When Mormon settlers descended upon the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the land was an oasis.

From the Wasatch Front, creeks and rivers flowed into the valley. Grasses were abundant. The soil was rich. It even featured both a freshwater and a saline lake—Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake—just like Israel with the Sea of Galilee and Dead Sea. It was clear the area had been chosen for them by God.

But as the population of the valley grew, the relationship to the Great Salt Lake changed. It was a waste of water, too saline for fish, and unable to be used for irrigation. So the water that replenished it was diverted, and the Great Salt Lake shrank to a fraction of what it once was. It is now verging on a complete collapse, threatening the ecosystem dependent on it and the city built on its shores.

The story of the Great Salt Lake’s decline is the template for others around the world, writer and reporter Caroline Tracey writes in her debut book, “Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History.”

Saline lakes dot landscapes from the Aral Sea of central Asia to North America’s Great Basin. Though often too salty to support fish, the lakes have become vital to hundreds of species of birds and unique, simple aquatic creatures. They are cornerstones of Indigenous communities, such as the Paiute tribes near Owens Lake in California and the Aztecs at Lake Texcoco in Mexico. Like the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the diversions of the rivers that fed those lakes have shrunk them to near nothing.

Saline lakes have regularly appeared in Tracey’s life—during road trips to the Salton Sea and across the Great Basin of the Western U.S., a Fulbright fellowship in Kyrgyzstan, and while ranching in New Mexico near Zuni Salt Lake. Tracey’s book explores her own story of finding home and love as a queer woman while researching the lakes, their unique ecosystems and their decline.

“This was the first of salt lakes’ 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,” Tracey writes. “Living in the world of my adulthood would require learning to find beauty amidst the dust, bad smells, and record heat, not for their own sake, but as a way of working toward something else: clean air, spectacular views, crisp mornings.”

Tracey’s book documents the miraculous efforts to save places like California’s Mono Lake, and how a tiny, unique bird— Wilson’s phalarope,—may be key to saving others like the Great Salt Lake.

Even President Donald Trump has said the decline of the Great Salt Lake is an “environmental hazard” and that the country must make it “great again.”

Tracey recently spoke with Inside Climate News about her book and the lessons saline lakes can provide us in a changing climate. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WYATT MYSKOW: To start, tell me about salt lakes and why so many of them are in crisis.

CAROLINE TRACEY: What makes a salt lake is not necessarily the concentration of salts, but actually that they form in enclosed basins, and so the closed basins, the lakes, receive their water from freshwater rivers that pool in the bottom of these basins.

Over time, humans have diverted those rivers to be used for irrigation, mainly. So in the case of the Aral Sea, for instance, the rivers were enormous, but they were diverted to irrigate massive fields of cotton. In Utah, it’s alfalfa and other crops. That’s the case across the West, not just Utah. So the issue is that the rivers are not reaching the lakes in the same quantities, and the lakes evaporate.

MYSKOW: You take us on this journey of places already experiencing the impacts of climate change, these once-massive lakes now reduced to a fraction of their size, and the ecological harms that brings. What can we learn from that?

TRACEY: I feel like when I first was drawn to them, it was a mixture of this sort of curiosity about catastrophe—I was reading about the Salton Sea, which has this really up and down, strange history, which is different than any other salt lake’s history—but also really aesthetically drawn to the lakes. It’s just amazing when you come across a salt lake with bright blue water in the desert. It’s very striking—the sort of greens and whites and purples that often surround them are really beautiful because they appear in the desert that has a more muted kind of palette. I think the initial interest came from a mixture of those two things.

These are kind of the canary in the coal mine for the Western water system. Because if the endpoint is in such bad shape, that means that, very soon, the whole system is.

MYSKOW: Something unique about this crisis on the Great Salt Lake is that so much of the conversation around it centers on the environment and the health impacts the lake drying up would have for both humans and other species. That’s not something talked about nearly as much on similar water issues, like the Colorado River, for instance. Why do you think that is?

TRACEY: Maybe it has to do with the fact that saline lakes are the end point of the system, rather than the system itself. If you are thinking about what is beneficial for Utah’s economy, it’s the snowpack and the water in the rivers and the Great Salt Lake is sacrificed so that that water can be used. Saving the lakes is asking people to benefit less.

MYSKOW: What makes the book really special to me is that blending of memoir with this deep reportage and research on the salt lakes. How did you begin connecting with them on a more personal level?

TRACEY: It was kind of fun to have the two arcs sort of developing as I was researching and writing. I didn’t always know where the book was going, because when I started, I was sort of writing these young woman essays. But I think that throughout I had kind of this theme of searching for a sense of home and what does it mean to have a sense of home in a world that’s changing very fast?

It was, for me, more of a study of “What kind of home do you want to make? Queerness is one option that’s available, and maybe actually, I would fit better into that.” This parallel ecology of salt lakes also has this element to it, and that fuses really nicely, with the creatures kind of reflecting queer ecology, but also these more landscape-level ideas of queer ecology about impacted landscapes and adaptation.

MYSKOW: Toward the end of the book, you have a chapter titled “The Ephemeral Forever.” Water reporters in the West use the word “ephemeral” a ton because so many of our rivers and lakes are ephemeral and only appear after big storms. But in the chapter, you connect that with how the word is prevalent in queer ecology.

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TRACEY: That chapter was a lot of fun for me. When I was in grad school, I took some classes about range ecology, and the word “ephemeral” comes up a lot because you have ephemeral plants and then ephemeral salt lakes, of course. Simultaneously, I was reading queer theory, and I was like, “Why is this word coming up so frequently here too? Why is this ecological term so important to queer theory?”

Where I sort of settled was that the appreciation for the ephemeral can be a really powerful tool in one’s own life for dealing with constant change, or adapting to constant change. In a world of climate change, or in a field like environmental journalism, where you have to deal with climate change all the time, you sort of have an emotional tool that allows you to appreciate what is in front of you, and appreciate it, even for the fact that it may change.

MYSKOW: Another chapter recollects your time working as a cowboy on a New Mexico ranch with another saline lake nearby. Did that experience change how you viewed the land and how you now write about it?

TRACEY: Ranching has a really bad rap among environmental circles in the West. That was something that I was aware of from a fairly young age. But also I had grown up in Colorado, and had grown up in the romance of ranching and like that was the hardest, most authentic thing you could ever do as a Westerner. I really idealized the idea of it. I took that first jump at the opportunity to do that work.

“The appreciation for the ephemeral can be a really powerful tool in one’s own life for dealing with constant change, or adapting to constant change.”

I was tangential to circles that were thinking pretty hard about the ecology of ranching from within. I certainly wasn’t ranching for people that were going out of their way to exploit the landscape or anything like that. On the contrary, they were trying to think hard about the impacts, even when it requires a degree of magical thinking. They were concerned about soil health and grass health and animal health.

At the same time. it brought into relief the sort of white-landowner dynamics of the West, for me, in a way that I didn’t realize before. Even though the urban lands of the West are equally kind of a subtler colonial situation, it’s just more obvious when it’s a big parcel of land, no matter how good a steward you are.

So reflecting about that and reading geographic theory later, when I ended up going to graduate school, ended up complicating my romance for it, getting [me] over the crush a little bit, and pushed me toward a more urban life in the West, where I’m sort of an armchair contemplator.

But I would say that certainly, my richest experiences of land in the West were while ranching. You’re obligated to be out there doing stuff, thinking very closely about ecology while you do tasks. You just can’t replicate it.

I think there is something much more fundamentally consumptive about, like, hiking, than ranching, even though the ordinary opinion is the reverse. When you’re ranching, you’re like: ‘I need to build a fence here so that cows can’t go eat that green grass.’ You have to be sort of thinking about the ecology on a very close level, whereas when you go hiking, you just admire.