Drying Of Great Salt Lake Endangers Latter-Day Saints Stronghold: How The Church Responded

A bird stands sentinel at the Bear River migratory bird refuge, where the Bear River Flows into the Great Salt Lake. Photo by Marc Coles-Ritchie.

After years of persecution culminating in the assassination of its founder, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints migrated from Illinois to Utah in the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, the church, widely known as the Mormon church, has helped build the state into a religious and economic stronghold, with Salt Lake City as its crown jewel.

Now, the crown jewel is in peril. 

The Great Salt Lake, for which the city is named, is drying up after years of water diversion and recent droughts. This could devastate the area’s economy and spur an ecological disaster. More pressingly, the receding water could expose nearby residents, many of whom are Latter-day Saints, to previously hidden life-threatening chemicals picked up by increasing dust storms.

“Unfortunately, the lake bed itself, the soil that comes off, has very high concentrations of arsenic, which is a toxic heavy metal,” said Kevin Perry, chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah. “If people are exposed to that arsenic over a period of a decade or longer, and frequently exposed, then it could theoretically lead to increases in lung cancer, skin cancer, bladder cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”

The church hasn’t unveiled an official plan to prevent or cope with the coming change, but it has taken some small steps, including reducing water use at its religious meetinghouses in the American West, negotiating the donation or leasing of water to the Utah government and encouraging individual Latter-day Saints to conserve water and pray for rain.

The church has every motivation to protect the lake, having spent years and billions of dollars building and maintaining assets in the area. This includes the church’s business and real estate holdings, both of which could decline in value if they’re periodically swimming in clouds of hazardous dust. The blood, sweat and tears of Mormon pioneers soaked the soil during their journey to what they called the New Jerusalem. The faith’s largest temple, the Salt Lake Temple, serves as the meeting place for the highest members of the church hierarchy. 

“The pioneers tamed it, and it’s become a very sacred place for us,” said John Montgomery, Bishop of the Thirteenth Ward of the Salt Lake Ensign Stake, about Salt Lake City.

The church holds nearly $2.5 billion in Salt Lake City proper real estate spread across residential, commercial and other property types, per a Truth & Transparency estimate.

“I would assume if the air quality gets significantly worse in Salt Lake City, or in wildfire-prone areas in the west because of smog in other areas, that it’s going to cause a persistent challenge to human health, and that could pose a challenge to real estate value,” said Billy Grayson, executive director at Urban Land Institute’s Center For Sustainability and Economic Performance. The Urban Land Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that researches development and real estate challenges.

Grayson added that gauging how property values respond to environmental hazards in the short term is more difficult.

In a nutshell, the lake is shrinking because river water that would otherwise flow into it is being unsustainably diverted for agricultural, industrial and municipal uses, Perry said. What’s more, the American West, northern Utah included, is being pounded by a years-long extreme drought. These factors have seen the lake reach its lowest water level on record in July 2021 and continue to drop since, per NASA Earth Observatory.

According to a 2017 Nature Geoscience report, 63% of all state water consumption is going to agriculture; 13% to lake water extraction for salt pond mineral production; 11% to municipal and industrial uses, 10% to evapotranspiration from constructed wetlands (the process by which water moves into the air); and 3% to reservoir evaporation. 

As water volume decreases, the lake will become saltier — so salty that it will eventually kill the brine shrimp that live in it. The brine shrimp are a food source for migratory birds that feast at the lake along their journey. Without the shrimp, millions of birds will die, Perry said.

More troubling, if the lake continues to dry, it could imperil billions of dollars in Utah industry. The mineral harvesting industry is dependent on the presence of sufficient water, and Utah’s skiing industry relies on snow generated by the lake effect.

Worse still, the drying lake has exposed 800 miles of lake bed and increased the likelihood of dust storms, Perry said. The immediate effects of this are bad enough. Small dust particles in a high enough concentration can create difficult breathing conditions for anyone. For children, elderly people and people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, and asthma, it can spur dangerous respiratory distress.

Prolonged exposure to poor air quality can increase the likelihood of more serious disease and shorten life spans, Perry said. Arsenic from the lake bed makes the storms all the more dangerous. There is ongoing research on how frequently people are exposed to dust from the lake and how high of an arsenic concentration there is in the storms, Perry added.

It’s not just Salt Lake City that’s in danger, but its neighbors too. Some of the smaller dust particles from the storms can stay in the air for two weeks. Assuming toxic dust is picked by a 20-mile-per-hour-wind, “all of Utah County, all the way up to Box Elder County, including Duela County on the other side of the Oaker Mountains — everybody is in the path of this dust,” Perry said.

There are means to protect the lake at the church’s disposal it has yet to tap. Within its unutilized arsenal is its capacity to lobby the Utah legislature, nearly 90% of which is composed of church members. It’s possible that unofficial “backdoor” lobbying regarding the lake has already occurred; former Utah legislature members have spoken publicly about the church asserting its influence this way. It’s also possible the church has refrained from the arena entirely.

Two officials in the state legislature, Rep. Steve Handy of District 16 and House Minority Communications Specialist Ross Chambless, told ReligionUnplugged.com that they aren’t aware of church lobbying efforts regarding the Great Salt Lake, and ReligionUnplugged.com didn’t find meeting minutes indicating such lobbying.

“Nope ... haven’t heard from any church people ever about the GSL,” Handy said in an email. “Not something they would typically weigh in on. ... They only very rarely weigh in on anything unless it is a clear moral matter. ... I’m sure you are casting a wide net, but that’s my perspective. I wouldn’t have anything else to add except for this. ... The Church officially is just as concerned about the lake as all Utahns.”

Alexa Roberts, director of communications for the Utah House of Representatives, told ReligionUnplugged.com that “several groups and organizations have shown a committed effort to preserving and protecting the Great Salt Lake” but did not answer whether she was aware of church lobbying.

It’s possible the church has deemed it unnecessary to lobby the legislature given that elected officials have made a number of moves seemingly without its prodding. The legislature recently authorized $40 million to lease water rights for the lake and another $250 million to put secondary water meters on water canals used by homeowners in some parts of the state to encourage water conservation. These moves have made Perry more confident in Utah’s ability to avoid catastrophe, he said.

Asked about the details of negotiations between the church and the state of Utah for leased or donated water, the office of Utah Governor Spencer Cox told ReligionUnplugged.com: “Water rights leases will be negotiated by the Great Salt Lake Water Trust, and since the trust is still being finalized, no agreements have been made yet. Until then, we’re in the process of identifying all large water rights holders who could potentially benefit the Great Salt Lake and starting conversations.”

The church did not comment on any matters regarding the Great Salt Lake, apart from providing a statement it made back in late June saying that it was making water conservation efforts in and around religious buildings in the face of the drought and inviting other individual church members to conserve water.

The invitation, should it be accepted, could make a difference, considering that much of the water diverted from the Great Salt Lake goes toward agriculture and industry, and many northern Utah farmers and entrepreneurs are Latter-day Saints.

Individual actions do play a role in excess water use, even for those who don’t own a farm or other business. There is a culture in Utah, unlike in Arizona or Nevada, of keeping lawns green, which takes a lot of water, Perry said. It’s “not prudent” to do that in a desert climate, he added.

Beyond the actions of individual church members, church-affiliated institutions have made efforts regarding water conservation. For years, Brigham Young University has adjusted its water systems to be more efficient, according to its website.

It’s unclear whether these efforts are manifest across the church’s northern Utah business holdings.

Bishop Montgomery said it hasn’t been made clear to him from leadership whether the church community would “act as a church group in some way” to confront the changes, but there is “heightened concern” among the community around the potential consequences of a drying lake.

“I personally think about it a great deal, and I think there’s concern generally … amongst members of the church that we don’t know what the effects … could be, as to the Great Salt Lake, as to all kinds of things with climate change,” he said. “I think we’re all quite aware of the concentration of minerals and the concentration of harmful chemicals that could be caught in the wind and could impact us greatly.”

For some Latter-day Saints, protecting the Great Salt Lake and the environment as a whole isn’t simply a means of avoiding disaster — but an integral piece of the faith itself.

“My understanding of our doctrine and the teachings of the church is that this Earth was made as a place for us to live and to learn and to grow, and it’s a place that we are to take good care of, to be stewards of, to be appreciative of — not to be wasteful of,” said Marc Coles-Ritchie, secretary of the board of Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance. “So there’s a lot of teachings in our Scriptures that talk about being good stewards, and taking good care of the Earth, and being appreciative and respectful of the beauty of nature.”

Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance is a nonprofit organization made up of Latter-day Saints and those closely connected to the church that is dedicated to promoting environmentalist policy. The group is not officially affiliated with the church, however. MESA is in the beginning phases of strategizing how to combat changes happening to the lake, Coles-Ritchie said. He said Utah’s government could create policy promoting more efficient use of water and lessening diversion of water from the Great Salt Lake. 

As for the church, Coles-Ritchie said, “Personally I would love to see the church become more proactive and more of a leader in solving environmental problems. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the church to lead out in a variety of ways.”

Coles-Ritchie said he gets the sense there is concern around climate change and water use among church leadership. He added that the church could be an example of efficient water use by implementing low-water landscaping around churches or other water conservation measures.

“I think to some degree they’ve done some of that already — I think more could be done,” he said.

Should air quality in Salt Lake City become more hazardous over time, Coles-Ritchie said he anticipates some Latter-day Saints moving elsewhere in Utah and the American West in search of cleaner air. But he doesn’t foresee the church ever moving its headquarters

Montgomery put it another way, alluding to a renovation project of the Salt Lake Temple slated to be completed in 2025:

“You see the efforts that they’re putting into, for example, the temple. The thought is that it’s being done so it can stand until, our belief, until this world concludes. So I don’t see there being any way that the church would abandon this place.”

Iain Carlos is a reporter for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and formerly participated in the Dow Jones News Fund for American business journalists. He graduated from St. Olaf College with a bachelor’s degree in religion.