Great Salt Lake Voices

Great Salt Lake is seeing birds sometimes by the thousands and feeling like you're stepping into a scene in the middle of a nature documentary.

I would call myself a person who likes to bike around the lake. When I was riding along it, and one side is dark red, and the other side is blue…that was crazy. You look to your right, and it feels like you're in some sort of like Star Wars universe.

One of the things that I love about Utah and I love about Salt Lake is that I think people here really care and that we will solve this problem and there are a lot of people that are using art and their skills in the nonprofit world to, you know, make a difference.

Check out Alireza’s song “Water to Survive/Save the Great Salt Lake" on YouTube or purchase the song on Bandcamp, where 100% of the proceeds go to the Utah Rivers Council.

The lake calls scientists, it calls artists, it calls poets. And it's just a very special place.

 You're hearing the birds squawking, and you can smell the saltwater, and you can also smell another slight decay, which you can't really identify. And looking out, it's just water, it's lake bed, it's mirage, it's distant mountains.

I’ve devoted a lot of my time to telling people about the lake and helping people understand why we shouldn't let it disappear, why we shouldn't just dry it up.

There's no beachfront property or hotels around it. And it is super buggy around the shore, but once you get out on the lake, it's definitely one of the prettier places I've seen.

I look at the Great Salt Lake as this barometer of climate change, and humans and what we're doing to the hydrologic system that we have here.

People always equate Great Salt Lake to a big bathtub, when in fact, a probably more apt description is it's like a giant dinner plate. It is really, really shallow. And so, just navigation on Great Salt Lake is going to be increasingly more difficult and risky. I've been stuck on the lake a jillion times, I’ve been lost out there at night, submarined an airboat at one time…

I barely knew anything about the lake. And then I started sixth grade, and my amazing teacher over there taught me about the lake. You kind of fall in love with the lake, in a way.

Our sailboat tips—
we are a pelican wing
skimming the turquoise
cabochon of Utah sky.

I don't want to look back and regret not doing more to protect the lake. It's not too late for me and the many other friends of Great Salt Lake to act big act now and do what we can to preserve Great Salt Lake and all of the amazing ecosystem services it offers. 

[My] poem is called irreplaceable. There's praise and lament, there's grief in this poem as well. I feel like some people will turn away because it's really hard to bear. It's hard to be with a great body, dying of thirst. It's hard. But if we look away, we won't change it.

Israel uses ocean water after they take the salt out of it to supply their water supply. In fact, Israel even has enough excess water with the salt out of it that they're putting it into the Sea of Galilee. Wouldn't be cheap to do a pipeline from the Gulf of California [to Great Salt Lake], but it would be reasonable especially compared to the cost of not doing anything.”

Read the pipeline proposal and other water-saving engineering ideas from Woolley Engineering Research here.

It's endlessly fascinating, sometimes buggy and smelly, but an ever beautiful feature of this unique place that we call home. ... The Great Salt Lake is an asset that we all must treasure and we must preserve.