When you fly into Salt Lake City from the north, you get a poignant view of the vanishing water in the Great Salt Lake. The problem is real. So what is Utah doing about it? Last Chair traveled to Antelope Island, in the heart of the lake, to speak with Utah state representative Tim Hawkes, a passionate advocate, on the very realistic steps the state is already taking to save the Great Salt Lake.

In today’s world of polarized politics, Hawkes stands out as a leader who works across the aisles. He laughs as he describes himself as a conservative who advocates for natural resources. In fact, if there is any one issue in Utah that truly unites politicians, it’s saving the Great Salt Lake.

Hawkes grew up in Brigham City, Utah, learning to love the outdoors as a young boy, hiking, fishing, hunting, cutting school to go skiing. He followed his passion into law, becoming a water rights attorney with a thriving career in Washington, D.C. Over time, he missed the Utah outdoors and moved back to his home state, working first with Trout Unlimited protecting waterways.

Today, Hawkes is a leading advocate saving the Great Salt Lake, working closely with his fellow legislators to seek real solutions. In his day job, he serves as legal counsel for the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative.

How real is the problem? For our podcast interview, we drove across the causeway to Antelope Island. What used to be a roadway surrounded by water, now has only a few small pools. Birds that used to flock along the highway are now relegated to small patches of water. To find water along the shore of the island, in some places you would need to travel a mile.

Can the lake be saved? Hawkes thinks so. He’s a positive, forward-looking leader focused on solutions.

Here’s a sample of Last Chair’s episode 5 of season 4 with Utah state representative Tim Hawkes on how Utah is working together to save the Great Salt Lake.

There's something deeply human that appeals to us about wild things and wild places. And I think it's important for our mental health, for our spirituality, sense of well-being and connectedness, just presence. 

It's easy to see the lake as kind of an oddity. I grew up in Utah and you see it as out of sight, out of mind. It's been interesting as an adult to get to know it better, to understand the ecology. That's part of my job – to learn about it. But just to get out to Antelope Island and see the amazing wildlife that's out here, it feels otherworldly.

A terminal Lake is basically a lake that sits at the bottom of a watershed and it doesn't have an outlet. So there are rivers flowing in. There are no rivers flowing out. And so the only way that water is lost is through evaporation. That tends to concentrate salt and other minerals in that system. And that's where you get these unique systems where you need uniquely adapted critters that can survive in them because the conditions are very harsh salt, salt content very high.

For those that have been engaged in protecting the lake and trying to conserve the lake, we've all been astonished by just how much interest has kicked in over the lake in recent years. And I think that has everything to do with these low lake levels. So the low lake levels have driven concerns about how that can affect the state and can affect the ecosystem that's driven media attention. And that largely then accounts for the public starting to gain more and more awareness of, ‘oh my gosh, the lake does touch us in ways, really important ways that we didn't fully realize we've got to do something to protect it.’ 

It's really human caused. And one of the interesting data points that I don't think people realize, is they assume because we're in the middle of a very significant drought, that it's just we're getting a lot less precipitation and the science actually doesn't back that up. If you take Salt Lake Valley or Cache Valley, important watersheds that feed into the Great Salt Lake, and you just measure them over time, you just look how much rain and snow is falling and you plot it out – it's largely flat. It hasn't changed. It's hard to make the argument that we're getting less precipitation. So the only thing that can account for these dramatically low levels are really two things. One is that our climate is getting warmer. And as it gets warmer, then it takes more water to keep crops up or keep your lawns green or whatever. So we use more water. But the second way that it affects us is that we are just altering this ecosystem. The best available science suggests that we have contributed about 11 feet of elevation loss. If you took that 11 feet and you put it back into Great Salt Lake today, the lake would be right close to its historic average. 

Agriculture is a big use and then everybody points the finger at agriculture. It is interesting though, because when largely the areas around Great Salt Lake were in agriculture, the lake was fairly healthy. What's changed is a lot of urban and suburban development and that changes flow patterns as well. We all have grass where before there was just sagebrush and we try to keep that grass green even in the middle of the summer, even in the heat of summer. And so we call it municipal and industrial, but basically water that's used for homes and businesses. And the last one I would say is industry. We have a very important mineral industry out on the Great Salt Lake and the way that they get the minerals out of the water is forced evaporation, so they contribute to lake declines, as well. So I sort of say it's agriculture, it's homes and businesses and then it's industry.

The pace of change has been nothing short of extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it. It's hard to change water law. But, I'd say in the last two to three years, we've probably seen six to eight major pieces of legislation that have direct effects on Great Salt Lake – really extraordinary bills that provide greater legal recognition for environmental uses of water, that provide greater flexibility in terms of how we share water, and that fundamentally call out Great Salt Lake and try to create legal tools to help fix this enormous problem.

Well, I'm one of those crazy idealists that really do try to ask myself, ‘what have I done to make the world a better place?’ That's really what got me interested in public policy. And I was working outside of the legislature on these policy questions. I had sort of written off the idea of running for office, but my wife was the one that actually suggested to me, ‘Hey, Tim, you get really excited when it comes to politics and policy, have you thought about running?’ And so I made kind of a wild haired decision to run. It's been immensely rewarding and gratifying. I'm so grateful for my colleagues at the legislature – many of whom are just terrific people and people of vision and integrity and that and I've been able to work with them to accomplish some amazing things.

Part of it is just being informed and helping educate others. I think most people, at the end of the day, want to do the right thing and they just need good information. And so we can be a source of good information. We can help educate people and inform them and let them know. The lake touches us in so many ways. It affects the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, the water that we drink. It is tied into our snowpack through lake effect snow. So for a skier, right, I mean, it touches something that skiers care greatly about. So we can help educate other skiers and snowboarders about the value of the lake and the way that we're connected to it. But the single biggest thing we can do goes back to what I said before, and that's that we can conserve water and encourage other people to do the same. We can be the model in the neighborhood. That or our lawn maybe is not so big and not so green. Right? And we can just set a good example and try to cut back. I tell people it just everybody in the state of Utah watered one time less per week in the summer – that alone would generate a significant block of water if we could deliver that down to Lake.