We’re killing the Great Salt Lake…
As a writer and photographer, I’ve turned my attention to the Great Salt Lake three times...
The first came in the 1980s, when I spent time with the lake as I completed fieldwork for my 1989 book, The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin. I didn’t live in Salt Lake City then, and so I didn’t realize just how anomalous that wet interlude was.
The lake flooded Saltair, threatened I-80, and put the Salt Lake International Airport at risk. Those years were wild—and we all had the sense that, sure, the lake would go down but could come right back up in good water years.
The lake level rose to a record high of 4212 feet above sea level in 1986, a dozen feet beyond its long-term average. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the lakebed is a shallow saucer, and adding or subtracting enough inflow to move the surface a foot or two up or down has enormous consequences..
By the time my second intense engagement with the lake came in 2004 (lake level 4195), I lived within sight of the lake and knew it far better. When Amy MacDonald of Salt Lake City’s Brolly Arts organized an artistic extravaganza to celebrate the Great Salt Lake—"Contours"—to be performed at the Rose Wagner Theater, we knew the lake fluctuated, but we weren’t imagining that the lake was headed for catastrophe. We were more interested in highlighting the phenomenal bird populations and the wild spirit of the place—all to counter Wasatch Front residents’ casual dismissal of what they perceived as a smelly bug-infested nuisance.
I contributed photographs and stories that evening. My favorite was this sequence of my photos to accompany the Ahn Trio playing Astor Piazzolla’s tango, "Milonga del Angel."
To fill out my photo files, I motored out into the lake with a brine shrimper. I flew over the lake in a brine shrimp spotting plane. I followed a group of Brolly Arts dancers along the shoreline as they improvised movement in response to the lake.
I love this combination of visuals, music, and dance—all interpreting the spirit of the lake. It was a thrill when the three glamorous and impeccable musicians, Angella, Lucia, and Maria Ahn, effortlessly synchronized their live performance with my images.
“Contours/Milonga” turns up again in the 2022 anthology of creative work gathered by the Great Salt Lake Collective, Consecrate/Desecrate. This community project produced a book rich in words and photographs; the anthology website includes a sampling of videos, including mine. Check it out—there’s inspirational stuff there. The short film will be shown in April 2023 at the Tumbleweeds Film Festival in Salt Lake City.
I’m focused on the lake once again, for an update of The Sagebrush Ocean—a 35th (!) anniversary edition to be published in 2024 by the University of Nevada Press. I’ll need to learn 35 years of science and grapple with the momentous change in the Great Basin in these decades. To begin, I attended the People’s Great Salt Lake Summit on December 10th at Westminster College—and I learned a lot.
I’m coming to the lake now when it’s receded to an historic low, 4188 feet. The lake has shrunk by three-fourths in volume and by nearly two-thirds in area and risks ecological collapse. The entire ecosystem faces catastrophic decline—a complex community of more than 10 million birds annually depending on the brine flies and brine shrimp that, in turn, depend on cyanobacteria and algae.
Salinity is running at 19 percent, and these organisms do best at 12 percent. The lake desperately needs more water—an additional 2 million acre feet each year—to return to the 4200-foot level that will head off collapse.
How do we meet this challenge in the face of climate change? Divert less from the rivers that feed the lake, especially the Bear River. Conserve water in cities. Come to grips with how we choose to use our water: we pour more than two-thirds of our diverted water on alfalfa fields, an agricultural choice that contributes just two-tenths of one percent to the total Utah economy.
The global populations of phalaropes and Eared Grebes depend on the lake. If these birds crash sufficiently to merit listing by the Endangered Species Act, the Feds will be looking at every management decision affecting the lake and its rivers. In other words, all of northern Utah. Our legislators definitely do not want this to happen. That imminent threat just may trigger a significant response.
And so I’m writing op-eds to encourage action. Utah controls its own water, so the Utah Legislature has more power to save the lake than any other group of people. I urge them to take action now, in the 2023 session, before it’s too late in this op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times has a wide reach: the op-ed led to an invitation to speak for the lake on BBC World News’ morning program on February 12, 2023. It was daunting to know I had a worldwide audience, but mighty cool to have such a bully pulpit to focus attention on a place I love.
