Conservation and community groups have filed a lawsuit against Utah for what they claim is the state's failure to ensure enough water gets to the Great Salt Lake, to avoid what they call an "ecological collapse."

The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring Utah to let more water reach the largest natural lake in the Western Hemisphere.

John Leshy, professor emeritus of law at the University of California-San Francisco, said the lake is a "public trust" resource per the state's constitution. He added the court will examine what the designation means when it comes to managing and protecting it.

Back in the 1970s, the California Supreme Court stepped in to protect Mono Lake from its water being diverted to Los Angeles utilizing the Public Trust Doctrine. Leshy argued it could set a strong precedent in Utah.

"The Utah courts will have to make up their own minds about what Utah law said on this subject," Leshy acknowledged. "But obviously if they look to the Mono Lake situation, they will do something along the lines of 'You can't let this important resource disappear from inaction,' because that is what the future holds unless the courts intervene."

Leshy pointed out potential public health impacts make the Great Salt Lake case different and more serious than the Mono Lake case. According to a NASA study, residents in west Salt Lake City and Tooele County will be disproportionately affected by the exposed lake bed sediment which contains fine particulates and toxic pollutants. Critics of using the "public trust" approach said there are multiple water users to consider, and other, less drastic solutions to improve the lake's health.

Stu Gillespie, senior attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, filed the lawsuit. He contended the Utah Constitution imposes public trust duties, forcing the state to protect the Great Salt Lake, which now sits below the point experts said is needed to remain viable.

According to Earthjustice, the state cannot sustain a minimum water level of about 4,200 feet without modifying upstream diversions. Gillespie stressed the law is on the plaintiffs' side.

"The lake has gone into a structural decline in recent years," Gillespie pointed out. "The elevation has dropped, dropped and dropped, hitting record low levels. And as a result, that is triggering widespread impacts to the ecosystem, and also creating a public health crisis."

In Utah State University polling, a large majority of Utahns see drought and a drying Great Salt Lake as their top two environmental concerns. Gov. Spencer Cox's office would not comment on ongoing litigation.


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Since the 2020 collapse of the famed Apalachicola Bay oyster fishery, people who made their livelihoods on the bay have been counting on local leaders and scientists to pave a path for a triumphant return.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission closed the bay for overharvesting, habitat degradation, the BP oil spill and more.

Betty Webb, coordinator and facilitator with the Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay, said the Apalachicola Bay System Ecosystem-Based Adaptive Restoration and Management Plan marks a milestone in the quest to reclaim the bay, giving hope to multigenerational families who were forced to find new jobs in construction, air conditioning and plumbing.

"In their mindset, that's an interim opportunity for them to survive. Some have even gone into the service industry, for the tourism," she said. "But their heart and their passion is wanting to get back on that bay. They like the freedom. They like the self-employment."

For decades, oysters drove the economy, generating an estimated annual economic output of $134 million before the collapse. The plan has five overarching goals for restoration, including implementing sustainable management practices for oyster resources while considering future conditions such as warmer temperatures attributed to climate change.

Chad Hanson, an officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts, emphasized the significance of the Apalachicola Bay System Initiative in addressing the diverse impacts of climate change, ranging from intensified storm events such as hurricanes to prolonged droughts that disrupt the bay's water flow.

"That affects where oysters can can optimize their productivity. Thus, the plan calls for looking at the modeling, including what those projections for future conditions will be, to ensure that the management of oyster reefs and the restoration of reefs are being done accordingly," Hanson explained.

The new management plan was developed over four years of collaboration and is critical to the community. Webb emphasized the urgent need to reopen the bay in January 2026 for affected families, and said even if it has to operate at limited capacity initially, she urges policymakers to ensure fair access for all.

What the extraction industry calls "produced water" is the subject of hearings this week in New Mexico.

The term applies to water coming out of the ground along with oil and gas, which can be toxic to humans, animals and the environment.

The New Mexico Environment Department has developed draft rules for the reuse of such water, while also creating safeguards.

Camilla Feibelman, director of the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, encouraged residents to support the rule.

"What this rule-making does is to prohibit the use of this produced water outside oil and gas operations," Feibelman explained. "It keeps it from being discharged in a way that would harm our surface waters and our groundwater."

A hearing by the Water Quality Control Commission at the State Capitol allows for public comments from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. the rest of the week. Even though the rule is meant to enforce protections, some environmental opponents have rallied outside the State Capitol, arguing no produced water is safe and will always pose a threat to New Mexicans' health and safety.

The rule allows for research projects on the use of produced water, as long as there is no discharge to surface or groundwater, and formalizes the approach already used by the department. Feibelman says the Sierra Club opposes the use of produced water closed-loop industrial processes, in part because the state's environmental division did not provide any substantive testimony supporting its use.

"We want to make sure that these liquids that are dangerous and filled with toxic chemicals -- even in some cases naturally occurring radioactive material -- don't intersect with any of our waters," Feibelman emphasized.

A 2023 lawsuit claiming the state has failed to enforce pollution laws while also allowing more oil and gas production is currently making its way through the New Mexico courts.

By Syris Valentine for Grist.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

We tend to think of buildings as semipermanent structures. Once they go up, decades or even centuries pass before they come down. But when they do, it's usually under the weight of wrecking balls and sledgehammers. The shattered remains of the structures that once sheltered us are then often cast into a landfill. Each year, nearly 150 million tons of this debris piles up in dumps in the U.S. alone.

Globally, the act of erecting new buildings and tearing down old ones consumes roughly a third of all resources extracted from the environment every year and produces just under a third of all the world's waste. But several cities across the U.S. have begun to push the construction sector toward practices that keep materials out of the landfill. The goal: Reuse parts of old buildings in new ones, and recycle the rest.

In 2016, Portland, Oregon, became the first city in the country to institute a deconstruction ordinance, requiring that all single-family homes built before 1940 and slated for removal be deconstructed - that is, taken apart board by board - so their materials can be salvaged for reuse. Since then, more than half a dozen cities from San Antonio to Pittsburgh have followed Portland's example.

"Ideally, what is being pulled out of these houses is being used for their same purpose," says Stephanie Phillips, San Antonio's deconstruction and circular economy program manager. Like Portland's, San Antonio's 2022 ordinance specifically mandates that old, historic homes be deconstructed if they're coming down.

That's at least in part because the best, and sometimes only, way to get the right materials to rehab historic buildings is from a different home built in the same period. As Phillips says, "Rehabbing buildings is looked at as the pinnacle of climate-wise building."

A small number of cities go even further. Boulder, Colorado, is one of only two cities nationwide (the other being Palo Alto, California) that requires deconstruction of any and every building slated to come down, regardless of age and whether it's residential or commercial. Boulder's ordinance also includes what's known as a "mandatory minimum." At least 75 percent of the total weight of a building must be diverted from landfill through either reuse or recycling.

Jackie Kirouac-Fram, executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit ReBuilding Center, believes that a mandatory minimum is necessary to achieve the intent of these deconstruction ordinances: salvaging high-quality materials that homeowners, builders, and craftspeople can then access at affordable rates. Without this requirement, Kirouac-Fram says, Portland has seen particularly low rates of salvage. (Official figures aren't available, and city representatives didn't respond to a request for comment.)

While San Antonio also lacks a mandatory minimum, Phillips says the city's contractors have on average recovered 70 percent of a given building's weight, with over half of the recovered materials going to reuse. Phillips attributes these figures to the thorough, city-sponsored training contractors must go through in order to qualify for San Antonio's list of certified deconstruction contractors.

Meanwhile, in Boulder, despite its mandatory minimum, the city has not provided much training for the local workforce or established certification requirements, according to Emily Freeman, the city's policy advisor on the circular economy. As a result, some contractors may exploit loopholes to meet the requirements without salvaging so much as a single two-by-four, and property owners have few tools to evaluate the bids they receive. They're being asked to compare "apples to kiwis," Freeman says.

In the worst example she has seen to date, a contractor used the foundation - the heaviest part of a building - as well as patio furniture and mulched trees on the property to meet the requirement to divert 75 percent of the building's weight.

This reveals another challenge when it comes to mandatory minimums: Such requirements often don't differentiate between reuse - the ideal form of waste diversion - and recycling. For instance, if lumber isn't sorted and stored so it can later be picked up and incorporated into a new project, it might instead be sent through a chipper and processed into particleboard.

To address these problems, Freeman and her colleagues are looking to revise and strengthen some of Boulder's deconstruction practices, which could include hosting trainings and establishing a certified contractors list, similar to San Antonio's, to ensure everyone has the same playbook of best practices. Freeman hopes that these types of changes would help Boulder to achieve the vision she briefly saw realized in 2023, when the city deconstructed an abandoned hospital. Of the 65-million-pound building, the city recycled or salvaged 60.8 million pounds, or 93.5 percent of the building's weight. This included structural steel that has found its way into two new city-owned buildings: a fire station and a golf course clubhouse.

Taking salvaged materials and getting them into other buildings is what organizations like Kirouac-Fram's ReBuilding Center aim to facilitate. It stores salvaged materials that Portlanders can purchase at low-to-no cost. San Antonio has launched its own Material Innovation Center to find the next best use for salvaged materials, including bus shelters, garden beds, and affordable housing repairs.

But a final challenge remains in many of these cities: getting contractors to use salvaged materials in their projects. In some cases, the problem is a matter of ease and inventory; contractors don't want to waste time browsing stacks of mismatched materials when they may not find what they need. In other cases, builders still need to be convinced that giving old materials a second life in new construction won't compromise a building's integrity.

Boulder has been struggling to close this piece of the reuse loop. Though the city has incorporated many of the metal beams extracted from the old hospital into new city-owned properties, some leftover steel remains. City officials are still in talks with builders in Boulder to find someone to take what's left.

"It's just a matter of convincing the construction world that reused steel is going to be solid," Freeman says. She hopes that as people see other buildings standing strong with salvaged steel, they'll start to use it in projects of their own.


Syris Valentine wrote this article for Grist.


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