'What a (Lake) Body Can Be' helps unpack the personhood of the Great Salt Lake to offer saving solutions

On Tuesday May 9, the downtown City Library hosted a short film titled “What a (Lake) Body Can Be” by local filmmaker Sarah Woodbury and panel discussion addressing the perils of the Great Salt Lake through the lake’s personhood – reimagining the lake as an animate being deserving of rights just as much as humans. 

At the intersection of art, science and spirituality, the film followed two dancers who personified the lake and a shorebird, Wilson's phalarope, using the personhood of the beings to inform how solutions can be created. Looking at how if we applied the same rights granted to humans to beings like the Great Salt Lake, we could make the changes necessary to save it.

Woodbury is an Earth-based, multidisciplinary artist and facilitator using performing arts, creative writing and listening to the land to guide her practice. She is a socio-ecology student at Utah State University researching land relations on the Bear River. The film opened with her original poetry as the only narration of the piece, using “she” pronouns when referring to the lake, continuing that personification.     

“Myself and the two dancers, we approached the lake for consent and for conversations,” Woodbury said. “It was important to us that we engage with this being with a lot of respect and as a being with agency and did not assume to speak for the lake.” 

Bringing autonomy to what is often considered a resource to be taken from, rather than a reciprocal relationship to be upheld like our human connections. 

“When you refer to your relationship to a body of water, it is exactly the same as your relationship to your friends or family members, and that has as much right as anybody else,” Darren Parry said, a storyteller and former chairman of the northwestern band of the Shoshone Nation who currently teaches Native American history at Utah State University. “Nature has a spirit.”

“I think just by asking what our relationship is to the lake, and even acknowledging that there is a relationship, is so important,” said Chandler Rosenburg, the cofounder of Utah Food Coalition and Save Our Great Salt Lake. “Not asking that question is what got us here in the first place.” 

The dancer representing the lake, dressed in cool colors like purple, blue and turquoise with glitter streaks running down like tears, gracefully worked with the Wilson’s phalarope dancer, who wore a mask of the bird’s head. They danced in balance with one another on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, white caps rolling behind, textures of the water-affected sand looking like aerial topography a bird would see flying overhead. Tugging and pulling, one supporting the other in a backbend, cradling each other. Conveying their ecological dependence on one another. 

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Wilson’s phalarope is a shorebird that migrates between a sister saline lake in Argentina – Laguna Mar Chiquita – and the Great Salt Lake, relying on brine shrimp to support its livelihood that is now at risk as the Great Salt Lake’s salinity levels are surpassing livable conditions for these essential crustaceans. 

“This past fall, we actually crossed the threshold for brine shrimp, which is 18 percent salinity. We were at about 19 percent,” Janice Gardner said, an ecologist for the Sage Land Collaborative and wildlife biologist with experience in conservation management of natural resources. “To hear reports that we crossed this threshold was so eerie.” 

Eerie too is the extractive industry surrounding the lake. The camera flashed between the natural beauty of the lake sitting at the foot of the mountains while factories and smokestacks linger there too. Spotlighting the irony of industry killing this ecologically unique nature in its billowing fog. 

Like the codependence between the Wilson’s phalarope and the Great Salt Lake, we humans too have a reciprocal dependence with nature. 

“The interconnectedness between us, our health, is the same as the health of the ecosystem,” Rosenburg said.  

“It’s interesting to conceptualize ourselves as separate from more than humans around us,” Woodbury said. “We are truly dependent on these systems for our own health as well.”  

A sense of sorrow overcame the tone of the film as the demise of the two beings became apparent in their body language, separating from their indelible connection. The phalarope now on the ground, camera flashing from dancer to an actual skeleton of a dead bird on the shore. 

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This discussion comes at a time when the Great Salt Lake is at its most perilous, where these conversations are almost too late, but not quite. Happening just in time to avoid the outcome of Lake Owens, a saline lake that dried up in California that has since become the source of the nation’s worst dust pollution. Exactly what could – but need not – become of Salt Lake. 

“When you look at the data, we are exactly where we were at in 2021,” said Carter Williams. “We dropped so much over the last two years that one incredible winter only got us back to where we were.” 

Williams, a reporter for ksl.com and working with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, likes to think of the lake shrinking as a barometer of where we are as a greater society.  

“The Great Salt Lake hasn’t declined because of this current drought. It’s declined because of the mega drought,” Williams said. “It’s declined because of the consumption in Utah that takes water away from the lake. The lake is a very important piece of knowing where we’re currently at and what the state of the environment is here in the West and Utah.”

He cites a researcher from Utah State University, saying we’re already using 30 percent more water than we should be. Meaning that even with a normal snowpack this coming winter, we would still see a decline in the lake levels, needing at least 130 percent or more to see gains. 

Rosenburg goes on to talk about how 80 percent of our water goes to agriculture, and most of that agriculture does not even stay in Utah. 

“I would love to see an understanding that we live in a desert,” Rosenberg said, “that we have limited water and it’s time to get serious about making decisions to live within our means.” 

The panel unanimously agreed that collaboration and inclusion of a broad spectrum of perspectives is essential for finding lasting solutions. 

“But you know who was not invited to the table? Indigenous people,” Parry said. “What if they had been given a seat at the table 100 years ago and they incorporated this Indigenous thought, Indigenous way of looking at the environment, into what the states wanted to do?”

“This isn’t a partisan issue anymore. This is bipartisan at this point,” Williams said. “When you leave people out and you aren’t being collaborative, you’re potentially leaving the answer out.” 

The event is an example in and of itself of how collaboration across disciplines can concoct solutions from various perspectives, offering ideas considering different identities that would otherwise be neglected if left up to one entity, one perspective, to decide.  

“The conversation becomes really empty really quickly when we are speaking just from one perspective when there’s such deep systems of knowledge and interaction and balance that we can learn from,” Woodbury said. 

“When you assume that scientific knowledge is superior to Indigenous wisdom, you make collaboration impossible,” Parry said.

Skeletons of birds and smokestacks billowing can be something of the past. Brine shrimp can thrive again in higher water levels. Wilson’s phalaropes can continue their evolutionary stopping grounds here. 

“I envision a flourishing lake able to support the relationships that she has agreed to support. I envision glimmering, full waters and birds that are abundant,” Woodbury said. “I envision alongside that more abundant human culture as well because it all reflects each other.”