The massive lake had just appeared on the horizon. After trekking for days through the arid mountains of Utah, any amount of water was surely a pleasant surprise to the Latter-day Saint pioneers in 1847. Brigham Young famously stopped the party, made camp on the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in view of the lake and declared, “This is the place.”
I guess he hadn’t smelled it yet.
The smell hits you first. It’s rank — decaying and unbearable. Walking across the dry, peeling mud, crushing the salt-encrusted carcasses of billions of brine shrimp, it is easy to turn back before even seeing the Great Salt Lake’s equally disgusting water.
Ecologically speaking, it’s easy to ignore. The government sure has. But as the lake continues receding due to climate change, scientists are pleading with us to protect the salty reservoir.
Ugly, smelly places like this are often last in line for governmental protection. But perhaps they are the most in need.
“It’s definitely a difficult sell,” said Wayne Wurtsbaugh, a renowned watershed scientist whose work on the Great Salt Lake has been published in Nature. “It is such a unique place.”
Though the middle of the lake can host only brine shrimp and flies, spots like Farmington and Bear River bays are vital for fish populations and visiting shorebirds.
Like the lonely gas station you bet on during a road trip in the desert, the Great Salt Lake is also a necessary stopping place for migratory birds. They get a good meal and much-needed rest. However, this gas station is starting to run empty.
But don’t get me wrong — it’s still ugly.
Even in the brackish bays where the Weber and Bear rivers dump into the lake, the government does not regulate pollution nearly enough. The smell itself, that of rotten eggs, is due to toxic algal blooms exacerbated by agricultural runoff.
The Great Salt Lake is already more than 10 feet lower than it was when Brigham Young saw it. Thanks to a few more million thirsty people surrounding the lake, the rivers that fill it are slowing down.
It doesn’t help that there are constant attempts to develop lakefront property. Developers buy the ever-increasing shore and apply for easements to take water from the Bear River before it can replenish the lake.
“They talk out both sides of their mouth,” said Wurtsbaugh. “They say they care about the lake but then move along with the development anyway.”
Luckily one of those proposed sites, Fremont Island, just south of Bear River Bay, was just bought from a developer to keep it safe.
Once the lake dries, the problems only get worse. The ancient lakebed, no longer anchored by plants or water, would be whipped up by wind, causing massive destructive dust clouds. That’s what happened to Owens Lake in California. Now the valley surrounding that mostly dry lake has some of the deadliest air in America, causing Los Angeles’ water district to pay out a $10 million settlement.
That’s for a valley of 25,000 people. Imagine the settlement for the 2.5 million people along the Wasatch Front.
With these threats to ecology, biodiversity and human health, why are we so quick to write off the Great Salt Lake, the same wetland for which the state’s capital city is named?
Perhaps it is something about the shallow, murky water.
That seems to be the case for peat bogs, which have been written off of the conservationist shortlist until recent years.
Made of decaying organic matter sitting in waterlogged soil, peat bogs have historically been associated with the preserved bodies that float to the top of the mush. The bogs are difficult to traverse, often acting like quicksand due to the instability of the ground. In the 1980s, the United Kingdom even tried planting trees to cover up the eyesore of northern Scotland’s bogs.
But peat makes great fuel. It stores an absolute ton of carbon due to the oxygen-less breakdown of plants and trees and, yes, those bog bodies. The same characteristic could help us answer the climate crisis.
When healthy, one hectare of peat stores about 1,600 tons of carbon dioxide. In comparison, a stand of pines can store about 16 tons per hectare.
Most people generally understand protecting trees is beneficial because of their carbon storage. So why can’t we protect the thing that is 100 times more effective?
Because it is ugly.
This kind of negligence is tied to our self-importance. Yosemite, Yellowstone, Arches and Acadia are all objectively beautiful to human eyes. There is no objection to the protection of these places. But stark peaks and deep colors do not necessarily imply ecological importance.
“Many of the first protected areas focus on romantic landscapes that instill the feeling of the sublime,” said Sarah Klain, a professor at Utah State University who studies the way people interact with their environment.
The sublime is a complicated emotion. It incorporates awe, power, beauty and fear into one feeling. It’s addictive. It’s effective.
When John Muir showed Theodore Roosevelt the peaks of Yosemite, he focused on that emotion. He characterized these mountains, canyons and monoliths as “cathedrals” and works of a higher power. Duly enthralled, Roosevelt protected these places.
That part was easy. Mountains are not economically very viable.
But other landscapes are, and that’s a major obstacle to protecting them — especially if they don’t generate the same sense of the sublime.
For example: Tundras, rich in stored carbon, are desolate and barren, opening them up to drilling. Prairies are flat and monotonous, yet also thick with soil carbon. This makes them fertile, and impossible to protect. Even the sagebrush steppe, grayish and seemingly endless, is a vital protector of the West’s scarce water resources and provides habitat for threatened species. The fuels trapped below are just too tempting.
Humans are the only species that actively destroys habitat, but we are also the only species that can purposefully protect it. In the past, protections have mostly focused on what inspires and imbues us with the sublime. But if we have any hope of recovering a dying planet, we need to change our priorities.
We can start by protecting these ugly places.
Carter Moore
Carter Moore is a journalism student at Utah State University.