IN OCTOBER 2021, an increasingly dire megadrought had left Utah’s most famous lake at its lowest level in recorded history. As Great Salt Lake lay dying, Democrats introduced a modest water conservation bill requiring efficient plumbing fixtures in all new construction, a provision that many states in the West already have. In a state known for wasting enormous amounts of municipal water, it would have saved enough water to supply 30,000 homes annually by 2030. The bill should have been an easy sell.
Instead, some rural lawmakers were opposed because they believed that if people flushed less water down their toilets, Great Salt Lake would dry up faster. “I have concerns about the government telling me what kind of toilet I can have in my house,” said Republican state Rep. Casey Snider, a farmer from Cache County. “I’m concerned what it can do to the Great Salt Lake.” The bill never made it out of committee.
Great Salt Lake is the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere, and an all-important stop for millions of birds traveling along the eastern spur of the Pacific Flyway from as far south as Chile and as far north as the Arctic Circle. It’s also the country’s largest source of magnesium, a critical element in metal production. And as a terminal lake—none of it flows out to other rivers or the Pacific Ocean—it creates a unique hydrologic cycle along the Wasatch Front. This “lake effect” is responsible for Utah’s other famous product: the powdery snow that draws millions of skiers from around the globe and contributes more than $2 billion to the state’s annual economy. That snow, in turn, makes northern Utah semiarid and thus more livable than neighboring desert states like Arizona and Nevada.
But in January 2023, scientists at Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution, issued a report containing a dire warning: “The lake as we know
