A Bomb, a Bird, and a Lake: Redefining Economic Resilience

Greetings! I have a story about a bomb, a dead canary, and a dying lake.

Salt Lake City is a major city in a dry, mountainous region of the US, pressed between a large lake much saltier than the ocean and a mountain range where most of its freshwater comes from. About 180 years old, the city has seen explosive growth in population—and water consumption. Salt Lake City is also experiencing rapid, advanced climate impacts.

Although these issues have been known for some years already, last week I heard a very good podcast on the city and its challenges, which goes so far as to call the intensity and seriousness an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Very serious language, but the Great Salt Lake is the emerging Aral Sea for North America.

For years, inflows have been declining as the population has grown and precipitation levels have fallen. The Great Salt Lake sitting by the city has many suspended minerals that, with falling water levels, precipitate on the drying ground. These minerals look like thick, lumpy snow in the desert, but they are quite toxic. Air quality levels are falling and winds pick up these minerals. Indeed, unless the lake levels rise (by quite large amounts at this stage, reversing long term trends), residents could easily need to travel with quite powerful breathing “gas masks” to filter out the dangerous minerals. Some residents are already using such masks.

Climate change is making this problem much worse. But as the podcast shows, decision makers are accelerating the rate of the problem. Technical analysts have been pointing out the issues for some time, but you can hear decision makers on the podcast quite literally say that their job is to promote water-intensive economic growth rather than making choices that might reduce water usage or redefine development as resilience. There is no sense of balance between the availability of resources and the demand for those resources, much less preparation for future conditions.

The most overused metaphor for environmental catastrophe must be the image of a canary in a coal mine. The story behind this metaphor is that, long ago, miners kept a canary with them deep under the earth so that as long as they could hear the canary singing, they were safe. If the canary stopped singing, that meant (in theory) that poisonous, often hard to detect gases had risen to a level that could kill the poor bird. The miners might then be able to run away to safety.

I have a lot of issues with this metaphor, especially its overuse (but I also wonder why we need to kill the bird to save ourselves; I happen to like birds). From a practical perspective, decision makers generally have a bad record of listening for the dangerous silence. And in Salt Lake City, the technical analysts have not been silent but consistent and persistent in their warnings.

For Salt Lake City, the canary is dead on the receding lake’s shore. The choices that are left now are difficult yet remain clear. Indeed, other cities have made better choices in the past. Many more are making better choices now.

Our policies matter, and how we evaluate economic success and progress is especially important. The doctrine of promoting growth in a fragile place has a clear endpoint. We need other metrics. Let’s develop them when they are missing, and apply them rapidly where they are needed.

John H. Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA