Retreat
Terry Tempest Williams
Three figures walk the salt playa near Promontory Point on the northeast shore of Great Salt Lake. From a distance, it is hard to tell whether they are human, bird, or animal. Through binoculars, I see they are pelicans, juveniles, gaunt and emaciated, without water or food. In feathered robes, they walk with the focus of fasting monks toward enlightenment or death. This was not a dream or a nightmare, but the first time I realized Great Salt Lake was in danger of disappearing. It was the fall of 2016.
Great Salt Lake’s Gunnison Island has been a sanctuary for one of the largest white pelican rookeries in North America, with up to 20,000 nesting birds every year. Adults make a daily 30-mile round trip to fish in fresh water, north to Bear River Bay or south to Utah Lake. Until recently, the watery distance from the island to the mainland has protected the pelicans from predators. Now, young pelicans are easy prey for coyotes crossing the land bridge created by the receding water. Likely spooked by their predators, adolescent pelicans were not strong enough to fly to fresh water. Forced down by fatigue, they were dying from hunger and thirst. Walking behind them at a respectful distance felt like a funeral procession. I passed sixty salt-encrusted bodies stiff on the salt flats, hollow bones protruding from crystallized clumps of feathers, wings splayed like fans waving in the heat.
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I have known Great Salt Lake in flood and now in drought; between her highest level at 4,212 ft in 1986 and her lowest at 4,188.5 ft in 2022 (1). Great Salt Lake is a living presence, a sovereign body who gathers life-giving water in the Great Basin. Her survival and ours depends on our capacity to change.
America’s Inland Sea evolved from ancient Lake Bonneville, whose liquid hand spread across much of the Intermountain West, including Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. For 13,000 years, Great Salt Lake has been a closed basin with no outlet to the sea, her large deposits of salt left behind through evaporation. Three main rivers, the Bear, the Weber, and the Jordan, flow from the Wasatch Mountains into Great Salt Lake. Lately, evaporation from heat and drought accelerated by climate change combined with overuse of the rivers that feed it have shrunk the lake’s area by two thirds. A report out of Brigham Young University (2) and other institutions in January 2023 warned that the contraction has been quickening since 2020, and if we do not take emergency measures immediately, Great Salt Lake will disappear in five years. Climate change accounts for roughly 10 percent of Great Salt Lake’s water loss. “We just don’t know what role that climate will play in the future of Great Salt Lake,” says Dan Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard University. “What we do know is that the probability for Utah in the next twenty-five years is hot.”
Great Salt Lake presents us with a chronicle of death foretold: the collapse of an entire salt desert ecosystem of reefs that foster the life cycle of brine shrimp and brine flies that in turn support twelve million migrating birds along the Pacific Flyway; the loss of a sacred landscape for the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, Paiute and Ute Nations; of a $1.5 billion per year mineral extraction industry; a $80 million brine shrimp industry; and a $1.4 billion ski industry (3) dependent on the famed powder snow from the “lake effect”- between September and May, the lake rarely freezes, warm air rises and the added precipitation contributes to 55 to 80 inches of snowfall.
Great Salt Lake’s death and the death of the lives she sustains could become our death, too. The dry lakebed now exposed to the wind is laden with toxic elements accumulated into the lake over decades. On any given day, dust devils whipping up a storm in these hot spots blow mercury and arsenic-laced winds down the Wasatch Front, where 2.6 million people live, with Salt Lake City at its center. Arsenic levels in the lakebed are already ten times the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for safety. And with the state’s population projected to grow to 5.5 million by 2060, the urgency to reverse the lake’s retreat will only grow. Yet I do not believe Utahns have fully grasped the magnitude of what we are facing. We could be forced to leave. The retreat of Great Salt Lake is not a singular story. Death is what happened to vast stretches of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by the late 2010s, now seen as one of the planet’s largest environmental disasters. Pick your place anywhere in the world and Great Salt Lake is a mirror reflecting a flashing light on what is coming and what is already here. Our natural touchstones of joy will deliver us to heartbreak. Each of us will face the losses of the places that brought us to life.
In the American Southwest, we are also experiencing a megadrought not seen for 1,200 years (4). During the summers of 2022 and 2023, temperatures in Utah reached or exceeded 100°F on 33 days as of August 1, 2023. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the average temperature in Salt Lake City has risen by 2.5°C. Scientists reported that, globally, July 2023 was the hottest on record for 120,000 years. (5) However, the most significant factor in the demise of Great Salt Lake is our thirst: water overconsumption. Utah’s relationship to Great Salt Lake is embedded in white settler history.
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After Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Latter-day Saints, was persecuted for his beliefs and killed by a mob in 1844, his successor, the newly recognized prophet and colonizer Brigham Young, sought a territory of arid lands for his followers, lands that no one else would want. A Great Salt Lake Desert rimmed with rugged mountains seemed an appropriate destination to anchor a religion for Latter-day Saints. He made a hard sell: Leave everything behind but what you can pull in handcarts; then walk 1,300 miles to a land of little water. This was the Mormon trail to religious freedom. As Mormon pioneers approached the mouth of Emigration Canyon, Brigham Young is said to have raised his head from his sick bed in the back of a covered wagon and caught a sweeping glimpse of the Great Salt Lake Valley with the lake a line of quicksilver stretching across the horizon.
“This is the place,” he said.
Young’s pragmatic gospel of making the desert blossom like a rose was both a strategy for survival and a call to action. The Mormon settlers dammed, diverted, and diked the Bear River responsible for about 50 percent of the inflow of freshwater to Great Salt Lake. By 1920, only 3,000 acres remained of the 45,000 acres of wetlands found at the Bear River delta. So great was the settlers’ thirst that had it not been for the National Wildlife Refuge system, which created the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1928, these wetlands may not have survived at all. The local edict that “unused water is wasted water” remains Utah’s water policy today. For many Utahns, Great Salt Lake remains a basin of wasted water — salt water in the desert that no one can drink, filled with tiny shrimp that humans don’t eat. It is a lake that smells and stings and pickles the skin with brine flies you can’t escape.
Not everyone feels this way.
The landscape around the lake is the ancestral home to many tribal nations, including the Northwestern Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Uncompahgre Ute Nations. On the vernal equinox in 2022, I watched as the Ute leaders Malcolm Lehi and Christopher Tabbee led a prayer circle on the edge of the lake. Clouds gathered and blackened. Temperatures dropped.
As the first song was sung into the storm, a flock of pintail ducks dropped down to the waters as if they knew that song, had missed it, and needed to hear its familiar rhythms again. The singing of prayers was woven into the wind. Seven bison appeared.
As Lehi and Tabbee faced the lake and lit sweetgrass to seal their prayers, the wind swallowed the flame. They lit it again; the match went out. They sheltered the offering in their hands, but each time sparks failed to ignite. Finally, Lehi spoke: “This is a sign hard times are ahead. The sparks will have to do. Our ancestors have heard our prayers. Great works will be required from all directions.” Then he added: “Great Salt Lake is a holy being, she will need our prayers again and again. Blessings will come but it will take time.”
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Last November, when Great Salt Lake reached her lowest point on record, the artist Fazal Sheikh and I set out to circumnavigate the lake to see what might be revealed. In 1987, the year my mother died, when the lake was rising in floods after heavy snowfall and rains, I made a personal pilgrimage to the lake, a place we both loved. Years later, when we met, I discovered that Fazal’s mother had died the same year and he, too, had been in Utah and visited the lake, looking out over the water in search of solace. It was a shared history that seemed to bind us closer together.
This time, we were called to the lake in drought. As we set out, we focused on four compass points: Antelope Island, Promontory Point, the alkaline desert to the west, and Stansbury Island to the south.
In the years my mother was facing ovarian cancer, 1983 to 1987, Antelope Island was largely inaccessible. The island became my mother’s body, unreachable, floating in uncertainty. Now, thirty-six years later, it is the body of my Mother Lake who is hurting. Great Salt Lake has mentored me almost twice as long as my birth mother. She calls me home with the birds, keeping me buoyant in a broken world.
Housing developments near Antelope Island and other shores of Great Salt Lake have grown beyond what is sustainable. Each new subdivision needs its own water lines: each home waters a green lawn. Gone are the miles of wetlands and fields bursting with meadowlarks, gone are the tangles of cattails, where flocks of red-winged blackbirds rose in a vibrant dark cloud as they banked west to Antelope Island.
Fazal and I stopped at the lake’s edge to watch Wilson’s phalaropes spinning in circles, creating columns of water rich in brine flies to eat. Half a million phalaropes come each fall. They are vulnerable, dependent on Great Salt Lake. Petitions are underway to list them as an endangered species. Flocks of teals, green-winged and blue, flew over us as we watched a pied-billed grebe mirrored in water. Behind the grebe was a colony of avocets
Although Fazal and I were seeing many species, the numbers were few. We traveled northeast to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where 75,000 tundra swans normally gather in the fall. We saw 11. A predictable world is another casualty in drought and climate chaos. We are navigating in constant disorientation.
Near Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake is in conversation with the Spiral Jetty. In 1970, the artist Robert Smithson set this piece of land art on the salt flats near the Golden Spike National Historical Park, where a century earlier the transcontinental railroad was completed. During the flood years in the 1980s and the years that followed, the spiral made of black basalt stones was submerged, resurfacing in salt crystals in 2002. It is a place of pilgrimage, a path to walk in a landscape of mirages.
In the center of the spiral, Fazal and I lay on our backs and closed our eyes, feeling a shared pulse as we held hands. Our minds slowed down to the pace of the vast spaces that encircled us and we became part of the Great Salt Lake Desert breathing. The world shifts when the heart is met with quiet.
From Spiral Jetty, Fazal walked west with his camera; I walked south with my journal. The lake was now a mile away. Salt crystals brocaded the flats, reflecting prisms of light. Kettles of water created detours. I saw no pelicans, only stone cairns left by fellow pilgrims. At the edge of the lake, red water pooled like a bloodletting: red bleeding into magenta, becoming pink; color changes caused by halophiles, a Greek word meaning “salt-loving.” Halophiles are one of the few microorganisms that can survive the extreme salinity, now at 27 percent in the North Arm of Great Salt Lake.
The malignant colors, shapes, and smells eerily mirrored the imaging of my mother’s late-stage cancer. I knelt to caress the water body of Great Salt Lake, my hennaed hands now tattooed in intricate designs by the feathered bodies of dead brine shrimp.
On the surface of the lake, small waves broke toward shore creating salt lines, but beneath the water’s surface there appeared to be an undertow, an inner tide pulling water back toward the center.
If Great Salt Lake is in retreat, perhaps she is holding her breath, as do we who worry about her prognosis. To retreat, to withdraw momentarily, to garner strength and perspective, can be a strategy. Retreat can be a conscious action, a time spent to pray and study quietly, to think carefully and regain one’s composure. I had not thought about the retreat of Great Salt Lake as a position one could take: to commit to a different way of being, to change one’s beliefs.
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Rattlesnakes the size of a large man’s arm inhabit the lake’s western shoreline. I find a shed skin of one wrapped around the gnarled branches of a greasewood and wear it as a necklace.
It’s easy to get lost here in the alkaline desert of big sage. It’s squint-worthy country covered with shattered glass and empty shotgun shells. We have seen no one.
Fazal and I are a few miles from Lucin, in the Great Basin Desert west of Great Salt Lake, where in the early 1970s the land artist Nancy Holt searched for a site and in 1974 bought 40 acres for its unobstructed circle of a view. Here she created her installation, Sun Tunnels, where we stand now. (7) It took her three years to complete. She then, in an act of grace, gave it freely to desert pilgrims, who after being lost could be found.
I remember my first impression when I saw the Sun Tunnels in 1988 with my grandmother. We thought they looked like a construction site with conduit pipes abandoned in the desert. Why? How? But the closer we got to them, they appeared so delicately positioned on the floor of the salt desert that when set against the purple-blue mountain ranges I thought the tunnels might roll away with the first gust of wind.
They drew us in with the wings of prairie falcons and we stayed.
My grandmother placed the lawn chair we had brought into the center of the four tunnels that had been meticulously situated in the shape of a cross. Every few minutes, she rotated her chair so she could see and experience the full peace of the circumference. The next year, she was dead.
The Sun Tunnels continue to frame this same vast and arid landscape in the Great Basin that we saw decades ago. Little of the view surrounding this land art has changed and they still remind me of bird bones transformed into whistles when the wind blows through. What has changed in these decades is the climate, the extreme fluctuations of flood and drought of Great Salt Lake to Great Lake Salt. The constellations remain a constant as the sky’s turning is reflected inside the tunnels; bright circles of light narrowing as the day lengthens and widening again as darkness falls.
Fazal and I walk toward the Sun Tunnels enthralled by their mysterious presence.
We separate and explore them. Each tunnel welcomes our bodies as shelter. I crawl into one of them facing north, lean back and lie on the cold concrete looking up through the cut-out holes that align themselves with either Draco, Perseus, Columba, or Capricorn. I look through the sky circles and surrender to time, expanding and contracting like the clouds I am watching until I have forgotten where I am and who I am as the materiality of concrete becomes fluid as changeable as water.
Two ravens fly over the tunnels, their wings beating in syncopation, like jazz. Fazal in the east tunnel taps his fingers on the concrete walls like a drum. I sing sustained notes that rise and fall in the tunnel I am inhabiting. To collaborate is to conspire with the unknown – to listen and to respond. What might it mean to dwell deeply in the given place of uncertainty? Improvisation reigns in the desert, especially in drought. We play.
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From the Sun Tunnels, traveling east toward Lucin, one catches glimpses of Great Salt Lake. In 1959, a twelve-mile wooden railroad trestle that had crossed the lake since 1903 was replaced by an earthen causeway that cut the lake in two. Suddenly, there was the South Arm, where all three rivers flow into the lake; and the North Arm, which has no outside water source. But it was a fluid boundary, dependent on the levels of the lake, not fixed.
Most of the industry surrounding Great Salt Lake is located on the South Arm. Mining companies extract nearly two million tons of minerals from the lake a year and the brine shrimp industry supplies 40 to 50 percent of the global demand for brine shrimp eggs. The eggs are sold to Asian markets (sometimes marketed as “Sea Monkeys”) to feed tropical fish in aquariums.
In 2022, the South Arm was approaching 19 per cent salinity, the upper levels of what brine shrimp can tolerate. In order to stop saltier water from the lake’s North Arm flowing into the South Arm, Governor Spencer Cox issued an executive order to raise a breach in the causeway by five feet, shutting off any flow between the South Arm and the North. By closing the causeway, two lakes have been created, “one dead and one on life support.”
Bonnie Baxter, a professor of biology, and director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, said she saw raising the causeway as a “temporary measure to protect the life cycles of the shrimp and flies that will ultimately protect the birds in the South Arm, but it’s a big experiment.”
The risk is that changing the shape of Great Salt Lake, and letting the wildest parts die, will compromise the pelicans at Gunnison Island and the health of 350 species of migrating birds along the Pacific Flyway, all seeking refuge.
A dying North Arm may also offer us a glimpse of the future: the collapse of an entire Great Salt Lake ecosystem. Ben Abbott, an ecologist, and lead author of the Brigham Young University report, is opposed to creating a tourniquet across the North Arm. “This single act of raising the causeway and closing any flow between the two arms is sacrificing the North Arm to save the South Arm,” he said.
As of now, there are no plans to lower the causeway and restore flow between the two arms. This may make it a ter minal decision for a terminal lake.
Who will benefit in the future? The lake miners and brine shrimpers will continue to extract their profits from Great Salt Lake. But the elevated causeway is the first step to a smaller Great Salt Lake; easier to manage, water now with a use. It is a savage blow to the lake and a vastly diminished world to the birds.
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Fazal and I scramble up a rocky slope on Stansbury Island just in time to witness the sunset over the lake. It is a local ritual. My mother would stop everything to step outside and applaud the sun slowly sinking into the water. As we watch in silence, I see it as a burning metaphor for the state of the lake. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words return to me: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” (8)
Darkness meets us with the arrival of nighthawks and bats as we sit facing the lights of U.S. Magnesium LLC, where salts are mined for magnesium metal. The remoteness of the 80,000-acre operation has kept it largely out of the public eye. But the birds see it.
In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency identified U.S. Magnesium as a Superfund site, demanding the company clean up areas of toxic pollution. (9) The 4,525 acres on the edge of the lake, 40 miles west of Salt Lake City, was deemed a hazard to human health and the environment. Contaminants including heavy metals, dioxins and PCBs were found in sediments, in waste pools, water, and air. In 2021, the company was still cleaning up these environmental abuses under the supervision of the E.P.A.
Nearby, on the southwestern edge of the lake, Morton Salt has produced industrial and table salt, sending its waste streams into Great Salt Lake.
As a result of waste, agricultural runoff, and other industrial and natural processes, the lake’s sediment now contains a host of pollutants, including arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel, chromium, lead and organic contaminants, the Brigham Young report found.
How can we be surprised at the lake’s critical condition? With its retreat, these poisons are transformed into deadly dust sitting on the areas of exposed lakebed.
In January 2023, Hanna Saltzman, a pediatrician and mother in Salt Lake City, wrote in the Salt Lake Tribune that as the lake retreats and the toxins on the lakebed are uncovered, “toxic dust storms could be catastrophic for children’s health. ... Take lead, for example, one of the heavy metals found in the lakebed; even the tiniest amount of lead poisoning can harm a child’s brain". (10)
Robert Paine is a pulmonologist and professor of medicine at the University of Utah who studies the impact of air quality on human health. He is most concerned about the effect of breathing in the tiny particulate matter in the lakebed dust known as PM 2.5. (11)
“We know that even a couple of days of higher exposure to PM 2.5 particles can have immediate health effects,” he told me. “We also know that increased amounts of lakebed dust will add to accumulated exposure with long-term health effects.” What we breathe during these dust storms can trigger cardiovascular events from strokes to heart attacks to respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia, and lung cancer.
In 1947, Dr. Walter P. Cottam, an esteemed professor of botany from the University of Utah, delivered the Reynolds Lecture to reflect on the 100th anniversary of the Mormon pioneers arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. “Is Utah Sahara-bound?” he asked. (12) “To a public accustomed to the self-glorification expressed by the repeated boast that ‘We have made the desert blossom as the rose’,” he said, let’s admit that “serious range and watershed problems do exist ... and that we can do something about them.”
This rebuke of Utah’s poor agricultural practices and mismanagement of soil and water resources hastening desertification was prophetic. The desertification of the lake is happening, a fate that may echo the death of Owens Lake in California, when it desiccated in 1926, after much of the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles aqueduct. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and its ratepayers have since spent $2.5 billion damping down the dust in the name of mitigation.
Fazal and I walk for miles along the shoreline of Bridger Bay, stepping between microbialites, reef-like formations that are usually covered by salt water. What remains are dry, calcified honeycombs devoid of life. Despite what Fazal and I have seen on our circumambulation, we have been embraced by what Major Howard Stansbury, who led the two-year expedition to survey Great Salt Lake in 1849, called “a great and peculiar beauty.” Grace can inhabit the paradox of being present with the living and dying.
I make a bouquet of bones and leave them for coyotes.
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Nan Seymour is a poet who keeps vigil on Antelope Island. This is the second year she has camped on the shores of Great Salt Lake for 45 days, the length of another Utah legislative session, from January through March. It is not for the faint-hearted as temperatures drop and winds are fierce.
In January 2023, I visited Nan and walked a quarter mile along the lake’s edge, stepping over and around the bodies of dead eared grebes rotting in the shallows. They are small, sturdy water birds with sharp pointed beaks, largely black with pearlescent white bellies and a shock of gold feathers that radiate outward from the intensity of their red eyes. We counted their bodies: 496 eared grebes were dead. There were so many more. We stopped counting. The stench was suffocating.
Each year, at least two million eared grebes, half of the North American population, come to Great Salt Lake in the fall to molt. Each eared grebe eats from 25,000 to 30,000 brine shrimp a day. (13) They, too, are dependent on a healthy lake. The dead we saw may have left the lake later than usual, their health weakened by the low water level, and been slapped down by a winter storm.
Walking back, everything was blurred by tears of salt water. Grief is love, I kept repeating under my breath. Whatever I have come to know of love and grief I have learned from Great Salt Lake.
Protecting the life of Great Salt Lake is a moral imperative. “We can become a lake-facing people,” Nan had said, her eyes the color of the lake she loves; changeable from blue to green to steel. We faced the lake as she read this poem:
when praise began to flow
we thirsted for the names of birds
we learned the mouth-feel of the words
grebe, avocet, willet
pelican, curlew, stilt
we observed their long dives
sudden swerves, and bright eyes
we noted their cries and habits
tracing murmurations
we drew love
beyond naming (14)
We know what needs to be done in the next five years. Scientists, Ben Abbott, among them, tell us the lake needs an additional one million acre-feet per year to reverse its decline, increasing average stream flow to about 2.5 million acre-feet per year. (15) With this, a gradual refilling would begin. Two-thirds of the natural flow going into Great Salt Lake is currently being diverted: 80 percent by agriculture, much of it for growing alfalfa; 10 percent by industries; and 10 percent by municipalities. Water conservation provides a map for how to live within our means. We can create water banks and budgets where we know how much water we have and how much water we spend. Public and private green turf can be retired and transformed with drought-tolerant plants.
State and federal agencies must turn toward Indigenous leaders for traditional knowledge about watershed restoration and conservation. There has been no tribal representation on the state Great Salt Lake Advisory Board. This must change. Darren B. Parr, former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said with frustration to the Salt Lake Tribune, “How do you solve these problems without engaging with people who’ve managed the resource for thousands of years?”
But for Great Salt Lake to survive, we need to cut 30 to 50 percent of our water usage. Ecologist Ben Abbott’s words return to me: “The gospel of overconsumption must end.” We can compensate farmers who use water to grow alfalfa to feed cows in other states to fallow their fields during these critical years to support Great Salt Lake’s rise. We can demand a legally binding lake level within a healthy range of 4,200 feet or higher where Great Salt Lake can count on a sustained table of water that will benefit all species and cover 60 percent of the toxic dust. And, most importantly, we must secure permanent legally binding water rights to replenish Great Salt Lake.
This is a soul-making moment, with the howling winds of the toxic lakebed swirling around us. This is the place of our reckoning. This is the place of our awakening, where consumption and climate change meet spiritual reform.
“If we believe in the Western water doctrine of ‘first in time, first in rights’,” said Ben Abbott, “then the water law of prior appropriation says these water rights originally belonged to her, a sovereign body.”
The Rights of Nature is now a global movement granting personhood to rivers, mountains, and forests. Ecuador was the first country to grant constitutional rights to ecosystems for them to exist and be restored. In the United States, Lake Erie was granted rights in 2019, allowing citizens to sue on behalf of the lake. Although the decision for Lake Erie was later invalidated by a federal judge, this is the new frontier of granting legal status to a living world. Why not grant personhood to Great Salt Lake, which in 2021 was voted “Utahn of the Year” in the Salt Lake Tribune? This is not a radical but a rational response to an increasingly wounded Earth.
Senator Mitt Romney may not be ready to advocate personhood, but he has acknowledged the crisis and helped Congress pass the Great Salt Lake Recovery Act, which will bring millions of dollars home to support the lake.
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The Utah Legislature finished its 2023 session without passing any meaningful legislation for the lake, including a non-binding resolution that would have created a target lake level of 4,198 feet. (16) The bill never even made it out of committee. “One reason the Legislature was so cowardly this session,” said Zachary Frankel, the executive director of Utah Rivers Council, was that the “water buffaloes” and their lobbyists, who favor water storage projects and pipelines over conservation, pulled the strings of the local lawmakers like puppets. On March 1, a reporter asked State Senator Scott Sandall why no bills had passed to replenish the lake. “Mother Nature really helped us out,” said Sandall, a rancher and farmer. Thanks to an above-average winter snowpack in the mountains, “We are going to see a really nice runoff in the lake.”
What he didn’t say was that very little if any of that runoff will find its way into Great Salt Lake. The water has already been earmarked, mostly for agriculture. One high water year does not solve decades of overconsumption.
But moral leadership comes from many directions. Within the State of Utah, the Church of Latterday Saints is a nexus of power, some of it hidden. It has moral authority and political sway. On March 15, the Utah Department of Natural Resources announced that the Church, which holds significant water rights within the Salt Lake watershed, was donating 5,700 water shares, or about 20,000 acrfeet of water, permanently to Great Salt Lake. (17) It means that this water, formerly reserved for agriculture or other municipal uses, will be returned to the lake. This will hopefully inspire other private donations of water rights to be managed by the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust, (18) established by the State Legislature in 2022, in partnership with the Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society.
But it is not enough.
Brigham Young’s vision of roses in the desert needs a radical correction. The ecological, economic, and human health along the Wasatch Front is at stake. Our toxic legacy is being written on our bodies.
We do not need a Mormon revelation to save Great Salt Lake. We need the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints and its members to call for conservation to deliver urgent care to the lake and protect the health of those of us living in the heart of Mormon Country.
This is where I place my faith – in our collective capacity to mobilize our love. If we can shift our view of Great Salt Lake from a lake to be avoided to a lake we cherish, not to exploit, dam, and dike but to honor and respect as a sovereign body, our relationship and actions toward the lake will be transformative.
In 1895, the artist Alfred Lambourne was keeping his own vigil at Great Salt Lake from the vantage point of his homestead on Gunnison Island. In his book Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead, he wrote, “History must be rewritten. With a wider view, we must grasp the deeper law.”
A wider view restores the lake to health. A deeper law is exhorting us to change, so she can flourish as she has done for centuries. The Mother Lake is an oracle who has brought us to this place of revelations; she is offering us a gift of prophecy if we will humble ourselves, kneel at her receding shores and listen.
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In the spring of 2023, after the mammoth snowfall in the Wasatch Mountains, a surge of snowmelt flooded the rivers feeding Great Salt Lake, raising the level of the South Arm by more than five feet. The rising lake crashed over the causeway and flooded into the North Arm. It was a temporary transfusion that ecologists said would add maybe two years to the lake’s survival.
I returned to the lake in late March. Sunrise cast a silver sheen on blue waters still laced with ice. A coyote hunted along frozen edges with a focus forward. Sweet murmurings of pintails and shovelers numbering tens of thousands became an exuberance – an ecstatic reminder of what I still trust: the return of birds with millions more on their way.
It was also a haunting of all we stand to lose.
That month, Utah State biologists had counted 5,000 white pelicans on Gunnison Island, (19) far fewer than they had ever found before. The adult birds appeared to be abandoning their nests and gathering on the northern tip of the island, as if for self-protection.
By early June, biologists reported seeing 1,000 white pelicans, and on June 29, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that biologists found no adult white pelicans on Gunnison Island. None. They had seen “a few dozen juvenile birds, too young to fly, hiding in some rock outcroppings.” Their findings echoed the troubles I first observed in 2016.
“I expected this to happen years ago,” said John Luft, manager of the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program, “and it finally has.”
Some scientists are saying it is due to drought and the receding lake water. They predicted this would happen when the causeway was raised five feet, with no flow between the two arms. Others blame the predators, who have been able to reach Gunnison Island for some time. Others say it might be avian flu. Still others blame the State of Utah. As Wallace Stegner, Utah’s great novelist and environmentalist, wrote, “There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.” (20)
Forty years before, I had flown over Gunnison Island with Don Paul, who then worked for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, for the pelican count. I remember circling Gunnison Island in the small plane and when it banked, there were so many white pelicans inhabiting the sparse island, it looked like whitebeaded buckskin. I remember thinking: so this is what 10,000 white pelicans look like in the middle of Great Salt Lake.
Pelicans exemplify more than 30 million years of evolutionary perfection on the planet. There is speculation by some ornithologists that the ancestors of Great Salt Lake’s white pelicans inhabited islands like these during the Pleistocene era, 12,700 years ago. Their bodily structures have changed very little. With a wingspan up to twelve feet, they are angels among us. They glide along Great Salt Lake with what appears to be barely an inch between their bodies and the body of water. They can fly 100 miles to freshwater to fish communally and return with full bellies to feed their young who await them; and they have been seen spiraling the Grand Teton, almost 14,000 feet high, offering up their prehistoric cries for sheer joy and pleasure.
Now they have chosen to leave their ancestral home of Great Salt Lake. One followed another and another until Gunnison Island is largely empty of their vibrant and peculiar presence. Some have stayed and have been seen at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Most have left. We can hope they will return.
In medieval times it was thought that the female pelican, fearing her young were starving, would peck at her breast so violently that blood would rain down into the open mouths of the baby birds. Through her sacrifice, her kin were spared.
Emily Beran, a public docent at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library in Kansas, found a reference to this in the Historia Animalium, a zoological encyclopedia written by the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner. (21)
She writes:
The term vulning comes from the Latin verb “vulno” which means “to wound.” When pelicans feed their young, the mother macerates fish in the large sack in her beak then feeds it to her babies by lowering her beak to her chest to transfer the regurgitated fish more easily. The observation of this feeding practice led to the mistaken descriptions of female pelicans pecking their breasts and spilling blood onto their babies to provide sustenance.
The blood of the pelicans is on our hands. What will we do to repair the rupture we have caused other species by withholding water from the Mother Lake? What sacrifices are we willing to make to restore the lake and ensure their survival? What sacrifices are we willing to make to secure the planet for us all?
An inconsolable loneliness enters my bloodstream. A fundamental part of me feels lost, adrift, without bearings. Each year, as the pelicans return, my life force lifts with their wingbeats. Without the spring and summer spirals of white pelicans rising and turning against the blue sky of Great Salt Lake, tell me, how do we live with what we have wrought?
What do the pelicans know that we do not?
Castle Valley, Utah, Summer 2023