On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged men strolled in athleisure, practicing their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Green Springs golf community just outside St. George, a ballooning city of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 homes, mostly single-family — many with RV garages — orbit the fairway, like rings around Planet Golf, and more are on their way. 

As in so many cities in the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty business, with a powerful lobby and a relationship with water painted in green on the landscape. Among its peers, however, St. George is in a league of its own.

Few cities in the Southwest use more water per person: nearly 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to keeping ornamental grass, lawns and golf courses lush in an arid region where water supplies are dwindling every day. Within a decade, and without immediate action to conserve, local officials predict that its water shortage will become a water crisis.

Utah is notorious for granting an unusual degree of grace to this sort of profligate water use. That may be changing, however, at least when it comes to the golf industry: In 2022, the city of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, effectively banned the construction of new golf courses, while early this year, state Rep. Douglas Welton, a Republican, introduced House Bill 188, which could require golf courses to be more transparent about how much water they use.

In a city and at a time where something’s gotta give, will golf be the first to fall?

Minutes down the road from the Green Springs community, at the Dixie Red Hills Golf Course, I joined a group of older players staging behind the first tee. Before we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the rough that his friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t help but admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt said. Soon, the chatter moved to water. “When I was in Mexico, there was only enough water for three flushes. That could happen to us if we don’t pay attention,” Felt said.

While Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d rather give up golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the rest of the community is so inclined. “This is a place where a lot of people do a lot of golfing,” Greg Milne said, gesturing toward the sprawl of St. George.   

The area’s mingling of desert and water has long attracted people. Southern Paiute bands lived near the Virgin River for a millennium or more before Mormon colonists arrived in the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the next century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little community off the I-15 that people would pass by on their way to California,” said Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for the city of St. George. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats test range blew radioactive dust onto the homes of the city’s 5,000 residents — dust that stubbornly clung to the valley’s reputation.

But in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s how it started. The course was built as a sort of vision for growth in the area,” said Cowan. Since then, golf’s role in the regional recreation economy has burgeoned. The 14 golf courses in Washington County, including four owned by the city of St. George, attract nearly 600,000 visitors a year, generating $130 million dollars annually, according to Cowan. That puts golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gas industries in the area, though still below the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.

And, like those other industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water needs came under fire in Washington County in 2021 and again in the state Legislature this January, the industry flexed its influence. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Association, pulled strings at the Statehouse in Salt Lake City, killing the bill even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly targeted the sport. 

Generally, the golf industry tries to burnish its image by touting its economic benefits and highlighting its efforts to decrease water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the executive director at the Utah Section Professional Golf Association, said in a call with High Country News. “What the sport brings economic-wise is the story we want to tell.”

In practice, those changes have come down to encouraging course operators to replace some turf with native plants. Other technologies, like soil-moisture monitoring and artificial grass coloring, which gives turf a deep green appearance with minimal watering, are being adopted, though strictly on a voluntary basis. Dehlin said his organization does not track how widespread these changes are.

Of the 10 thirstiest golf courses in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned courses, including Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Club, actually increased their water use between 2018 and 2022.

The mercury tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit here more than 50 days each year, so it takes an exorbitant amount of water to keep the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons annually for each course, or roughly eight times the national average. And if the region continues to grow at its current breakneck rate, existing water supplies — from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will be severely strained.

That prospect has some local and state officials backing a proposed pipeline that would carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this corner of the Utah desert. With or without the pipeline, the region is likely to face severe water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan could require cities to cut their water use by up to 30% in a worst-case scenario.

“And if you look about where they would cut their water usage,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District Manager Zach Renstrom, “it really would come to large grassy areas, such as golf.”

In a bid to avoid future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to reduce its water use now. Under Renstrom’s guidance, the city passed sweeping conservation ordinances early this year — the toughest in Utah, but still mild compared to those in Las Vegas. Three of the four city-owned golf courses now use treated wastewater for irrigation rather than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for the majority of its courses by 2008.

Cowan said the city-owned courses are beginning to remove ornamental grass from non-play areas. So far this year, the county has removed more than 264,000 square feet of grass. While that may sound like a lot, it’s only about six acres across the entire county, or roughly 4% of one local golf course. Even with those measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah need to end: “I’ve had a couple of developers come to me recently and want to talk about golf courses, and I flat-out said, ‘I won’t provide the water.'”

For now, though, the county still has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all while stashing almost two years of reserves in a network of reservoirs. “We have a lot of water stored away,” said Ed Andrechak, water program manager for Conserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation rules that Las Vegas has, he believes it could grow at the blistering pace it’s projected to over the coming years.

But Andrechak worries that, ultimately, a culture of profligacy will be the barrier to conservation, not money or technical know-how: “We just don’t think water rules apply to us here,” he said.

Andrechak cataloged a number of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river under construction at the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Color community, which is built around an artificial lake that Andrechak described as a “giant evapo-pond”; another three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing complex in Hurricane, and perhaps most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park will require 5 million gallons or more of culinary-grade drinking water annually for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a toilet bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hollow golf course next door gulps up 60 times as much water.

“We’re 23 years into a mega drought, and yet my struggle here is that we’re not really that concerned about it,” Andrechak said. “That’s the culture.”

This culture is enabled and even nurtured by policy: St. George’s water rates are among the lowest in the West, which results in bigger profits for course operators and more affordable green fees, but also disincentivizes conservation. “The whole idea has been to have low (water) rates to take care of the citizens by making golf affordable,” said Dehlin.

“Having affordable water is important for the growth of the game and to keep our facilities in the conditions that we do. And that’s one thing about golf courses in Utah in general: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin said. “And yes, well-irrigated.” 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. This article is republished with permission.

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The seasonal miller moth migration had started. By late May in Colorado, Google searches for “get rid of moths” left orbit. Over a group chat, I asked friends how they were handling this seasonal visitor. “I find miller moths in my closet, my bathroom, and sometimes in my bed. I get a washcloth and wet the tip — my moth katana — and twirl that sucker for the nightly harvest,” said Jack Martin. “My wife left me to join the miller moth migration,” joked Sam Krason, while Connor Rafferty, a graphic designer, offered a vivid tableau. “Every time I open my garage door, I have to wait a minute for the trail of moths to exit the garage, like a bunch of bats out of a cave, before I can walk in.”

After a wet winter, moths the size of dollar coins and the color of dehydrated mulch cascade onto Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico from their nesting sites in the High Plains. Beginning with the June migration, the miller, or army cutworm moth, touches nearly every denizen in the region — their faces, their pillows, their window panes — but rarely their hearts.

Because the miller finds refuge in dark crevices during its journey to the Rocky Mountains to pollinate flowers, it often ends up in garages and bedrooms instead. Trapped and disoriented, the moth panics. Frantic attempts by the resident hominids to swat the confused insect are frustrated by its evasive acrobatics around the nearest light source, which, to the insect, resembles the moon it navigates by. Neither the manic wing-flapping nor the buildup of tiny gray corpses inside homes has done much to endear the species to residents. But according to multiple entomologists, the diminutive creature deserves our sympathy.

“They’re not exactly intelligent, but they’re doing the best they can,” said Maia Holmes, a Colorado State University entomologist. “So, when you find them ramming themselves up against your window at a time or place you don’t want them, they’re just lost and confused.”

Even though the miller moth aggravates human beings, flowering plants and other animals delight in its arrival. The army cutworm begins life as a green-striped caterpillar munching on grasslands and fields at lower elevations. In late spring, it pupates into a winged adult and chases wildflowers up into the Rocky Mountains, where it spends the summer. Along the way, the moths become a crucial food source for native bird species and bats — even grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park that turn over logs and gorge on the sheltering arthropods.

As industrial agriculture transformed the landscape of the West in the late 1800s, the human relationship to native insects changed, too. “Historically speaking, the moth wasn’t a problem,” said Holmes. “Then we start growing a lot of corn and wheat for money. Army cutworms were like, ‘Great, there’s more food.’ But humans were like, ‘Wait a minute, we use these crops for money.'”

An all-out war on the army cutworm had ensued by the late 19th century, buoyed by an emerging school of thought known as “economic entomology.” This approach to insect management, backed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sought to safeguard agricultural profits against its non-human competitors. Controlling cutworms and other “pests” required researching their life cycle and led to USDA officials evaluating pesticides and spreading anti-insect propaganda that reads almost like medieval folklore.

In 1919, a Colorado newspaper published an ominous USDA press release titled “Cutworm Cowardly Rascal,” warning readers that the cutworm “watches and waits … then sneaks out in the night to destroy the plants.” A year later, an experimental farm operated by the Great Western Sugar Company in Longmont, Colorado, released its own study: “The Principle Insect Enemies of the Sugar Beet.” Liberally footnoted with USDA research and targeted at numerous arthropods, the study saved its most unhinged descriptions for the Miller:

“Like the evil gnomes of old who sallied forth on moonless nights to wreak vengeance upon some hapless wayfarer, the cutworms come forth from hiding and under cover of darkness, despoil the farmers’ crops.”

The farmers didn’t realize that monoculture crop fields automatically attracted miller moths accustomed to scanning biodiverse grasslands for food. Faced with fast-adapting insects like the army cutworm, the industry embraced chemical weapons to protect crops. “If your primary aim is short-term economic efficiency, the strongest, most powerful and most immediately effective chemicals are the logical endpoint,” said Texas State professor James McWilliams, author of “American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT.

 “It’s really quite amazing,” McWilliams said. “You can look at economic entomology before 1960, and there’s just no consideration at all of long-term environmental impacts.” 

Application of the deadliest pesticides like DDT only abated in the 1960s, after harrowing revelations concerning their environmental consequences emerged in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” But changing our cultural attitudes toward insects has proven to be a much slower process. In fact, the name “miller moth” is a linguistic artifact left over from the era of ecocidal excess. The term is generic, referring to any moth deemed a pest, whether in Louisiana or the Rocky Mountain West. 

But more recently, Moussa Diawara, an entomologist at CSU Pueblo, has been encouraged by the ethos of tolerance he’s observed in students, and by the calls he’s begun receiving from the public. “I used to get a lot of calls about how to get rid of miller moths. That has come down a lot. Even in my classes, students are more aware of the importance of biodiversity. So the public perception is changing, but slowly,” Diawara said.

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. This article was originally published at High Country News.

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When California, Arizona and Nevada agreed recently to stop using 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water — about a trillion gallons — in order to protect their drinking supply, they took aim at one especially thirsty user: hay. So-called “forage crops” like alfalfa and Bermuda grass, which are used to feed livestock, mainly cattle, require mind-altering amounts of water to cultivate. For the next three years, the states agreed to pay farmers who ordinarily grow livestock feed $1.2 billion not to. That alone is estimated to conserve the lion’s share of the trillion-gallon target.

Alfalfa, meaning “father of all foods” in Arabic, is the nutrient-rich linchpin of the dairy and beef business. No other field crop produces more protein per acre. But that bounty comes with high water use. Alfalfa has a long growing season — another plus for farmers — a deep root system and a leafy, dense canopy that needs immense moisture to stay green. But that’s not the whole story: A century-old legal doctrine compels farmers to use as much river water as they’re allotted, or else lose access to the unused portion in the future. That perverse incentive, combined with the cheap Colorado River water afforded to many Western water districts, means that wasteful irrigation methods have not gone out of fashion. That includes a technique called “flood irrigation,” which is exactly what it sounds like: watering hundreds of alfalfa acres at a time by briefly flooding the field.

It’s a popular solution; the practice is simple to implement, recharges underground aquifers, and can create temporary havens for migrating birds. But it’s also wildly inefficient. So are those “central pivot” sprinklers that water perfect circles of crops — the ones that look like scattered green coins from an airplane window or a satellite. Those steel arms sweeping across the fields are less wasteful than flood irrigation, but far below the efficiency achieved by drip systems. Arizona and California alfalfa watered by the rolling sprinklers can soak up 800 to 1,200 gallons per minute, per sprinkler, during summer months. In contrast, a typical eight-minute shower at home uses about 17 gallons. All told, alfalfa swallows triple the water used by every household in all seven states that the river supplies.

California’s Imperial Valley, a juggernaut of hay output, laps up more water than anywhere in the whole Colorado River Basin, accounting for 80% of the state’s allotment. A quarter of the 2.4 million acre-feet the All-American Canal brings into the valley goes to alfalfa fields. Located in the Sonoran Desert, it’s one of the hottest places in California and one of the driest, too — even drier than Las Vegas, averaging three inches of rain a year. All of that poses a problem for alfalfa, which gets stressed when soil moisture drops and temperatures climb. So, in order to keep the fields healthy in hot places like the Imperial Valley, southern Arizona and central Nevada, farms make up the difference in other ways, primarily by using irrigation to simulate Michigan-levels of rain in the desert. Heat-stressed alfalfa can require the equivalent of 36 inches of precipitation in a single growing season. Since regions like the Imperial Valley receive a fraction of that, farmers turn to water sources like the Colorado River to make up the rest.

Farmers working in unforgiving desert climates have their own reasons for cultivating alfalfa. For one, with enough irrigation, it can handle the ferocious summers in the West better than many fruit and vegetable varieties. It’s also a serious cash crop: Between 2012 and 2021 in California, alfalfa fetched more dollars per ton than any other hay variety for nine years straight. It dominates agriculture in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, the four driest states in the country, all of which depend on the Colorado River. 

In fact, much of the Colorado River is exported as hay. Rising demand for dairy products in the Middle East and skyrocketing beef consumption across the globe are driving up the demand; 40% of the alfalfa grown in California in 2020 was shrink-wrapped, containerized, and shipped to cows on the other side of Earth. 

When states and the federal government come to the table to finalize plans for the river cuts, they’ll have to balance those financial gains against the water requirements of the Southwest’s people, ecosystems and other crops. Meanwhile, the federal government still needs to review last week’s deal, and the states and the other parties involved will have to hammer out the finer points over the next several months.

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. This article was originally published by High Country News and is republished by permission.

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