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- [00:00]
Zeb Larson
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- [00:43]
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- [01:56]
Caroline Tracy
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:01]
Zeb Larson
Hello and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm your host, Zeb Larson, and I'm here today with Caroline Tracy to discuss her book Salt Lakes An Unnatural History. Combining memoir, history and geography, Tracy discusses the history of salt lakes in North America and western Asia, looking at the impacts they've suffered from human industry, their significance for indigenous population, and the future that they're facing as a result of anthropogenic climate change. In so doing, she also reveals the very personal impact that these landscapes had on her. Caroline, thanks so much for joining us today. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourself and sort of, I guess, what brought you up to the moment of writing this book, of course.
- [02:44]
Caroline Tracy
Thank you for having me here. I started this book in about 2014. Unconsciously, I did not set out to write a book titled Salt Lakes and unnatural history. In 2014, when I was 23, I had just finished studying literature, specifically Russian literature, as an undergrad. And so I had a big interest in sort of literature and the relationship between literature and geography. How does literature represent big spaces? That was sort of where I had ended up in this sort of strange major was that I had grown up in the American west and I wanted to see how writers thought about similar spaces. The Russians have a huge country, so they had also done some of this contemplation. But after, after I graduated from college, I was reading a ton of literature about the American west and specifically California, and decided I wanted to go visit some of the places in the California desert that I had read about but never seen. And one of the places I went to see the, probably the one I went to first was the Salton Sea, which is in southeastern California. And it is a salt lake, but it has a very unusual history. It's, it's essentially man made. It's, it's basin, you know, was made by geology, but it, it was created in its sort of permanent water body form by an agricultural irrigation canal that overflowed in 1904. And then it, it stayed full over time because of irrigation water. In recent years, they've, they've cut back on all the irrigation water in the Imperial Valley and, and it started to shrink. So I went to this lake. I was very drawn to it aesthetically and I was also drawn to it from this sort of strange, slightly catastrophic history that it had. And then, you know, I wrote an essay about it. I published an essay about it in 2015. And at the time I thought, I love the personal essay. I'll write personal essays. But over time I just couldn't get away from the sort of environmental history. So during that time I went and did a PhD in geography. I did not study salt lakes, but it definitely gave me research skills that helped me with this book, like doing interviews, which was something that in the past had made me really nervous, and doing archival research, which also figures pretty prominently in the book. And so over time it went from being sort of me learning to write personal essays to me becoming obsessed with salt lakes.
- [05:16]
Zeb Larson
Well, and so then we've touched on those a little bit. You know, what, what drew you to salt lakes in the first place? But, you know, for readers who might be unfamiliar with them, you know, I'm thinking if you've grown up in the eastern half of the United States, not as likely to interact with them on a regular basis, what's their ecological significance? And, and maybe, you know, even past that, what's the aesthetic draw? Because reading this, it really jumps out how much the beauty of these landscapes pops out at you specifically in ways that other people might not immediately appreciate.
- [05:46]
Caroline Tracy
The salt lakes, I tend to define them by the geologic formation that creates them rather than, you know, the, the exact percentage of salt, because that threshold can be pretty variable, the amount of salts that are suspended in a salt lake. But the way that they form is pretty consistent, which is that they form in the bottom of closed basins. So if you picture a valley with a river running through it, you've got a river entering and exiting the valley. But in these closed basins, the water only enters, or it usually kind of runs down the mountains that surround this kind of bowl in the landscape and there's no exit. And so that means that the water can't flow out, it can only evaporate. And when it does, whatever minerals are suspended in it stay behind. And so over geologic time, you know, thousands of or millions of years, they, they have built up a salt concentration that until, until relatively recently, until the 20th century, has stayed pretty consistent over time. Nowadays, most of them globally are drying up because the water that runs into those lakes has been diverted, often for agricultural use. So here in the American West, a lot of alfalfa, in the case of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, cotton. And then even more recently, we're starting to see really dramatic effects of climate change. So of course this year in the American west there's this thing called the snow drought, this sort of record low snowpack. I'm in Denver at my parents house and they were just telling me that Denver Water sent out a communique saying that no one is allowed to water their lawns until May. Like you can, you cannot water lawns for the next two months because it's been so hot here that even the snowpack that they did have, has, has evaporated. So that type of problem, this, this declining snowpack, unpredictable snowpack, has compounded the disappearance of the salt lakes. But in addition to that sort of urgent environmental problem, they're, they're really beautiful. They, they captivated me because they, they tend to exist in, in arid landscape. So in, in a landscape with more water, the water would cut away out of that closed valley. And so these closed basins are a really desert or arid landscape features for the most Part. Um. And. And because there are salts suspended in them, they are very reflective. So they. You. You come across them in the desert, and they, first of all, contrast really strikingly with the surrounding landscape because they're blue, but they're not just blue. They're very sort of glisteningly blue. And they often have the mountains and the sky reflected really clearly in them. And so for me, there was sort of this rational knowledge about this environmental problem around them, but there was also a really sort of undeniable esthetic pull.
- [08:39]
Zeb Larson
So. And we touched on this a little bit, too, in talking about your graduate work. But when you were conceptualizing this as a book, you know, how did it come together? Did it start as a history of salt lakes or as a memoir? And what do you think you gain by having these two narratives complement each other in this way?
- [08:55]
Caroline Tracy
That's a good question. It was something that I only kind of started to reflect on recently because it was sort of such an amorphous evolution, I would say. But when I first started in 2014, 2015, I really saw myself as writing a collection of essays. But, I mean, that was sort of the most grandiose vision of what I was doing because I was really learning to write personal essays. So the essays or the chapters in here that come from that period have been thoroughly revised over a number of years because I was young and I was still sort of learning to write. But during the course of sort of writing, writing what I thought would be a collection of essays about, you know, young womanhood, being a woman in your 20s. This was kind of a genre that was very popular at that time, like Roxane Gay and Lena Dunham had just released essay collections. So I was trying to do that type of thing. I just really couldn't ignore that. I really enjoyed doing the research about the environmental history and the ecology of these regions. And that kept taking up way too much space in the essays for them to be personal essays. You know, I would, like, write, for instance, about the Salton Sea, but then there would be this handbrake and then three pages of the history of the Salton Sea. And at the same time, I took some nonfiction writing workshops. I went to the Tin House writing workshop, for instance, and took a.
- [10:21]
Zeb Larson
Of couple.
- [10:21]
Caroline Tracy
A couple classes online. And I saw that a lot of what was being written in those type of nonfiction workshops was memoir. And I think I came away from sort of being in rooms with tons of memoir by thinking, you know, it's actually somewhat unique that I have this interest in this unusual feature of the landscape. And maybe I ought to lean in more to that. And, in fact, I already have been. And I've been sort of, like, fighting it by trying to make these essays into personal essays more than reported or researched essays. And so it shifted toward being a book about salt lakes. I felt like I actually had something to say about these landforms in particular, or these water bodies, more like in particular. And also just sort of the way that humans and people who live in arid regions can relate to landscape, especially sort of in a moment of climate change and really profound change. And then maybe my point was more about that than about me, but I did think it was important to retain the kind of personal exploration element to tie it all together and kind of show my thinking about how I got to those ideas.
- [11:39]
Zeb Larson
I love that. That's a really beautiful way to put it. Reading it, it's striking how much change is just jumping out on the page, like, again and again throughout these different essays. Let's dive into the salt lakes a little bit, then. So, you know, you've touched on this. There's a colonial dimension going on here, and it's striking because you can see it in multiple different countries, but especially, you know, chapters on Russia, the Aral Sea, and then in the American west as well. So how have colonizing states, like, if there's a pattern of treatment for salt lakes, what has it been? And then what has the effect been on indigenous peoples?
- [12:18]
Caroline Tracy
Absolutely. Yeah. This is. I think this is present in nearly every salt lake around the world. Maybe I don't. Maybe that's too strong to say. But certainly in the American west, in the Great Basin, the salt lakes, many of them have different bands of Paiutes that were living on their shores, using them as food sources and also incorporating them into their cosmologies. There's a chapter about the Zuni salt lake, which was actually in a sort of successful court case restituted to the tribe. And then there are also examples from Mexico. The Mexica people, you know, constructed what is now Mexico City on an island in the middle of a salt lake. And. And then Central Asia with the Soviet Union. It's just these. These salt lakes, I think, by virtue of being in deserts, have been places that indigenous people once really sought out. They're so sort of striking. And also the fact of having, like, some creatures around them makes them very helpful in arid. In arid landscapes, but also impacted by colonialism, because when settlers started to arrive in these regions, because there was fresh water flowing into these lakes, that fresh water was seen as a resource. And so in the case of Great Salt Lake, for instance, Anglo settlement or White settlement, however you want to frame it, starts with Mormons in the middle of the 1800s and they very quickly started to divert water from, from the rivers that feed Great Salt Lake for irrigation districts. And actually the sort of governance of irrigation that they set up in that time period has a lot to do, a lot of bearing on the way that irrigation played out on a larger scale throughout the American west with the Bureau of Reclamation to settle these arid regions. It depends fundamentally on the ability to, to reroute the water that is ending up in, in salt lakes, in, in many cases at least, enclosed basins to, to human use. And so over time that, that diversion has ramped up to the point where very little water is reaching Great Salt Lake. In, in the Soviet Union, it's the same story that there was, you know, the, the, the Russian Empire colonized the, its Central Asian republics. And when it became the Soviet Union, um, they, they used Uzbekistan as kind of the cotton colony. This required massive sort of control of the people that lived there. A really rapid sedentarization of people that had in, in some cases been nomadic. Other people were already sedentary, but they were conscripted into working for the cotton economy. And, and by the 1980s, you have these massive rivers collecting water from, from the mountain ranges in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and they are no longer reaching the Aral Sea. This sort of the Amazon of Central Asia, as they call it, was suddenly not reaching the sea. And that is because it was all being diverted. So this is a story that is repeated around the world and one that I found important to engage with as, you know, the sort of descendant of settlers of the American West. Thinking about what does it mean to be kind of like a subject of this long term colony and how do we sort of move forward or conceptualize our presence here with the understanding that, you know, this isn't all about to be reverted in any way. It's something that, you know, it's a structure that is likely to continue and
- [16:11]
Zeb Larson
then just to dig a little bit into the lake. Zuni example. I thought it was really interesting the term landback gets used here and as a sort of like ur example of a land back movement. Can you dive into that just a little bit?
- [16:26]
Caroline Tracy
Absolutely, yeah. The Zuni Salt Lake. I wish I could pinpoint the moment when I found out about this story and I just cannot remember. Hopefully at some point I will remember, but it was one of the later lakes that I learned about. And I found, found that it has a really interesting court case associated with it where after Spanish and then U.S. colonization of New Mexico, the Zuni salt lake, which was sacred to, or is sacred to the Zuni people, was deeded to the state of New Mexico because it was mineral lands. It was used as a salt mine. And so all mineral lands were. Were places that the state would get royalties from. And the Zuni were. They still tried to make pilgrimages there, but found themselves cut off from the lake by the miners who had installed themselves. And then in the 1940s and 50s, there was something called the Indian Claims Commission. This was Congress's decision to give tribes one last chance to make a claim to lands that they felt had been unfairly taken by the United States or unfairly ceded sort of without compensation. But this wasn't a program of giving because up until that point, individual tribes had made making individual claims before Congress. And Congress was essentially just tired of this. So they, they said, okay, you've got this window of time to make any last claims. And the compensation wasn't going to be the restitution of land, but a monetary amount that they would determine. And, and the, you know, the, I read, for instance, the. The Paiute tribes court document or documentation that when they tried to get an Indian claim made. And, and the, the sort of. The rules that the US Government set up were very strict. They had to, you know, show that you were one single tribe instead of multiple related tribes. They had. You had to show that you had something called Indian title that really resembled what we would think of as a real estate title, which was not really how many of the people thought of themselves as using the land. So that was very sort of on the government's terms. And not only that, in the case of the Zuni, the Bureau of Indian affairs agent that was working with them told them, like, I typed up this letter. It says, you don't have any claims. Just sign it. And the leaders didn't really have any memory of doing this. That document exists. And when later, you know, they saw it and they were like, we never had this explained to us. You know, like, we didn't read sort of formal English legal documents. That wasn't something that we were. We were aware we were doing. And so it's a sort of like late in the game, like, you know, forced sort of treaty signing. And so at the. After the Indian Claims Commission had closed, the tribe started working with historian at University of Utah to build a case before Congress. I guess, you know, actually Sorry, just to take one step back. They, they discovered this because the lease for the Zuni salt lake came up. They got the opportunity to acquire the lease and they believed that they were purchasing the lake back. And only sort of upon getting the lease did they find out, actually, no, this is state of New Mexico lands that, that we, we can't just simply buy back. Um, and that prompted them to do this research to find out that they had been sort of swindled in the moment of the Indians Claims Commission and to work with a historian to show that they had been sort of misled at the moment when they could have made a claim and get an act of Congress passed to prompt the state of New Mexico and Bureau of Land Management to make a land swap so that the Bureau of Land Management federal agency could restore the Zuni salt lake to the Zuni tribe. So it's this very improbable, hard won restoration of a piece of land from the federal government to an indigenous nation. And this resembles what we now would describe as land back. But it was happened in the end. It happened in the early 1980s. So before, you know, I guess what, 2016, maybe a little before that is when when land back starts to become a real kind of rallying cry in moments like the Dakota Axis pipeline and other recent fights. It's this sort of proto land back that also, you know, proves that the federal government can be persuaded to do this type of thing. And it was also amazing to me that it happened over a salt lake, that this salt lake was such an important part of Zuni cosmology, that it was the piece of land that they prioritized getting back. They later had a second similar court case and were able to get back a piece of land called Zuni Heaven, but they started with the salt lake.
- [21:21]
Zeb Larson
Perfect, thank you. Jumping ahead, there's a term you use describing Lake Tetzcoco that I thought was really interesting. Queer nature. What is queer nature? And how do salt lakes embody or sort of fit into this schema?
- [21:37]
Caroline Tracy
Queer queer nature or queer ecology? Either one is a sort of an amorphous idea that emerges out of queer theory, but in a very interdisciplinary way to describe a few different things. One of them is queer ecology in the sense of identifying creatures in, in the world that don't conform to the kind of simplistic and ultimately heteronormative ways of kinship and reproduction that we're taught in like 9th grade biology. So, like, you know, in the case of salt lakes, the brine shrimp reproduce in basically every conceivable way. Like they, they can both give birth to live young and they can give birth to too young in eggs. Like they, they can be, they can like change sex, some of them. So, so this, this type of thing, there's a book called, I want to say it's called Exuberant Nature. I might be getting that slightly wrong by, by Bruce Bagamill. That is one of the kind of founding text of that, that sort of vein of queer ecology, what we would now call queer ecology. There's also an amazing series of YouTube or they're on YouTube, but short videos by Isabella Rossellini where she like weird animals and describes, describes the different ways that they, that they reproduce and stuff. So that's, that's one feature that I, as I was reading about it, I was like, well, you know, the, the salt lakes really sort of exemplify this because the brine shrimp, blindflies, even the birds, some of the birds that go to salt lakes, there will be like sort of sex or gender reversal where the woman will be less drab, she'll be much more showy and bigger than the male, which is the reverse of the, the normal bird world. So that really resonated with salt lakes for me. And then I think even, what I even sort of attached myself onto more was queer ecology as a perspective for looking at landscapes. So there is an essay or an article by the geographer named Matthew Gandy that talks about this abandoned cemetery, abandoned and overgrown cemetery in London that became a cruising site. And eventually some like ecologists realized that this sort of like non normative human use of the site was, was actually turning out to be kind of beneficial. Like not only was it sort of conceptual parallelism between like people that are scorned from society and a site that's been abandoned and neglected and scorned by society, but actually like a mycologist went out and showed that like, you know, the men walking around were like spreading mushroom spores. And so I really liked this idea of queer ecology as something that takes these sites that have been abandoned or scorned and shows that they are really rich in biodiversity and rich in sort of the ecosystem possibilities that they have. And so I talk about that with Lake Texcoco, as you mentioned, which is in Mexico City. It's the remnant of the salt lake that Mexico City was built on. Um, and, and it's an interesting place because you, when you go there, it's now, it's now a park after a lot of years of fighting. But when you go there, you can see sort of the different layers of what's, of what's been tried. You see sort of like the gravity fed canals that they used to use to send water from Mexico City into the lake bed. You also see in the 1980s they had terrible, terrible issues with dust in Mexico City. And so they did planting of like salt tolerant grasses. You see, they thought they were going to build an airport there until very recently. And so you see like the sort of very large roads that they built for airport traffic and the parking lots are there. There's also a very tall fence surrounding it with airport type signage. And then finally you see the park on top of that. So you have this, this site that no one really knew what to do with for a long time and that's been through all kinds of different human impacts. And it certainly doesn't have the ecological value, not, not inter, not in a quantitative way, but it doesn't have the exact ecology that it had, you know, in, in 1500 when the, when the Spanish were starting to colonize Mexico. But it has a, it still has an ecological value and it has a different ecological value. Kind of a novel one. So that sort of queer ecology as an approach to landscape. And the third element of queer ecology, which I really sort of took from a hydrologist named Cleo Wolfley Hazard, who has a book called Underflows, is the idea that queer and trans communities have developed practices of mourning that can be really beneficial for scientists, especially climate scientists and other scientists who are having to deal with changes, who have to think about, you know, things like sort of saying goodbye to their research site, which is something beloved. And that this sort of like community familiarity with mourning or community sort of developed practices of mourning can be something that applies to scientists too.
- [26:53]
Zeb Larson
Beautifully put. And I think this is a sort of logical lead into our next question because this book is also about you and a sort of process of discovering your own sexuality or learning more about it. So what do these landscapes teach you about yourself?
- [27:06]
Caroline Tracy
I. Yeah, you know, as I mentioned when I started working on this book, I thought it was a collection of essays about womanhood and womanhood in your 20s. And one of the things that had been really beneficial to me in my early 20s or early to mid-20s was sort of having conversations with women where I learned that like sort of womanhood is, is this like fraught and confusing topic for many people. It wasn't just me that was sort of like what you. Sometimes I felt like my mom had a very clear vision of, of what I was supposed to sort of like, have as a woman, adulthood and that I didn't fit into. And I didn't really understand why it would be so confusing for me and not for others. It was very beneficial to sort of start having conversations with. With other people and realize, actually there's this whole spectrum of. Of. Of like, sort of ways to be a woman in the world. And that was. That was a really beneficial thing for me to understand and that I wanted to kind of work through and in. In writing essays too. And one of the things that I got really into reading, sort of stemming from that was I read. I started reading a lot of Queer Theory and I started to say, like, to think like, you know, this. This actually sort of expresses some of the things I feel about, you know, family structure and friendship and ways of being in the world that I just hadn't sort of seen in my daily life around me. And so I started to think, you know, like, what would it mean? What would it look like to pursue a queer future? What would it. What would. What would that mean for me? And so the book follows me sort of from my relationship with my college boyfriend into marrying the woman that I eventually married and thinking through sort of queerness in the context of. Of salt lakes and outside of the context of salt lakes. But I guess, you know, one. One other sort of thing that's often said is that the word ecology comes from household, right? In Greek. And so I think that queer theory lends itself really nicely to thinking about households. And then we also have queer ecology. And so I really wanted to sort of think about, you know, my. The household of the region that I live in and the household of the. The household that I live in.
- [29:23]
Zeb Larson
Now, you mentioned at the beginning of this, salt lakes are under special threat from climate change. They're sort of. They're even more vulnerable than everything else, which is sort of staggering to think about. Owens Lake is an example you cite in the book as one sort of possible future of these lakes going forward. That's an interesting story. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [29:42]
Caroline Tracy
Owens Lake is in eastern California. It is not exactly a lake at this point. I think it deserves to retain its name, but it looks very different than a normal lake. It is on the sort of in. Is that the base of the valley or the closed basin to the east of the Sierra Nevada? And so historically, the Owens river collected all the runoff from the Sierra Nevada and deposited into Owens Lake. In the early 20th century, the LA Department of Water and Power built an aqueduct that brought the water from Owens Lake to Los Angeles for municipal use there. And that meant that within about 10 years the lake had completely dried up because no water was reaching it. And by the 1970s, 1980s, it was the most emissive site in terms of dust in the United States. It was like, you know, more than 100 times the EPA's limit for, for clean air in dust was being in particulate matter was being emitted from its lake bed every day. And so what happened was the local air quality regulation district, I think it's called Great Basin Air Quality Control District. But so the Eastern California Air Quality Agency decided that they would sue the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power based on its Clean Air act violations. At first they were not able to do this. At first the judge dismissed the suit because they said that Owens Lake was a natural site and that the Clean Air act applied to manmade sites. Eventually they revised the Clean Air act. And in the discussions in like the House committee, they actually discussed that they needed to revise it specifically for these lakes for Owens and also Mono in eastern California that they had been affected by, by this aqueduct that were natural sites, but they were impacted very clearly by human, human activity. And so the air quality control district was able to eventually hold Los Angeles accountable after a very long lawsuit for all the dust. And Los Angeles was obligated to do dust mitigation on, I believe at the start it was 14 square miles of lakebed. There were a few later lawsuits that expanded that, that amount of dust mitigation. They've now part of the final settlement was you can't, you can't sue us for more mileage anymore. So there is a little bit of area that's still emissive. But in, in general, the lakebed of Owens Lake now has better air quality than most cities. It's, you know, I think it still has a bad reputation because it had a well deserved bad reputation for many decades. But now when you go there, the air is quite clean. They have, you know, a whole team of people monitoring it all the time. But so the way that it looks now, it's kind of like almost like an apostrophe shaped lake. And the center of the lake stays in a hard crust, but around the kind of the edge of it, you have a variety of different dust mitigation sort of engineered landscapes. So at first they did shallow flooding because that was the most efficient way to control the dust. You see these sort of bermed in cells that have a small amount of water and those proved to be really surprising. Ecologically, there was an amount of bird life that just immediately returned that no one could have predicted and that had a really high diversity. And the brine trip and brine flies also sort of came back to the lake. So even though it was this very man made engineered type of water body, it had really similar ecological values to an ordinary sort of natural lake. Other other sort of dust mitigation adaptations they've done there include, at first they put beds of gravel, but eventually the state decided that was, that was, so that was too ugly. They also plant salt tolerant grasses like they do in Mexico City. I believe there was actually sort of discussion between the two lakes about adaptation. They have something called dirt clods where they have sort of compacted the dirt in ways that it won't be emissive. And they have brine. So not fresh water doing shallow flooding, but salty water doing that flooding. And I think that this is potentially the future for some salt lakes. The Salton Sea in southeastern California, which I mentioned before, is rapidly shrinking and there, there likely is not, it's Colorado river water. So it's, it's quite valuable and it's not likely that they're going to divert that much Colorado river water into it to refill it. And so they are starting to do somewhat similar things. There's some shallow flooding at the base of the. Sorry, at the south end of the lake. There's some shallow flooding that was recently constructed. I, I had like a funny experience where I went to the Salton Sea and I wanted to see, you know, I want to see the earth movers and everything. And then I went back a year later with some people and I was like, oh, let's go see the construction site. And we went and it was all water. And I was like, oh, wow, they finished the, they finished the shallow flooding and they're also building some, some wetlands to try and develop bird habitats there. But the problem is that the, these type of engineering sort of solutions for lakes require a ton of resources, both in terms of, of financing and in terms of human capital. So the, I can't remember off the top of my head the amount of money that Los Angeles has spent at Owens Lake, but it's, it's just sort of staggering the amount of money that they've had to spend on the restoration or the dust mitigation of the lake. And it's, it's something that is kind of going to be part of their budget in perpetuity. Like they have dozens of staff members that are working in the Owens Valley. That work at Owens Lake and, and that have to constantly be doing maintenance and oversight to stay in compliance with the Clean Air Act. So I. And that's a lake that is much smaller than something like Great Salt Lake. So I think that it is both a solution and a success story in certain ways, because you do see this sort of surprising ecological value that's emerged from it, but it's not necessarily a path that anyone else should want to follow.
- [36:23]
Zeb Larson
So then building off of that, what are the consequences that we're looking at, you know, ecologically to bird species, to brine shrimp, to human beings as these lakes dry up? What's it going to look like, you know, in our worst case scenarios or worse case scenarios?
- [36:41]
Caroline Tracy
The, the main, the main sort of ecological barometer that people notice first is, is bird life. The salt lakes can be really important for migratory birds. And so there have been cases like, like Mono Lake, for instance, where it's been birders that have really sort of started to sound the alarm about the decline of the lakes and that the, you know, the increased salinity affects the invertebrates. That means that there's no food for birds. And so either birds are dying on the shoreline because they can't get enough food and they can't continue their migration, or they're simply figuring out that they shouldn't visit. And scientists don't really know where they go when they, when they don't come to those lakes, Especially since it's a systemic problem. You know, it's not that one lake is drying up and there is plenty of water in the others. It's that they're all kind of drying up in parallel. So, so the bird life and the, the food chain that leads up to the bird life is a big one. And then in terms of human health, the main concern has been dust. So of course, at Owens Lake, you know, you had this situation where the, it was, it's fairly remote, but the people that lived in the surrounding towns had to have gas masks for when there were dust storms. They had really severe chronic respiratory illnesses. That's also something that's been seen at the Aral Sea and not just, not, just, you know, asthma or lung cancer, but at the Aral Sea, they have cases of things like infant mortality, like higher infant mortality than the surrounding regions and other just sort of issues that have ripple effects through human life. And at the Salton Sea too, I think one of the big reasons, one of the big motivators for figuring out how to mitigate the decline of the sea has been the dust, especially because the sea received a ton of runoff from commercial agriculture. So there is a lot of fertilizer and pesticide residue that's dissolved in the lake or sort of deposited on its lake bed, and that has now ended up in the air. There are some scientists doing really interesting work about like novel strains of asthma that's not so much like, you know, an acute reaction in your respiratory system, but like a chronic sort of inflammation or like a chronic like heightened reaction in your respiratory system. So for humans, dust is sort of the urgent health issue. But I think there's also like a conceptual kind of issue where the salt lakes are the endpoint of these water systems. And so when, when we see that the salt lakes are in rapid decline, it means that throughout our water system, something is not right and something is broken. And eventually that is going to affect us at the sort of diversion points at the rivers we use, at the snowpack that we depend on.
- [39:33]
Zeb Larson
Thank you. So you end the book with this really beautiful discussion of ephemerality. And it sort of has dual meanings in the way that you use it. Can you walk through that for us?
- [39:44]
Caroline Tracy
I noticed in my reading of sort of my simultaneous reading of Queer Theory and my reading of science, you know, of range ecology and science regarding salt lakes, that the word ephemeral kept coming up. And I was sort of struck by this, this parallel because those weren't bodies of literature. I necessarily expected to be in natural conversation or even using the same vocabulary. And so the, the last chapter sort of stems from trying to think with this idea of the ephemeral. And why does it appear in, in Queer Theory and why does it appear in science? And what did we sort of learn from that synthesis in, in, in Queer Theory there's, you know, for those listeners that are familiar with it, there's a lot about dance. Dance is something that queer theorists love to theorize. And, and part of that has to do with the fact that it's, it's something that's constantly in movement that you can, you could photograph dance, but that is different than, than dance itself. And in, in the case of science, the ephemeral has to do with things like in the case of salt lakes, an ephemeral salt lake is one that fills only after a storm. So the lake Manly in Death Valley is an example of this. It's not a snowmelt fed system. It's a system that creates a lake when there's a big rainstorm and then it dries up until the next rainstorm. And in Range ecology. There are ephemeral plants. So these are these, like, plants that come up, they drop their seeds, and they're done pretty quickly in the growing season. And for me, sort of thinking with these two ideas of that, we have sort of ephemerality built into the natural world, but it's also becoming more ephemeral. Right. In salt lake terms, right. These water systems are drying up less often or drying up more frequently. Some of the seasonal salt lakes, we could say, are becoming ephemeral salt lakes as less snow melt is available and weather patterns are more unpredictable. And then on the queer theory side, this sort of ephemerality, as perhaps we don't live in a world that is designed for queer happiness or queer life at the moment, but we can catch glimpses of what that might look like in certain sort of moments, like dance. I wanted to put those two together to think about what is it to sort of think with this question that had been on my mind since I started the book, which, which was, how do you. How do you live in a world that is. Is changing really fast or a region that you're attached to that's changing really fast and that you sort of have to accept you don't have control over stopping change. Instead, you have to adapt to constant change. And I think that that's, you know, only becoming clearer as the effects of climate change really accumulate, as they have in the last few years. Like, you know, the sort of Western winter that I mentioned of this year, that we've never seen anything like this. And so there's this just rapidity and degree of change that we don't have a say in. Most of us, maybe some politicians do, but most of us, for all our best efforts, have to just adapt to change as a. As a constant feature in our lives. And so that last chapter talks about the ephemeral as a concept that can help us do that.
- [43:15]
Zeb Larson
And then there's a question I like to ask everybody, having finished the book, what are you thinking of working on next?
- [43:21]
Caroline Tracy
Oh, goodness. I am really interested in the sugar beet industry, which was a huge deal around the American west for most of the 20th century. I'm from Colorado, as I mentioned, and like both sides of my family, had connections to the sugar beet industry. No one was a literal sugar beet farmer, but, you know, people who worked on irrigation systems, people who worked in the sugar factory over one, one great uncle oversaw, like a restoration, ecological restoration program after the decline of the sugar beet industry. So I have been doing a ton of research about sugar beets. I have not yet convinced the powers that be in publishing that this is something that the world is ready for, But I would love to, you know, talk with anyone about sugar beets. So that is. That is something that's occupying my mind quite a bit.
- [44:14]
Zeb Larson
Wonder. You know, my grandmother grew up on a sugar beet farm in Idaho. So, yeah, I will be ready to read this in whatever form it takes.
- [44:21]
Caroline Tracy
I. I mean, it's like everyone I talk to, I, I in the Bay. I was in the Bay area, and I met a friend of my aunt's who said he worked as a child in North Dakota hoeing sugar beets. And he was like, it was a great job for a child. And I was like, children aren't supposed to work. And then I talked with a friend whose dad was a lawyer for some sugar beet farmers. So, you know, I think that a ton of the sugar beet industry touched the lives of a ton of people in the west and Midwest. And so I think it's. It's a really important history that, you know, has. It's sort of shocking how completely it's been forgotten. At least in. In Colorado and in Denver, no one talks about it anymore.
- [45:00]
Zeb Larson
Ah, that's fascinating. Oh, I hope I get to read this because. Yeah. Touches on family history in a really good way.
- [45:06]
Caroline Tracy
Perfect.
- [45:07]
Zeb Larson
All right. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
- [45:09]
Caroline Tracy
Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.