Journalist Caroline Tracey's book explores the history and mysticism of the world’s salt lakes

In a new book, journalist Caroline Tracey explores the treks through the American West and all over the world, exploring the unique cultural and ecological history of salt lakes — from the Great Salt Lake to the Salton Sea in the United States to the Aral Sea in Central Asia.

Along the way, she weaves in her own story of self-discovery, and realizing her life was going to follow a different path than the one she envisioned.

The book is called “Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History,” and Tracey recently spoke with The Show about it. Tracey started by reading a passage from the book.

Full conversation

CAROLINE TRACEY: This was the first of Salt Lake's many lessons. For me, places that seem ugly or desolate are vital and complex in ways that you don't notice until you give them a chance. Living in the world of my adulthood would require learning to find beauty amidst dust, bad smells and record heat. Not for their own sake, but as a way of working towards something else. Clean air, spectacular views, crisp mornings.

Dylan's family taught me that lesson among the clover leaves, processing plants and contaminated water of the Central Valley, and the Salton Sea taught it to me with its smell. Fish kill and persevering bird life. It's possible, and even in the world we live in, necessary to make a home in an environment that is increasingly inhospitable, toxic and mundane.

Indeed, those patches of complexity and wildness may be the only places where it's possible.

SAM DINGMAN: Thank you for reading that. And I should say this is from a chapter that is titled "Richness in Damaged Places. "

So these lakes, you, at the beginning of the book, talk at some length about why they're pretty special as a phenomenon, this phenomenon of being endorheic. Tell us about that and what it represents to you beyond just the mere science of it.

TRACEY: Yeah. Endorheic means closed basin. So an ordinary lake has both an inflow and an outflow. In the case of closed basin lakes or endorheic lakes, these occur at the bottom of closed valleys.

And that means that the only way for the water to move on is through evaporation. So you have situations where there is snow melt or simply rainfall that drains into the base of the valley, depending on the climate.

And it all collects and it has minerals suspended in it, and the water starts to evaporate, but the salts stay behind. And so that is what creates the phenomenon of a salt lake.

DINGMAN: There's a section where you talk about the Church of Latter-day Saints and their relationship with salt lakes and this idea early on that the lakes were a kind of divine gift.

TRACEY: Yeah, these salt lakes, when you see them in the desert, they're very striking. They're very blue because of the salts that are suspended in them. And they look really impressive in contrast to the surroundings where they're ordinarily found. And so I think that they do have this kind of charge to them that means that many cultures have found something sacred or mystical about them.

And what I learned was that there was a very early myth that when the early Latter-day Saint settlers came to Utah, there had been a plague of, I think what are called Mormon crickets. They're kind of like a locust family bug that was eating their crop and was threatening the settlers' ability to survive that year if the whole crop was going to be ruined.

And so they prayed for a solution. And what happened was that the birds from Great Salt Lake flew and ate all the bugs. And so there was this miracle that was brought about by the existence of the Great Salt Lake.

At the same time, you know, those settlers also needed to irrigate the lands that they were settling in order to survive. And so the Great Salt Lake goes from being this sacred place that has a role in helping settlement to a place where water just goes to be wasted. Where, if any water is getting to the lake, that's a waste of water.

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, and this gets into that passage that you shared at the beginning, because there and elsewhere in the book, you're alluding to the fact that in the case of other of these salt lakes as well, there has been this idea that those lakes are for use, that they are a resource to be exploited.

TRACEY: Yeah. I think that there's an idea in the history of American settlement of the West, for instance, that the desert needs to be put to use, right. This idea of the desert needs to bloom, that we need to make it productive. And in that way, salt lakes are almost the wasteland of the wasteland. Because even once you start to make the desert productive, you've got these lakes where there are flies and they're, you know, sometimes kind of smelly, and they don't have any fish, and they seem totally useless.

And the point I want to make is that in the same way that I think many people have come to appreciate the value of the desert ecosystem for what it is, these lakes similarly also have an ecological and aesthetic and spiritual value that's just inherent to them and doesn't need to be turned into anything to be useful.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, in that passage where you were talking about, as you put it, the first of the salt lakes, many lessons for you. In that passage, you also mentioned this person, Dylan, who we haven't talked about yet. Tell us who Dylan is and why meeting him helped introduce you to this more expansive way of thinking about salt lakes in general.

TRACEY: Yes, the personal narrative component of salt lakes, the non-environmental research and reportage component, follows me during my 20s and 30s in sort of two relationships that I guess are very different.

One with Dylan, who was my boyfriend for most of my 20s, who was originally from the Central Valley of California. And then later the person I married, who is Mariana, who's a woman from Mexico City, which was built on top of a salt lake just to bring salt lakes in.

DINGMAN: There we go. [LAUGHS]

TRACEY: [LAUGHS] But Dylan brought me, you know, to the Central Valley of California and to the desert of California and to places that I was not familiar with and didn't really know existed. I grew up in Colorado, and I just had these sort of very aestheticized ideas of California. And a lot of, for instance, the Central Valley is very, very agro-industrial.

It's full of farm fields that are really highly applied with pesticides. And then the desert is full of sprawl for housing, because obviously the housing costs in the coastal areas are very expensive. And so it was an interesting learning experience for me to get to know California and initially feel disappointed. But then try to come to terms with, well, what does it mean that this is the reality of life in the West, in the Southwest? And how do you still find the type of beauty that you had imagined in your head?

DINGMAN: Well, finally, Caroline, there is a school of thought in the world of ecology known as queer ecology. That is a framework that the book proposes in terms of thinking about the future of salt lakes and the West. Tell us what queer ecology is and why it's an appealing framework.

TRACEY: I would characterize queer ecology as having three important components, or at least important to me and important to salt lakes. One is queer ecology is a way of thinking about biology that gets out of the kind of normative male-female reproductive norms that we are taught in ninth-grade biology class.

So brine shrimp, for instance, are one of the invertebrates that live at many salt lakes. And they can give birth in two different ways. They can give birth to eggs or they can give birth to live beings, depending on the situation. So they have this kind of variability that is different than just kind of the traditional male-female reproduction.

Another aspect of queer ecology is as a perspective on landscapes. So instead of looking for the pristine Ansel Adams landscapes that I was looking for in California, seeing a landscape that's more damaged or that humans have intervened in and finding the value and realizing that it also still has ecological value.

And so this kind of salt lakes as the wasteland of the wasteland idea, I think that view from queer ecology really speaks, too. That we have to meet landscapes where they are and appreciate them for the inherent value that they have.

And the last one that is important to the book came from a book called "Underflows," which is by a trans hydrologist named Cleo Wolfle Hazard. And Wolfle Hazard talks about in the book the way that queer and trans practices of mourning can really be beneficial in thinking about ecosystem destruction and especially climate change.

So one thing that many scientists are dealing with is the fact that things like coral reefs or glaciers that they've spent their lives studying are disappearing because our climate is changing really fast. And so I think that perspective from queer ecology says, well, you know, there's body of practices that humans have learned for other humans that can also be relevant to work as scientists.