In Defense of Utah Lake

And against dredging and other ill-advised ventures.

For the past several years, a group of private real estate developers (currently branded as Lake Restoration Services, LLC) has proposed dredging Utah Lake and constructing artificial islands that will host residential development. As many have noted, this proposal is not a genuine effort at environmental stewardship and rehabilitation; the dredging and deepening of Utah Lake will likely exacerbate some of its existing (and currently improving) challenges. 

It is a sad commentary on our understanding of and commitment to Utah Lake that some of the developer’s patently false claims have been accepted with few questions by many Utah state legislators. Our failure to recognize the worth and beauty of Utah Lake doesn’t represent a failure on the part of the lake, but our failure to accept what is given to us. Utah Lake isn’t Lake Tahoe nor Jenny Lake. And it doesn’t have to be. At times, life along the Wasatch Front begins to resemble an experiment in terraforming. We sometimes act as if leaving the desert alone, leaving this place to its own kind of desolate (but stirring) beauty, would be a kind of moral failure. So we fill our lawns with grass, plant foreign trees, and, sometimes, build sprawling golf courses. We can’t properly live in the desert because we’ve stopped accepting that it is a desert in the first place. And so, when Utah Lake eventually bears the strain of our wasteful civilization, we don’t blame ourselves, we blame the lake. If only the lake was deeper, if only it was clearer, if only it was a bit less of what it is supposed to be (as defined by what is supportable in the Great Basin, an arid and harsh environment that requires everything to be perfectly honed to its surroundings) then we could accept it fully. But as it is now—shallow, warm, and cloudy—we can’t fully assent to its belonging. 

But to actually go down to Utah Lake, to confront the very existence of a lake in a desert, is to see a miracle. Last year I drove down to Genola, a small town at the southern edge of Utah Lake, to bird. It was a cold and windy early spring day, and just as the season felt caught between winter and summer, I felt caught (nearly caught up) between the lake and the mountains. Mt. Nebo seemed to rush down toward me from the east, while Utah Lake caught the setting sun perfectly—as it eased behind the dynamic gray clouds of a stormy day. Life, all that it was, is, and ever will be, is captured in the simple beauty of a piece of earth doing what it has always done. And what does Utah Lake do? It reflects the sun and mountains, sustains numerous plant and animal species, and reminds us of the peaceful cycles of life—and that is more than enough.

Perhaps another problem this saga illustrates is our refusal to accept certain limits. It used to be that a shore, a seam between water and land, stated an obvious fact—you will not build past this point. But we can’t accept that anymore. We’ve forgotten that all our lives are an experiment in balance, in sanctifying the scarce through care and attention. If attention, as Mary Oliver says, “is our endless and proper work,” then perhaps the lack of attention isn’t our leisure, but our very destruction. It is the same story that levels mountains for coal, erases seashore for beach resorts, and replaces places to live with places to pass through. And it’s not that Utahans don’t accept some limits, it’s just that this concept isn’t fully taken to its logical conclusion. 

For example, the idea of limits is rightly celebrated in terms of moral restraint in the LDS Church, and many other churches throughout the state. The principle that what you do has both short- and long-term effects, that actions have consequences, and that these causes and effects are bundled together in a tangled skein that we have little control over, is duly noted in many ecclesiastical congregations here. What seems a bit underdeveloped, however, is the parallel idea that our actions toward the earth have both short- and long-term effects, and that scarcity is not simply an ancient phenomenon. For instance, we understand the scarcity and fragility of each unique human life—that is why many Utahans place a great emphasis on home environment, and on what media, foods, and beverages are consumed. There seems to be some sort of collective understanding that this delicate thread of our lives is easily entangled and knotted in destructive habits, behaviors, and cycles. We know instinctively that every choice has a consequence—and that the specific consequence is non-negotiable. 

Likewise, if we utterly transform an existing natural resource to resemble something it never was, we can’t, at the same time, pick what the ramifications of this action will be. Though, thanks to modern ecological science  we can predict, with a high degree of confidence, will happen. In all likelihood, when we poison all of the fish in the lake to remove non-native and invasive carp, we will damage the intricate food web that depends on the native fish to consume and be consumed. When we dredge and deepen the lake we will likely increase the chance that algal blooms “worsen [in] intensity and duration” as we decrease the lake’s turbidity and create anoxic zones. When we fill the lake with artificial islands we increase the source points of pollution right on the water. And when we change the lake fundamentally, we destroy the very habitat that many vulnerable species depend on for survival.

But that this proposal has gained the support of the majority of Utah state lawmakers not only illustrates a failure in our sense of limits; it also demonstrates a failure to consistently apply the conservative world-view ostensibly represented in the state legislature’s Republican super-majority. David Brooks masterfully summarizes this failure (which he generalizes to all of contemporary American conservatism) in his latest Atlantic article. In applying a Burkean worldview, Brooks writes, “this is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental.” He references the need for humility and caution as necessary companions in the task of improving, or at least ameliorating, society. This same humble and cautious worldview would, in my view, reflect on the long-term wisdom of such a venture, and come to the conclusion that scheme is really quite absurd.

It also seems quite blatantly redistributionist. Though I’m generally not an opponent of government-led redistribution of resources (from rich to poor), I would imagine most Utah state legislators are leery of any government-imposed redistribution. The fact is, though, that the redistribution here skews strangely. The government would help finance the privatization of a public resource using public funds. That’s like selling your house and then helping the buyer pay for a wrecking ball to finish it off. So, from a high-level view, where would the money go if this project proceeds? It would go from Utah taxpayers to Lake Restoration Services (so called), and then also travel from home buyers to Lake Restoration Services (so called). Finally, money would also flow from Utah taxpayers as they fund the same sort of economically and fiscally unsustainable life-style in little artificial islands that was previously enjoyed on the “mainland”—what Chuck Marohn has characterized as a Ponzi scheme of suburbia.

Theodore Roosevelt memorably called for the establishment of places to be “left alone.” Though that philosophy has been successfully entrenched (at least to some degree) in our national park system, we have forgotten that this philosophy has repercussions at home as well. There are certain things that we should leave alone right here. Let us have the grace, courage, and foresight to leave Utah Lake alone—so that our children and grandchildren can enjoy this lake, and the refuge and peace it provides in the middle of an increasingly busy valley. Because, fundamentally, land doesn’t belong to us—we belong to it. Its health is our health, and its ravages our ravages.

I would like to end with Wendell Berry’s inimitable words on this topic. “I have no doubt at all that even if the global climate were getting better, our abuses of the land would still be the disaster most seriously threatening to the survival of humans and other creatures. Land abuse, I know, is pretty much a global phenomenon. But it is not happening in the whole world as climate change happens in the whole sky. It is happening, because it can happen, only locally, in small places, where the people who commit the abuses also live. And so my question has been, and continues to be, What can cause people to destroy the places where they live, the humans and other creatures who are their neighbors, and ultimately themselves? How can humans willingly turn against the earth, of which they are made, from which they live? To treat that as a scientific and technological or political question is not enough, is even misleading. The question immediately and at least is economic: What is wrong with the way we are keeping house, the way we make our living, the way we live? (What is wrong with our minds?) And to take the economic question seriously enough is right away to ask another that is also but not only economic: What is happening to our souls?”

If you would like to help local groups fighting for the continued health of Utah Lake please visit https://conserveutahvalley.org/write-a-letter-utah-lake-needs-legitimate-conservation-efforts/ where you can join a campaign facilitating letter writing in support of Utah Lake. 

You can also sign a petition to stop any bills in the 2022 legislative session that would create a pathway for island development in Utah Lake at https://dontpaveutahlake.org/petition/