Harvard case study widens the reach to save the Great Salt Lake

In late April, members of Grow the Flow, a prominent Great Salt Lake advocacy group, travelled with law professors from the University of Utah to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a series of meetings to discuss the fate of the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere.

Across several days, the team met with local members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, did a reading with Terry Tempest Williams at the Harvard Divinity School, and gave presentations to students and professors from both Harvard’s business and law schools.

Considering the robust amount of legal, environmental and economic scholarship they brought with them, Grow the Flow’s basic points remain straightforward.

The Great Salt Lake is, in fact, drying up. If that is allowed to happen, the consequences will be catastrophic for the economy and for public health, and will be a problem well beyond the confines of the Intermountain region.

“Saving Great Salt Lake is certainly a regional problem or even a local problem, but the implications of the lake’s decline are national and international,” said Jake Dreyfous, managing director of Grow the Flow.

“We need to create a movement to save Great Salt Lake that goes beyond state lines and builds engagement and capacity around the country.”

Building that national effort was part of the reason they traveled to Boston.

Despite the size of the challenge, the group’s leaders are confident that solutions exist to prevent such a collapse from happening. With enough help, they believe that Utah can prove to the world that American’s can still do big, nearly impossible things.

“The collapse of Great Salt Lake is an immense risk but that is out outweighed by the opportunity associated with saving it,” Dreyfous said. “We Utahns and we Americans could become the first community to restore a saline lake in the face of collapse and to really write a blueprint for addressing water security around the world. ”

Sharing the story widely

One way to create that movement is to share the story of the diminishing, yet critically important lake with more people and, where possible, those with economic and legal influence. Regardless of the current politics swirling around it, there are quite a few of those folks within Harvard’s orbit.

In particular, the trip was scheduled around a co-presentation of a new Harvard Business School case study, conducted by Rebecca Henderson, a professor and research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Such business school case studies are an opportunity for masters students — future corporate and public leaders — to make hypothetical decisions based on a thorough assessment of the contributing factors of a specific, real world problem.

“It’s a discussion of a dilemma, and it attempts to put you — the reader — in the shoes of the people who have to deal with the dilemma,” Henderson said. “To give you enough information so you have some sense of what the different options are, but really to ask, ‘OK, what would you do?’”

Henderson explained that good case studies give enough information such that participants are sufficiently knowledgeable to be conversant with people who are immersed in the issue.

Over a year, Henderson and her research associate Nicole Marie made five trips to Salt Lake City, interviewed around 50 different stakeholders, state leaders and specialists — including Josh Romney — to create the study.

While Henderson has taught it several times, the case is not yet published. But it will be within the coming weeks at which point there’s the potential for 1,000 business schools to teach it and incorporate it into their curriculum.

That would mean thousands of MBA students across the country and globe would become versed in the “dilemma” of the Great Salt Lake and have waded into solving an issue that even President Donald Trump wants to invest in.

How did the study come to be?

After reading Williams’ 2023 op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” students and mutual friends put Henderson in touch with the author. Subsequently, she became “deeply interested” because she studies such issues — the intersection of ecological degradation and economics — for a living.

“The Great Salt Lake seemed like an amazing story for several reasons. One was it’s like a big deal ... this is a, for sure, if we don’t address these questions there will be very significant impacts,” Henderson said.

Not least of which are the straightforward financial costs associated with a dried up lake and what that would do to the Wasatch Front.

“You tell me how much embedded real estate there is in Salt Lake City,” Henderson said. “Billions and billions of dollars. Billions and billions and billions ...”

The other was that, “It seemed to be an example of a problem that fascinates me, which is we know there’s a problem. We know that the technology and the resources exist to fix it. We know the impacts are going to be very severe and very long lasting. And yet somehow we’re not acting at the speed and scale required.”

However, Henderson said she believes that many factors that would allow for a solution to be implemented are already present.

In addition to “the fact that Utah has the highest levels of social cohesion in the United States,” Henderson cited the state’s one-party rule, bipartisan political support and financial commitment, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ resources and active involvement and the location itself being of immense spiritual and historical significance, among reasons to hope action is possible.

But another reason Great Salt Lake makes for an excellent case study and point of interest for a broader audience is that it’s emblematic of many large issues facing the world, Henderson said. Yet, it remains fathomable.

“It felt to me that talking about the Great Salt Lake is a way to talk about these much larger problems that are present right across the world, but in a way that’s very concrete, that you can get your hands around,” Henderson said.

Additionally, she wondered, does anyone really want to find out what happens if nothing is done?

“Do you want to find out if being showered with arsenic and cadmium and mercury on a regular basis — and have these go into the land which grows your food — has significantly negative effects?,” Henderson said. “And by the way, this is one of the great wonders of the world. And by the way, it’s providing half the water — the precipitation — for the region.”

What did students think?

Henderson has taught the study three times now — to her MBA students, some philanthropists and, during Grow the Flow’s trip, to a group of online students who came to Cambridge to read a case study in person for the first time.

The students’ questions ranged from asking if Americans were in denial, wondering why the government didn’t just swoop in, to defending the rights and livelihood of regional farmers who’ve been working the land for six generations.

A solution started to emerge, but the pressured timeline — something needs to be done in the next three-to-five years — of the lake’s collapse brought out a curious response from the future business leaders.

“We were quite near the end, and someone in the class — and I promise I hadn’t put them up to it — said, ‘I think what we need is love,’" Henderson recalled. “I think what we need is love.”

That notion is the one that she’s come to think may be the most important of them all.

“It’s got to be about more than, ‘OK, we have to do our part,’” she said. “It’s got to be about, ‘We have a sacred duty to our children.’ I’m really coming to believe that.”

Gathering support

Gathering more people to feel that same “love” for the lake and for future generations was part of the reason Grow the Flow was in Boston. Growing the number of stakeholders — even if they’re from around the country — can only assist what is becoming a national, bipartisan effort to save the lake.

“It was really inspiring and empowering to see the passion and commitment for this cause 2,000 miles away resonates so deeply with with the Boston community,” Dreyfous said after returning home in Salt Lake City.

For the lawyers from University of Utah, they were thrilled to see such interest from the Harvard community. They’re hopeful that such visits turn into greater partnerships as more folks see the scale of the issue Utah is facing.

“The Great Salt Lake is garnering the president’s attention. It’s got white-shoe lawyers’ attention. It’s got Harvard Business School’s attention ... this is really a critical point,” said Brigham Daniels, a law professor at University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

“More and more people are waking up to the idea that this isn’t an environmental problem faced by Utah, but is an environmental crisis that will have implications throughout the United States and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Add to that that people are seeing this as, you know, people are hungry for moonshots.”

Grow the Flow’s leaders like Dreyfous and Ben Abbott, the BYU plant and wildlife professor whose one of the most trusted scientists advocating for the lake, reiterated that sense of overcoming the impossible several times.

They’re certain that Utah can save the lake if enough interests — like the church, state and federal government, local residents, farmers, sportsmen, artists and others — come together to help solve this “dilemma” as Harvard Business School referred to it.

“We need Utahns. We need folks from Idaho, Wyoming as regional partners ... We need folks in New York and L.A. and Boston to care about Great Salt Lake,” Dreyfous said.

“And we need our partners across the globe who are struggling with the decline and collapse of their own saline lakes to know that there’s a community and a network of resources who want to help, and who are committed to solving this unsolved ecological crisis. We have to take Great Salt Lake on the road if we want to succeed.”