Terry Tempest Williams: 'Great Salt Lake’s death and the death of the lives she sustains could become our death, too.'
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the moral authority and political sway to save Great Salt Lake
The lake’s Gunnison Island has been a sanctuary to one of the largest white pelican rookeries in North America, with as many as 20,000 nesting individuals. 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 as the waters receded.
Yet I do not believe Utahns have fully grasped the magnitude of what we are facing. We could be forced to leave. So great was the settlers’ thirst that had it not been for the National Wildlife Refuge system that 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.
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, 36 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.
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, and we saw 11. A predictable world is another casualty in drought and climate chaos. We are navigating in constant disorientation.
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. In 2022, the South Arm was approaching the upper levels of salinity of what brine shrimp can tolerate. And so to stop saltier water from the lake’s North Arm from flowing into the South Arm, Gov. Spencer Coxan executive order to raise a breach in the causeway by five feet, shutting off any flow between them.
Who will benefit long-term? The 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 lake, and a vastly diminished world for the birds. As of now, there are no plans in place to lower the causeway and restore flow between the two arms in the future. This, in itself, could be a terminal decision for a terminal lake.just in time to witness the sunset over Great Salt Lake. It is a local ritual.
In January, Hanna Saltzman, a pediatric physician and mother in Salt Lake City, wrote in The Salt Lake Tribune that as the lake retreats and the toxins on the lake bed are uncovered, “toxic dust storms could be catastrophic for children’s health. Take lead, for example, one of the heavy metals found in the lake bed:Robert Paine is a pulmonologist and professor of medicine at the University of Utah who studies the impact of air quality on human health.
stepping over and around dead eared grebe after dead eared grebe, rotting in the shallows. They are small, sturdy water birds with a sharp pointed beak, largely black with pearlescent white bellies and a shock of gold feathers that radiate outward from the intensity of their red eyes. Protecting the life of Great Salt Lake is a moral imperative. “We can become a lake-facing people,” as the poet Nan Seymour said to me. We know what needs to be done in the next five years.he 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. A gradual refilling would begin.
In the United States, Lake Erie was granted personhood in 2019, allowing citizens to sue on behalf of the lake. Although this right was invalidated by a federal judge, this is the new frontier of granting legal status to a living world. Why not grant personhood rights to Great Salt Lake, which in 2021 was? This is not a radical but a rational response to an increasingly wounded Earth.
But moral leadership comes from many directions. Within the state of Utah, Latter-day Saints is a nexus of power, some of it hidden. It has moral authority and political sway.the church, which holds significant water rights within the Salt Lake watershed, was donating 5,700 water shares, or about 20,000 acre feet of water, permanently to Great Salt Lake.
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