I am sitting on the shores of the Great Salt Lake near Salt Lake City, Utah. The scorching sun beats down on my back, and I am the only one who has braved the 20-minute walk across the dry lakebed. Few Utahns visit the Great Salt Lake; it is widely regarded as stinky, smelly, and unclean. For me, however, the lake is an old childhood friend. I remember wading out into the salty water to look for scarlet-hued brine shrimp, collecting them in a yellow pail to watch their delicate phyllopodium ripple to propel them through the water. I remember brine flies flitting across the sand and resting on my salt-encrusted legs. I remember the sound of pelicans and seagulls calling down from the sky.
But now, an eerie silence fills the lakebed. There is no wind, and the waves are too small to breach. The buzz of brine flies is absent. I don’t even hear any birds. It is the summer after the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest recorded elevation level in December 2022, more than 10 feet below its historical average.[1]
In the last few decades, it has become apparent that the Great Salt Lake is drying up.[2] Saline lakes are declining around the world; their delicate ecosystems rely on stable temperatures, water supply, and salt levels, things that are easily disrupted by human activity or climate change.[3]
The Great Salt Lake and its surrounding wetlands are a keystone ecosystem supporting millions of migratory birds, trillions of brine shrimp and brine flies, and uncountable microbes and algae.[4] Now, in the silent lakebed, the once-abundant life force feels small. If the lake continues to dry up, its ecosystem faces collapse within the decade.[5] I feel my old friend dying.
[Image description: A lone American White Pelican is standing reflected in the water as it grooms its right wing with a long, orange beak.]
The degradation of the Great Salt Lake is not natural, but a direct result of human water management and consumptive practices. The value of the lake, politically and economically, comes from what can be taken from it, contributing $1.9 billion annually to Utah’s economy through the minerals in its lakebed, the species that inhabit it, and the water from its tributaries. Even its natural beauty has an economic value. When the lake is valued only as a resource to be used for the benefit of human beings it is easy to justify exploitative practices contributing to its decline.
After the historic lows in 2022, I became increasingly involved with what many call “lake-facing” work, art, and advocacy with, by, and for the Great Salt Lake. As I did, I noticed many people in the environmental community used language portraying the lake as alive. For example, in a 2023 article for The New York Times, author and environmental advocate Terry Tempest Williams writes, “I have known Great Salt Lake in flood and now in drought, between her highest level, at 4,211.8 feet in 1987, and her lowest, at 4,188.5 feet in 2022. Maps and newspapers call her the Great Salt Lake, but to me, she’s Great Salt Lake” (emphases added).[6] Here, Great Salt Lake is not a place but a name; her body is not an “it” but a “she,” and she is alive.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, renowned Potawatomi ecologist and author, calls this kind of language the grammar of animacy. In her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, she says “[a] bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live.”[7] Water is constantly shaping the world around us both physically and socially. It can carve out deep canyons in the earth’s crust, transform landscapes with floods in a matter of hours, and shape coastlines. As a well-known Lakota expression says, mní wičhóni — water is life.
In 2024 I moved away from Great Salt Lake and my life-long home to Missoula, Montana, to begin a master’s degree in environmental studies, a move I knew marked a permanent end to my time in Utah. Yet, Great Salt Lake wouldn’t leave my mind. I wanted — needed — to know: what was the importance of a living Lake to the people working to save her, and what futures become possible if the Lake is alive?
[Image description: Mica, a research participant, crouches in the lakebed. They are wearing a blue hoodie, tan baseball cap, and tan pants. Their feet are bare. They look down at the sand beneath them while the sunset glows pastel pinks, purples, and blues behind them.]
I began research with environmental advocates at Great Salt Lake to learn more about how a living Lake plays a part in forming relationships with her, and what it can mean for environmental responsibility, care, and action. I conduct participatory research, where participants are invited into a collaborative role as co-creators in the research process. I spoke with 15 people involved with lake-facing work through science, community organizing, art, and nonprofit work, inviting them to share their stories through photographs and interviews.
Perceptions of a living Lake are widespread. Almost all of my participants were familiar with worldviews of the Lake as living in their environmental circles, and most of my participants spoke about the Lake as a “living being” and an “entity” that they connected with as a “teacher,” “friend,” “relative,” “guide,” and “community member.” For these participants, a living Lake is not just a metaphor, but a worldview where they can form genuine and reciprocal relationships with her.
In addition to seeing her aliveness, many participants also believe she takes an active role in forming communities and relationships. One participant, a self-described poet, community organizer, and lake-facing witch, shared “[t]he lake introduces people all the time and, you know, those people start projects together. They fall in love. They get into conflicts that end up being really good for us. There’s all this tampering, meddling that the lake does.”
Not only does the Lake engage in relationship-building, she takes an active role in organizing environmental action. Another participant, an environmental advocate with experience in policy work for the Lake, shared that “[m]ost of the people I organize with are of the belief that the lake was leading this, bringing us together,” and that “Great Salt Lake gave me a list of things to do.”
Understanding the Lake as living and agentive is not the only way to care about her, protect her, or enact meaningful environmental action, but can offer an alternative to the dominant political and economic worldviews that value her as a passive body to be used, extracted from, and backgrounded. Instead, a living Lake centers care, love, and reciprocity with another being valuable in and of herself.
[Image description: A circle of nine hands rest atop the rim of a square wooden box filled with dry flower petals and a note. The box sits on the dry lakebed of Great Salt Lake.]
It is nearly three years after the historic 2022 lows and I am, once again, sitting on the shores of Great Salt Lake. I let myself come into relationship with her and listen, truly listen, the same way I might listen to the stories of my research participants. The ebbs and flows of her waters become the breath in her lungs, her tributaries become arteries carrying lifeblood to her heart, members of her ecosystem become a myriad of microorganisms that live in and are sustained by her body. Here, I feel it: she is alive, she is dying, and she is calling on us to help.
Acknowledgements:
This research could not exist without the time, energy, labor, and stories from my participants. Special thanks to the participants whose words and photographs were included in this essay.
[1] Benjamin W. Abbott et al., Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake From Ongoing Collapse, Report (Brigham Young University, 2023); Utah Department of Natural Resources, “Great Salt Lake,” accessed 27 November 2025.
[2] Abbott et al., Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake From Ongoing Collapse; Leia Larsen, “The Great Salt Lake’s Ecological Collapse Has Begun,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 November 2022, accessed 22 November 2024; Leia Larsen, “Here’s What the Great Salt Lake’s Dust Is Doing to Our Bodies,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 19 September 2023, accessed 22 November 2024; Leia Larsen, “Why the Great Salt Lake’s Causeway May Have Staved off Collapse More than Once,” The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah), 22 February 2024, accessed 22 November 2024; Leia Larsen, “The Great Salt Lake Enters 2026 Uncomfortably Close to Record Lows,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 6 January 2026, accessed 8 February 2026.
[3] Abbott et al.,Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake From Ongoing Collapse, 5; Caroline Tracey, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026), 6; Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh et al., “Decline of the World’s Saline Lakes,” Nature Geoscience 10, no. 11 (2017): 816–21, accessed 13 February 2026.
[4] Bonnie K. Baxter et al., “Microbial Diversity of Great Salt Lake,” in Adaptation to Life at High Salt Concentrations in Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya, ed. Nina Gunde-Cimerman et al. (Springer Netherlands, 2005), accessed 24 January 2026; Bonnie K. Baxter, “Great Salt Lake Microbiology: A Historical Perspective,” International Microbiology 21, no. 3 (2018): 79–95, accessed 24 January 2026; Frederick J. Post, “The Microbial Ecology of the Great Salt Lake,” Microbial Ecology (United States) 3, no. 2 (1977): 143–65, accessed 24 January 2026; Anthony J. Roberts, “Avian Diets in a Saline Ecosystem: Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA,” Human-Wildlife Interactions 7, no. 1 (2013): 158–68.
[5] Abbott et al., Emergency Measures Needed to Rescue Great Salt Lake From Ongoing Collapse.
[6] Terry Tempest Williams, “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” The New York Times, 25 March 2023.
[7] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, (Milkweed, 2015), 55.
*Cover Image: A lone bison stands in the dry lakebed of Great Salt Lake with Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, rising in the background. Photo by Kelly Hannah, research participant, 2025, used with consent.
[Cover Image description: A lone bison stands in the dry lakebed of Great Salt Lake. In the distance, Salt Lake City’s skyscrapers are reflected in a thin strip of lake water.]
Edited by Marie Comuzzo, reviewed by Deniz Karakas.
