also, so the domestic water, that's a little bit different than agricultural water, not that you can eventually treat agricultural water to get there. But that's really becoming a push, too, and a lot of your politicians are realtors, so that's a big thing for them. You know, it's just like Powell saying, Yeah, you can never get out of the Colorado River.

They don't want anything to slow down that development that has led to their career being so successful.

And that's one of the places we start to wonder, you know, are these legislative changes we're seeing really intended to help the lake? Or, if you really want to be cynical, are they really going to only help development? If we cut back our water usage existing residents, will that just make water available for more development? It's a very valid question.

If we go to agricultural practices that use less water, does that just mean that they'll irrigate more acres of crops? Will they still use all the water available? And the answer to that is most likely yes. Not trying to point a finger or question the integrity of any of these people. But you see that example again, time and time, and time again.

You see it throughout the Western United States every time. We've used tax money to fund infrastructure that allows agriculture to be more efficient. With their water use, it just means they don't lose as many crops or that they expand their operations. It doesn't mean that they take less water out of the environment. And that's a very valid concern, and that's one of the reasons you need everybody at the table to discuss that.

You don't want to just assume that agriculture is going to be unethical here. But you need to look at the reality of what's happened and say, OK, this has happened in other places, and it really didn't solve our solution. And eventually, if that lake goes down, agriculture is not going to work very well either. In fact, I'm really concerned the lake gets a very, very small percentage of water from seepage coming through the ground to the lake.

As we pump more and more areas around the lake, what's the possibility that that flow could change? Then you've got the saline water contaminating your ground water coming up in these pumps, on these fields. It could be catastrophic and it could happen if we continue to suck this area dry.

There are, you know, municipalities, have some pretty smart people and they do some good things. And one thing that they've learned is that a lot of these aquifers that we use for water across the wasatch front can be replenished. And they've actually found the areas where you divert the water through, basically gravel beds to get it down and replenish these aquifers. And they've established some fields to do that in near Provo, and actually some at the base of Weber Canyon, and they're doing that this year.

It's the first year they've had such a good winter that they have water to replenish some of those aquifers. It's a good use of water, I'd rather see it go to the lake, but it's a good use of water. I have an artesian spring on my property. It used to flow when I moved onto that property 30 years ago, it used to flow at probably 40 gallons to a minute.

Now it's maybe four or five gallons a minute.

It's changed a lot, it's changed a lot over the years.

I'm guessing it has to do with dust storms and the consequences of the death of the lake. Is that correct?

So, yeah, you know, they'll turn the catastrophe into a money-making machine for them, and that will actually have some positive effects. It will give us money to do things like making agriculture more efficient, you know, upgrading the infrastructure, so there's less loss. Those things are all positive, but that's definitely a big factor, I think, on the political scene right now, too.

So it's a mixed bag out there. But the average person on the street is worried about the dust storms, that's what they're worried about. And you know, they don't know too much about the lake, just like you guys. Finding out about the lake. When it hit the national media, people that live here found out about the lake the same way.

You know, very few of them went out there, and if they did, they took the causeway out to Antelope Island. By Farmington Bay, which has been more of a freshwater bay for years now, because it's not mixing with the lake. Now it's just a canal and that's where all the sewage from the Wasatch Road, it's treated sewage, but that's where it all goes. So you're talking about a body of water there that is nutrient-rich, so you get quite an odor coming off of that.

You know, it goes oxygen-depleted most nights out there in the summertime. Very different than the Great Salt, the main Great Salt Lake. If you get out on the west side of Antelope Island, or out to the east side or west side of the lake, it's hard to get to the west side. It's pretty remote out there, it's more of the brine smell that you would expect to smell at the ocean.

It's still a brine smell, but it's a very different smell. But that's kind of the perception people had. Yeah, it's a stinky lake, but I don't want the dust storms either. That's kind of what you're dealing with here.

And it's a great feeling to just sit there. There's a lot of emptiness, it's a healthy thing to do. And there's the advocates there. And then there's a lot of dedicated scientists from all the universities here that understand how unique this ecosystem is.

And you know, they have their circles, so that bit of knowledge gets out there a lot. But you're still not talking about a large portion of the population of the state being exposed to that. So the vast majority of them, you know, they might see a beautiful sunset over the lake from their house, on the bench and down, you know, but that's about as close as they get to the lake generally.

You know, kayaking on it, there's very few people that kayak there. Some people paddleboard, you know, around the marinas, where it's easily accessible, but they're normally within about three miles of a marina. The ski industry itself is becoming very aware of that. And they've really, really came alive actually just over the last 12 months, to where this has became a primary focus for them.

They understand how big of a threat that is to their industry and they are politically connected. So that does give you some political clout. You know, most of the groups that care about the lake don't have any political clout whatsoever. But the ski industry clearly understands it's a threat.

It fits within their area to be sensitive about the lake from a natural environment also. So it doesn't, you know? Some groups have to be careful about coming out supporting environmentalists because it doesn't fit their culture. That they represent well the ski industry. Very much higher economic, environmentally sensitive groups. So it's a good storyline and it's a definite threat to the industry. So they are very committed and getting more committed all the time.

And to all of our listeners, we'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America.