42 min
Expert: Utah's Wet Winter Won't Save Great Salt Lake Superpowers for Good: Empowering Changemakers for Social Impact via Regulated Investment Crowdfunding from the SuperCrowd.
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- Entrepreneurship
Devin: What is your superpower?
Ben: I'm basically the most humble person you've ever met. (Laughs.)
Saving the Great Salt Lake will require “a 30 to 50 percent reduction in our water use in the watershed,” says Dr. Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at Brigham Young University, one of the foremost authorities on the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
This isn’t just a local problem. Not significantly tied to climate change, salt lakes around the globe (about 120 of them) are drying up for the same reason: humans are using the water before it gets to the salt lakes.
AI Summary
1. The Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem.
2. The lake has experienced a significant decline in water levels over the last hundred years.
3. The cause of the decline is mainly due to human water use for agriculture, outdoor vegetation, and mining minerals.
4. Climate change plays a small role in the decline; water consumption accounts for 80 to 90 percent of it.
5. There needs to be a 30 to 50 percent reduction in water use in the watershed to address the problem.
6. Agricultural optimization, urban water use reduction, and targeted fallowing are potential solutions.
7. Alfalfa is a major contributor to water depletion.
8. Farmers must be compensated for reducing water use to remain economically viable.
9. A high percentage, perhaps 95 percent, of indoor water use ends up in the lake.
10. Ben Abbott’s work is focused on understanding and protecting freshwater ecosystems.
Great Salt Lake is a vital part of the ecosystem in Northern Utah. It is the largest of the salt lakes in North America. Losing the lake could create an ecological catastrophe.
Ben explains the problem in simple terms: “Great Salt Lake naturally fluctuates. It goes up and down because there’s no outlet to the ocean. But what we’ve seen over the last hundred years is a very steep decline, a decrease in the water level. This is driven overwhelmingly by one thing, extractive human water use.”
“The breakdown is approximately 80-10-10. So, 80 percent agriculture, 10 percent mineral extraction from the lake, 10 percent municipal water use the urban areas,” he says, summarizing the use of water that once flowed into the lake.
In urban settings, Ben acknowledges that about 95 percent of indoor water uses end up in the lake. After going down the drain, the water is cleaned and flows eventually to where it belongs. The water on urban lawns, however, doesn’t end up in the lake.
In agriculture, “alfalfa is the predominant crop that is using water in the watershed,” Ben says. He suggests paying farmers to fallow their fields for part of the year.
Utah received record-setting snow this past winter; Great Salt Lake has risen several feet. Ben worries this could be a problem. “We can’t get distracted this amazing snow year. It’s the biggest snow year on record. It’s a real gift. It gives us more—maybe a few months more or a year more time to implement these solutions. It doesn’t solve the long-term deficit.”
Interestingly, Ben notes that humans have lived around what is now Great Salt Lake, for about 20,000 years, since long before it was formed by the receding Lake Bonneville. “It was only in the mid-1900s when we had these big federally subsidized dam projects and canal and pipeline projects that we started to overuse, and we created this artificial surplus of water that nobody locally was paying for,” Ben says.
Ben has one overriding concern. “We haven’t come to grips with how serious an issue this is and with how hard the solution is going to be.”
“The lake responds to how much water flows into it; it doesn’t respond to the number of bills that were passed, the number of podcasts that were done on the lake or even the amount of money we spend on it,” he says.
Ben’s superpower is humility. He’s learned to focus on the lakes he cares so much about, not on getting credit for saving them.
How to Develop Humility As a Superpower
Ben has learned to
Devin: What is your superpower?
Ben: I'm basically the most humble person you've ever met. (Laughs.)
Saving the Great Salt Lake will require “a 30 to 50 percent reduction in our water use in the watershed,” says Dr. Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at Brigham Young University, one of the foremost authorities on the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
This isn’t just a local problem. Not significantly tied to climate change, salt lakes around the globe (about 120 of them) are drying up for the same reason: humans are using the water before it gets to the salt lakes.
AI Summary
1. The Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem.
2. The lake has experienced a significant decline in water levels over the last hundred years.
3. The cause of the decline is mainly due to human water use for agriculture, outdoor vegetation, and mining minerals.
4. Climate change plays a small role in the decline; water consumption accounts for 80 to 90 percent of it.
5. There needs to be a 30 to 50 percent reduction in water use in the watershed to address the problem.
6. Agricultural optimization, urban water use reduction, and targeted fallowing are potential solutions.
7. Alfalfa is a major contributor to water depletion.
8. Farmers must be compensated for reducing water use to remain economically viable.
9. A high percentage, perhaps 95 percent, of indoor water use ends up in the lake.
10. Ben Abbott’s work is focused on understanding and protecting freshwater ecosystems.
Great Salt Lake is a vital part of the ecosystem in Northern Utah. It is the largest of the salt lakes in North America. Losing the lake could create an ecological catastrophe.
Ben explains the problem in simple terms: “Great Salt Lake naturally fluctuates. It goes up and down because there’s no outlet to the ocean. But what we’ve seen over the last hundred years is a very steep decline, a decrease in the water level. This is driven overwhelmingly by one thing, extractive human water use.”
“The breakdown is approximately 80-10-10. So, 80 percent agriculture, 10 percent mineral extraction from the lake, 10 percent municipal water use the urban areas,” he says, summarizing the use of water that once flowed into the lake.
In urban settings, Ben acknowledges that about 95 percent of indoor water uses end up in the lake. After going down the drain, the water is cleaned and flows eventually to where it belongs. The water on urban lawns, however, doesn’t end up in the lake.
In agriculture, “alfalfa is the predominant crop that is using water in the watershed,” Ben says. He suggests paying farmers to fallow their fields for part of the year.
Utah received record-setting snow this past winter; Great Salt Lake has risen several feet. Ben worries this could be a problem. “We can’t get distracted this amazing snow year. It’s the biggest snow year on record. It’s a real gift. It gives us more—maybe a few months more or a year more time to implement these solutions. It doesn’t solve the long-term deficit.”
Interestingly, Ben notes that humans have lived around what is now Great Salt Lake, for about 20,000 years, since long before it was formed by the receding Lake Bonneville. “It was only in the mid-1900s when we had these big federally subsidized dam projects and canal and pipeline projects that we started to overuse, and we created this artificial surplus of water that nobody locally was paying for,” Ben says.
Ben has one overriding concern. “We haven’t come to grips with how serious an issue this is and with how hard the solution is going to be.”
“The lake responds to how much water flows into it; it doesn’t respond to the number of bills that were passed, the number of podcasts that were done on the lake or even the amount of money we spend on it,” he says.
Ben’s superpower is humility. He’s learned to focus on the lakes he cares so much about, not on getting credit for saving them.
How to Develop Humility As a Superpower
Ben has learned to
42 min