Great Salt Lake as Wasteland
Historian Jared Farmer, in On Zion's Mount, relates how Mormon settlers saw the Salt Lake Valley as an oasis only to be remembered later as a desert waste. The hot springs just north of Salt Lake City, whose waters fed a spa at one point, have been neglected since the 1970s as refineries took over the area. But these springs were valuable to Utes and Mormons alike in the 1840s, as the Mormons considered the warm, mineralized waters to be good for their health.
Recreation in Great Salt Lake itself has been more of a mixed bag. At least two beaches on the southeasterly part of the massive lake attracted swimmers in the nineteenth century. The Saltair Palace, once called the Coney Island of the West, has a long and troubled history--battered by the elements and oddly prone to burning down. There is a marina on the lake for sailors, and Antelope Island is a popular hinking attraction. The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson is a renowned piece of earth art located on the shore of the lake's North Arm. But for many residents of the Salt Lake Valley, the lake simply exists in the background, only considered when its drying playa kicks up plumes of toxic dust. Visiting the lake is not guaranteed to be a good time. Depending on where and when you go, the lake smells of sulfur, hiking to the water might take you through knee-deep mud, brine flies abound, and seagull skeletons covered in crystalline salt can make you feel unwelcome.
I like the multidimensional character of the lake. Its beauty is otherworldly. Terrence Malick's Tree of Life version of heaven was shot on the lake's salt flats. The North Arm's pink color comes from microbial extremophiles who live in the hypersaline water, a creation of a railroad causeway that split the lake in the 1950s. The shore is made of (salt) crystal. Visiting the lake when she's in the right mood is incomporable. And then there are her other moods. The negative view of the lake still prevails, though artists, photographers, and writers have been doing a lot of much needed work to reframe our perception of this natural wonder. While acknowledging that context, I like that the lake can be difficult, salty. It's not going to change who or what it is for us.
I believe getting to know the world around us, personally, physically, is an antidote to our problem. We're estranged from Great Salt Lake, like we are from all other bodies of water. Becoming acquainted with the lake can help us to create right relations, as Indigenous water protectors say. It is also important to get a big picture overview of things in the abstract, but relying only on that big picture can also lead to problems.
Environmental historian William Cronon in Uncommon Ground examines the idea of nature as "One Thing with One Name." This view of nature is "a monolith that can be described holistically in much the same way as God," and "Nature has become a secular deity in this post-romantic age." Elsewhere, he notes how our conceptual separation from the world around (and inside) us is the product of urbanization: "Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature." For city dwellers like myself, overcoming that alienation--witnessing the bird skeletons and brine flies and getting in the foul mud on Great Salt Lake's shores--can feel like a profanation and/or cut against deeply entrenched cultural and class markers. It has been much tidier and simpler for us to put Great Salt Lake and its complexity out of our minds.
The opposite of wilderness designation is wastelanding. Traci Brynne Voyles coined the term to describe the rhetorical construction of a piece of land that has no value, which can therefore be ruined. Great Salt Lake and its surrounding desert have long been a wasteland to many. Industry in the first half of the twentieth century argued that the saline waters of the lake would neutralize any pollutants. Whether they actually believed that is unclear, but at any rate, the argument sounded good enough to anyone who might've otherwise stopped them from dumping their waste in the lake. Cities operated according to the same logic until the 1940s, though they did not just dump untreated sewage into Great Salt Lake but into any nearby waterway. Even environmentalists gave little consideration to the lake prior to about the 1990s.
A dam proposal in Utah helped expose the whole country to the scenic beauty of the West and the importance of preserving it. In the 1950s, activists drew attention to the proposal to dam Echo Park as part of the Colorado River Storage Project Act. In protecting this canyon in Dinosaur National Monument, the burgeoning environmentalist movement built on the gains of the earlier conservation movement, which established the basis for protecting national monuments. The Sierra Club and other groups used color photography to publish books about these Western canyons that were under threat, and the country responded. There is no dam at Echo Park, and there almost certainly never will be.
Environmentalists, both because they cared about these wild natural sites and because the message resonated with a large audience, subsequently tended to focus on the evils of damming and the preservation of breathtaking scenery. There are complex considerations, however. The Sierra Club's David Brower regretted a Faustian bargain that he had to make to save Echo Park, in agreeing to withhold resistance to damming Glen Canyon, another beautiful site with some historic value as one that particularly impressed Johh Wesley Powell. The Bureau of Reclamation dammed Glen Canyon, perservely naming its reservoir after Powell. Another dubious victory for the Sierra Club was the saving of Marble Canyon. A dam at that site would have provided hydropower for the Central Arizona Project, which needed enormous amounts of electricity to lift water out of the Colorado River basin into the Salt River basin. The CAP proceeded with power from a coal-burning plant located faraway near the Navajo Nation, where it sourced its coal. The airshed and coal mines of nearby Dine people became what we refer to now as a sacrifice zone.
In Utah, criticism of the Central Utah Project formed along discontent over what Bonneville Unit dams would do to the high mountain streams in the Uintas. Beginning in the 1960s with recreational stream fishers, environmentalists joined forces in the 1970s. A collection of environmental and outdoors organizations sued the Bureau of Reclamation in 1974, though the suit was unsuccessful. By about 1977, one group, called the Citizens for a Responsible CUP, had formed, comprising environmentalists and stream fishers. The group published an informational packet that highlighted the environmental damage that the dams would cause as well as the dubious finances of the Bureau of Reclamation.
In order to erode support for the project, which now funnels water from the Uinta Mountains and Uinta Basin to cities on the Wasatch Front, the CRCUP pointed out alternative sources of water -- in stark contrast to the messaging of officials that the state was rapidly running out of water. Among those alternative sources was the Bear River and other freshwater sources that run into Great Salt Lake. Salt Lake County attorney Paul Van Dam, whose report was distributed by CRCUP, recommended tapping into "35,000 acre feet [which] flows unutilized into the Great Salt Lake." That water was "not being put to its best and highest use." The coalition also argued that Great Salt Lake's fresh water inflow was "ultimately consumed through evaporation" and that the water is "never rediverted except into brine." In other words, the group had a blind spot regarding the importance of keeping Great Salt Lake full -- rather understandable at the time. The fact that the lake's fresh water sources turn into brine and eventually evaporate is a point in favor of keeping those rivers and streams flowing into the lake. The reason the lake is drying up is because the terminal lake loses some two million acre-feet of water every year to evaporation. Any inflows that total less than that result in a net deficit, leading to the situation we are in now.
State and federal planners dismissed the recommendations at the time, but the coalition did play a role in bringing about a change in the CUP's plans. By the late 1980s, after the CRCUP coalition frayed, a new wave of environmentalist organizations (with the help of substantial environmental legislation passed in the 1970s) pressed officials to maintain minimum instream flows that were crucial to fish populations and to otherwise mitigate the environmental damage that dams caused to these riparian environments. The new plans, funded in part by revenue from hydropower that was transferred away from funding irrigation systems, so satisifed the environmentalists that more than forty local and national organizations voiced their support for the revised CUP.
CUP planners' favorite cudgel to wield against critics was the notion of progress -- people overly concerned about the fate of various fishes were simply enemies of growth and development. This was hardly true for even the most committed critics. Dorothy Harvey, co-founder of CRCUP, was a Wisconsin resident who valued the scenic high mountain environments of the Uintas. She and the others in the coalition made it a point to express their support for Utah's development; they simply felt that the CUP was too expensive and too damaging. Harvey opposed the CUP altogether, though this was a point of disagreement within the coalition. She tried to win over other organizers to her side, though the stream fishers were content with the project so long as it addressed their concerns. Even then, Harvey expressed in private correspondence her feeling that opposing the CUP was not opposition to progress.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to stake out a position on these issues in a way that is effective that does not involve some regrettable tradeoff. Coalition work can require compromise, and that happens before the real fight begins. If we concede the point that the development of natural resources is the fastest way to achieve economic gains, then failure to do so means consigning the least fortunate to poverty. It's complicated (though, to be clear, we also do not have to concede that point). As time goes on, our paradigm of extraction (and disproportionate enrichment of the wealthiest and best connected) inches closer to a point of crisis. There is no shortage of people calling for converting some irreplaceable piece of the world into cash, so those of us who oppose this paradigm have no obligation to lend them our voices. I don't see an easy way to reconcile the dilemma, but environmentalism reproduces the logic of estrangement, of separation, when making tradeoffs that create wastelands and sacrifice zones. I imagine that the process of conservation and protection will continue to proceed in a dialectic.
The era of big water projects is over. But Utah water planners still seem to prefer augmentation of water supplies over conservation as a way to meet increasing demand as the population grows. Now the alternative sources of water that environmentalists recommended in the 1970s have become part of the water supply portfolio as they plan for the next several decades. Agricultural-to-municipal transfers and groundwater (either directly or by virtue of farmers increasingly tapping this source instead of surface water) have sustained the growth of our urban populations since Great Salt Lake's high water mark in 1989. Utah, recognizing how unpopular and expensive the Bear River Development Project is, keeps pretending that it isn't pursuing the project, even as it collects tax revenue for it. Conservation measures, by contrast, must constantly make the case for every penny, even if the longterm math shows that prevention of adverse environmental consequences is worth billions of dollars. So we keep planning for the future in a way that lacks vision, that substitutes pragmatic sense with a hope that more water will somehow appear over the rainbow.
References:
Jared Farmer, On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995).
Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015).
Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Citizens for a Responsible CUP, "Issues Paper of the Central Utah Project," June 1978, Dorothy Harvey Papers, University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, Accn2232 bx 58 fd 5.
Utah Water Resources Council, press release, June 28, 1981, Dorothy Harvey Papers, Marriott Library, Accn2232 bx 58 fd 10.
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