The extraordinary qualities of salt lakes are not always evident at first glance—almost any description of them will contain the words “overlooked” or “misunderstood.” A rainforest announces its magnificence in a photograph, and thirty seconds’ worth of footage of a coral reef should be enough to make the case for its protection. Salt lakes are not so charismatic; it’s often difficult for the casual observer to understand how crucial they are to their ecosystems. To be fully appreciated, they need context, which the geographer and writer Caroline Tracey sets out to provide in Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History.
Unlike freshwater lakes, which drain through rivers or streams, salt lakes have no outlet to the sea. Some people call them “terminal lakes,” although scientists seem to prefer the less striking, and less menacing, “endorheic lakes” (from the ancient Greek for “internal flow”). They exist mainly in the driest parts of the world, forming where water gathers at the lowest point of closed basins. Rivers flow in, but they cannot get out: the only way for water to escape is to evaporate, leaving behind the dissolved minerals that were suspended in it.
Over time—tens or hundreds of thousands of years—the salts from these minerals become more and more concentrated, although salinity levels vary widely from lake to lake. Deep Lake, in Antarctica, is so saline that the water never freezes; should you find yourself in the area, you could row across it in the middle of winter. The Dead Sea, in the Jordan Rift Valley, has a salt concentration about ten times that of ocean water, and it is capable of supporting only highly adapted microscopic life: any fish that swim in on the Jordan River die immediately. The Caspian Sea, between Europe and Asia, is only about a third as salty as the open ocean and has a number of endemic species, including a little seal with no ears.
Around the world, birds flock to salt lakes, drawn by the flies and brine shrimp that live in them, and by the relative absence of predators. (I was exhilarated to learn that brine shrimp are the same creatures that American children were always tangling with in the sitcoms I watched as a kid: sea monkeys!) The lakes in the American West are major refueling points for more than three hundred different bird species, some of them endangered, along the Pacific Flyway, the migratory route extending from Alaska to Patagonia. A 2023 survey at the Salton Sea in Southern California counted 250,000 shorebirds on a single day in August: avocets, western sandpipers, black-necked stilts. Up to 90 percent of the world’s population of eared grebes—small waterbirds with golden feathers fanning out from behind their eyes, making them look like something you’d find on a coat of arms—stops at the Great Salt Lake in Utah every spring and fall.
Many salt lakes are what I would have to call ugly: gray alkaline flats whose most distinctive feature is their hellish smell, produced by the sulfurous gas that is released as bacteria break down organic matter. Others are luminously, freakishly beautiful, in ways that seem designed to appeal to beings from other solar systems. If you were an alien, you might choose the highlighter-pink Lake Hillier in Western Australia, its water colored by a type of salt-loving algae, as the place to set down your spaceship, or you might relax at the sight of the jagged white calcium-carbonate towers spiraling out of the water of Mono Lake, near the Sierra Nevada in eastern California, reassured that you could come to no harm in a place where such strangeness has been permitted to thrive.
Mark Twain might disagree. In Roughing It (1872), he calls Mono Lake “a solemn, silent, sailless sea” in a “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert.” No stream of any kind flows out of it, and “what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.” The only thing that lives beneath the surface of the lake, he writes, is “a white feathery sort of worm…. If you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these.” He goes on at jubilant length about the flies that eat the worms as they wash up on the beach.
Because the water they contain is generally undrinkable and unusable for agriculture, salt lakes have been seen as expendable, somehow beside the point. As Tracey observes, Mormon settlers in Utah came to view the Great Salt Lake with something like indignation, even disgust. What was anyone supposed to do with it? All that God-given freshwater from the rivers and the rain, channeling improvidently into the brine. Tracey cites an 1870s article in the church-owned Deseret News that called the Great Salt Lake “worthless…for uses of navigation and commerce,” “worthless for irrigation purposes,” and, finally, “worthless for any purpose.”
As Tracey works hard to demonstrate, salt lakes must be viewed in more generous terms, not least because they are drying up. For decades the rivers that once fed them have been diverted for use in irrigation, and because of climate change, the water that does get to the lakes now evaporates more quickly. The Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the largest salt lake in Central Asia and the fourth-largest in the world. But since the 1960s, as a result of the Soviet Union’s demand for cotton, its water level has decreased so rapidly that the lake has just about vanished altogether—it’s barely visible on satellite images. Its disappearance is now a kind of shorthand for ecological catastrophe.
To the west, the Caspian Sea—the world’s largest inland body of water, covering about 149,200 square miles—is also shrinking. In the United States, the Salton Sea is rapidly disappearing, and Owens Lake in eastern California is nearly gone. The Great Salt Lake has lost 70 percent of its water. Tracey points out that “far more of us than we realize are implicated” in the disappearance of these ecosystems. “If you live in Los Angeles, your drinking water comes at the expense of two salt lakes, Owens and Mono,” she writes. “If you live in San Diego, your drinking water once fed the Salton Sea.”
We underestimate the consequences of losing them. For one thing, their disappearance represents a public health crisis, already well underway in some parts of the world. The lake beds exposed by the receding water contain residue from multiple pesticides, arsenic, mercury, and other industrial and agricultural toxins. They become poisonous deserts whose dust storms can lift thousands of tons of contaminated sediment into the air.* Women in the Aral Sea region are warned against breastfeeding because of the levels of toxicity in their milk, and cancer rates are exceedingly high. Children who live around the Salton Sea have reduced lung function and “a novel form of asthma.” Scientists are worried that the air in Salt Lake City could eventually become lethal to breathe.
For another, if the lakes go, then so do the birds. The species that depend on these “freakish habitats” have nowhere else to feed, molt, and double their body weight during migration. In the Great Basin—a 220,000-square-mile area that spans six states in the American West and contains more than twenty major salt lakes, including Mono, Owens, and the Great Salt Lake—waterbird populations have declined by 70 percent since 1973. Tracey describes mass death events in which “the carcasses of eared grebes…piled up dead on the shore, looking like deflated toys” at the Great Salt Lake and the bones of so many fish accumulated on the beaches of the Salton Sea that they could be mistaken for seashells.
Perhaps most significantly, their disappearance indicates that things have gone seriously wrong. The existence of salt lakes depends on a delicate balance between inflow and outflow—because they are the end point of larger water systems, changes in the volume of a river thousands of kilometers upstream, for instance, will have a profound effect on water levels and salinity. As Tracey observes, “When the strange, hidden salt lakes start dying, it means entire ecosystems are in bad shape.” The speed at which they are shrinking is a very loud warning about unsustainable water use. Think of salt lakes as the canary in the coal mine, or the alarm that goes off when a nuclear reactor starts melting down. Keeping watch over what is happening to these places is a good way of keeping watch over everything else.
Tracey, who is originally from Colorado and now lives in Mexico City and Tucson, Arizona, has spent the past ten years fascinated by salt lakes and documenting scientists’ and activists’ efforts to bring them to a stable state, keep the dust down, save the birds, and convince the public that they are not only essential but special, to be valued on their own terms. Most of the book is focused on salt lakes in the Great Basin, with chapters on lakes in other parts of the world as well, including Kazakhstan and Australia (though these sections lack the same authority and insight). She is a sincere and scrupulous guide, persuasive in her argument that “places that seem ugly or desolate are vital and complex in ways that you don’t notice until you give them a chance.”
Writing about the lakes she knows well, Tracey opens up fresh perspectives. In a chapter on the efforts to bring water back into the Great Salt Lake, she introduces us to Ben Abbott, an ecosystem scientist at Brigham Young University who hopes to persuade the Mormon church to join the fight to save the lake. Tracey shows that the lake’s shrinking is part of “the story of water in the West” and a worldview that equates value with extraction. For Mormon settlers, the extent of a water right was measured by how much water someone used, and if they failed to fully consume their allocation, they would lose it. In an attempt to hold on to their water rights, farmers diverted most of the rivers that fed the lake, so that only a fraction of their flow reached the basin.
This zero-sum thinking still dictates how water in the West is used—and exploited—today. In a chapter on Walker Lake, in Nevada, Tracey writes about Glenn and Marlene Bunch, a couple in their eighties who have been fighting for more than thirty years to restore its water levels. When the Bunches were raising their children, they spent summers on its shores, camping, fishing, and swimming. Today the lake is on the verge of total collapse: 150 years’ worth of upriver irrigation has reduced it to less than 10 percent of its original volume. In an effort to save it, the Walker Lake Working Group, headed by Glenn Bunch, sought to apply the public trust doctrine, the principle that the state must maintain and protect certain natural resources for public use. Farmers in the area were so resistant to the idea that it took years to serve papers; all the big ranchers left town on the weekend the notices were due to be issued and told their staff to avoid any lawyers who showed up. Tracey makes you root for people like the Bunches, and for the places they love.
She is less persuasive, however, when she attempts to merge her exploration of the lakes with an exploration of her own awakening as a queer woman. In an oddly vague chapter on the Aral Sea, she strains to compare its “imperfect recovery” to her own attempts to draw firm boundaries between herself and a woman with whom she has a short, difficult, sexually charged friendship. The Kazakh government’s efforts to bring water and industry back to an ecologically and financially decimated region are presented as somehow adjacent to Tracey’s own efforts to ignore the woman’s emails about burning herself with cigarettes: “I archived the message and turned my phone face down on the table in front of me. Partial though it may have been, I wanted my recovery back.” It’s hard not to feel that the Aral Sea and the millions of people who live in the region deserve better than being reduced to an illustrative anecdote about an American woman’s tentative self-discovery. In a chapter on Owens Lake—not “much of a lake any longer, but the dry bed of one, long desiccated by water diversions”—she insists on the resemblance between a government agency’s success at dust mitigation and the bureaucratic hoops she and her partner had to jump through in order to get married in the US. The fainter the resemblance, the more she insists on it, sometimes summing things up with a neat homily at the end of a chapter: “Both my marriage and the life that has returned to Owens Lake offer proof that vitality can flourish out of the constraints of bureaucracy.”
Tracey is alert to complexity in nature and emphasizes that saving the salt lakes does not mean restoring them to a pristine state, only to a state in which life can flourish; the future, she argues, is full of “broken, unruly places” that we need to find beauty in. But she is not comfortable, it seems, with unruliness on the page, nor is she content to leave open any connections the reader might make on her own. These are instead chased down and tied up: an infrastructure project is the same as the end of a weird friendship; a dried-up lake that still attracts bird life is the same as a green card marriage.
The problem with this isn’t just that it’s jarring; it’s that it betrays a lack of confidence in the story about the lakes that she is telling. It’s as if she believes that they are not interesting enough on their own, that the class’s attention will drift unless she claps her hands smartly every dozen pages or so and reminds her pupils that this is, as one of the blurbs puts it, “not just a book of nature writing.” It is unfortunately very easy to imagine an editor making notes on a draft of a more coherent, less memoiristic version of this book—“Could we have a bit more of you in here?”; “The reader needs to understand why this matters to YOU.” (Reading it, I thought more than once of the villainous editor in Helen DeWitt’s 2022 novella The English Understand Wool, who informs a young writer that “if you don’t talk about your feelings there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages.”) It’s a pity because Tracey has expended considerable effort in successfully convincing her readers that “our earthly future…depend[s] on loving the lakes in all their mysterious, freakish, sacred beauty.”
Writing well about nature demands an interrogation of the self, of course. Receptivity to the natural world depends on individual perception, shaped by specific preoccupations and experiences. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Annie Dillard writes of the impulse “to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.” When the writer goes over the mountain to see what she can see, she is also going in search of who she is, or who she was. Nature is a mirror; we can’t help but look at it and see ourselves. But the best nature writers use that flicker of recognition as a starting point and not as the end of the line.
English (US) · 