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Saturday, August 26, 2023

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The Salt Lake City Public Library auditorium is packed to overflowing this morning. Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson
has invited the public to a conversation about Terry Tempest Williams’ essay, “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” published in The New York Times.  We greet the discussants with warm applause as they step onto the stage: Mayor Wilson, Terry Tempest Williams, and my son Ben Abbott.  Mayor Wilson describes the Sunday morning she found Terry’s essay in the Times.  “My husband and I had a brunch date with friends.  It’s going to have to wait, I told him.  You can’t imagine what I’m reading.”  She turns to Terry.  “Would you tell us how your Times piece came about?”

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"The catalyst," Terry replies, “was the report published on January 4 of this year titled ‘Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse.’  Ben Abbott, BYU professor of ecology, was the lead author, with an impressive list of co-authors.  Their scientific analysis was picked up in The Washington Post and other news outlets, including The New York Times.  I know Great Salt Lake intimately; still, the report shocked me.  I contacted Ben and asked if we could talk.  A short visit lengthened to a four-hour conversation.  Then a Times editor emailed me: Would I write something about the crisis?  I sent her a 2000-word reply, confident she wouldn’t have time to read it.  She read it.  I began to write.”

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​Terry unfurls the Sunday Review section of the Times, dated March 26, 2023. Accompanied by Fazal Sheikh’s beautiful, ominous photographs of the lake, the piece fills page after page.

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“Tell us more about the photographer,” Mayor Wilson requests.

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“Fazal Sheikh is a friend of mine, “Terry says.  “We have worked on several environmental projects together, including one related to Bears Ears National Monument.  I asked if he would contribute some recent photos of Great Salt Lake.  He was hesitant.  His work is collected in major museums of art, not really the stuff for newspapers.  I reminded him that more people would see his work in this Times piece than would ever see it in person.  Plus, I said, you really love Great Salt Lake; together we can do something for her.  And so we did.”  Terry raises a bundle of ten or twelve drafts of the essay, the work of the ensuing weeks.

“The day the piece was to go to print,” Terry continues, “the editor sent me a final copy w ith my work stripped of feminine personal pronouns in reference to Great Salt Lake.  They also took exception to my describing her as ‘my Mother Lake.’  This is not what we agreed, I told the editor.  My body and the body of Great Salt Lake are one.  You have separated us.  Our style guide requires this, the editor replied.  Then perhaps you should revise your style guide, I said.  You understand that we’re going to press in a few hours!  Not with my piece in this form.  Give me a couple of minutes, the editor said. S he returned: we’ll do it your way.”

In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry’s cancer-assaulted mother and the lake and bird refuge overwhelmed by too much water are melded into a narrative drawing wisdom and solace from two mothers.  The Times editor balked at the personification.  That much-maligned trope, I think, can be revelatory.

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A couple of years ago, my friend of three decades, poet Alex Caldiero, visited volcanos in Italy and Sicily, seeking the physical presence of what he considered living beings.  “I talked with fishermen at the docks overshadowed by Stromboli,” he told me.  “Stromboli is our father, they said, powerful and strict.  He tells us when to fish, where to fish, when the season begins and ends.  If we follow the rules, everything is fine.  When we don’t, there’s hell to pay.  In Sicily, however, people describe Aetna as a nurturing mother who provides the best soil and lava rock for building.  And when I asked about Vesuvius in Pompeii, people just laughed.  He’s a monstrous, trickster uncle who can’t be trusted in any situation.”  “Folklore,” Alex concluded, “gets to the souls of things.”

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Mayor Wilson turns to Ben.  "Professor Abbott, tell us how your report came together?”

When Ben is introduced as Professor Abbott, my mind spirals back to the moment I too was introduced as Professor Abbott on this very stage.  It was October 7, 2005, the evening of Alex’s epic 50th Anniversary performance of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”  Sponsored by Ken Sanders Rare Books, the event packed the auditorium and filled overflow rooms with another 700 eager participants.  The Will Lovell Quintet performed 50s-vintage jazz. Poets Ken Brewer, Andy Hoffmann, Sara Caldiero, Melissa Bond, Jean Howard, Sandy Anderson, and Paul Swenson sat in a semicircle behind the podium, as had poets Philip Lamantia, Mike McClure, Gary Snyder, and Phil Whalen at San Francisco’s 6 Gallery for the October 7, 1955 premiere of “Howl.”  Lamantia later likened Ginsberg’s reading to “bringing two ends of an electrical wire together.”

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“Professor Scott Abbott,” Ken Sanders announced, “will give us a sense for that historical event.”  I approached the podium, looked out over the audience, and protested: “Professor, my ass!”

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When Mayor Wilson refers to Ben as Professor, it makes sense, I tell myself.  It’s a marker of Ben’s scientific credentials.  But when I protested the moniker “professor” on this stage, the context was different.  Ken Sanders’ brilliance doesn’t owe itself to a college degree.  In fact, he once told our Utah Valley University students that he was a little nervous because the last time he had been in a classroom was in his junior year in high school when he and the principal agreed it would be in their shared best interests if Ken never returned to school.  Alex sat in poet Norman Pritchard’s course at The New School but also cites his informal apprenticeship with sculptor Michael Lekakis as formative.  At breakfast the morning after my friend and coauthor Žarko Radaković and I attended the premier of Peter Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout in Vienna’s Burgtheater, Handke asked what we thought of the play.  I started to describe how skillfully I thought the play employed an actual experience the three of us had had in Višegrad during the civil wars that disintegrated the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  Doktor Scott, Handke broke in, Doktor Scott . . . always on the job!

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I am indeed a professor. I’m proud of that.  But my nonacademic creative work is meaningful to me in its own way.  Although she founded the graduate program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, I don’t think of Terry as Professor Williams, but as Terry Tempest Williams, author.  And beyond his scientific credentials, I know Ben as an extraordinary back-country skier, as a mountain biker excelling in hundredmile winter races outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as a gifted and soulful singer, as the profoundly generous father of four of my grandchildren, as the inquisitive young man who, carrying his pack into class during his unhoused second year at Utah State University, responded to his professor’s “that looks heavy!” with “not as heavy as what you are carrying.”

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Professor Doktor Ben Abbott responds to the Mayor’s request: “Our 2021 report on the Utah Lake ecosystem,” he says, “was a scientific critique of the attempt by ‘Lake Restoration Solutions’ to monetize Utah Lake by dredging and filling the lake with islands.  In response, the developers filed a three-milliondollar defamation suit against me.  Our science eventually won out and resulted in the demise of the real estate scheme.”

Ben listed me as a co-author on the Utah Lake report—"Dr. Scott Abbott”—my contribution a thorough editing.  "Dr." feels just right in that case.  Identity is complicated.

When the would-be island builders served Ben with a SLAPP suit, my co-author of Wild Rides and Wildflowers, Sam Rushforth and I congratulated him for the accomplishment.  “Our environmental and academic activism has never attracted a SLAPP suit,” we lamented. “You have leapfrogged over us.”

In 2016, Terry and Brooke Williams bid on two oil and gas leases offered by the BLM, planning to develop the leases only when “science supports a sustainable use of the oil and gas at an increased value given the costs of climate change to future generations.”  The BLM rejected their bid, and the ensuing public response led to Terry leaving the University of Utah to accept a position as writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School where she offers a course on spirituality and Great Salt Lake.

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“For our next project,” Ben continues, “we decided to study Great Salt Lake, threatened, as it is, by drought and overconsumption of water.  Contributors to the work included scientists and advocates from six universities, four nonprofits, and three working ecology professionals.  Six BYU students contributed to the report,  s did ten BYU faculty and staff members across five colleges.  I don’t say that to brag about BYU, but to point out that universities in general are institutions structured to facilitate this kind of interdisciplinary problem solving.  We wanted to post the report before the mid-January beginning of the state legislative session, so many of us spent Christmas break developing and refining the work.  We concluded that excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake, that the lake is on track to disappear in five years, and that the consequences of losing the lake will be drastic.  Our report, published on January 4th, called on the Governor and the legislature to take immediate action.”

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Bn pauses eand Terry breaks in: “Ben, your activism on our behalf is much appreciated, but the stress from your work is immense.  You are so skinny!  You’ve got to eat more steak.”

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“Thank you, Professor Abbott,” Mayor Wilson says with a big smile, “and thank you Terry Tempest Williams.  We now invite questions from the audience.”

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Someone notes that alfalfa is the region’s biggest consumer of water.  “What can be done to limit alfalfa growth?”

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“We all have family or friends whose livelihoods depend on growing alfalfa,” Ben says.  “Any actions we make must take them into account.”  He follows with a detailed description of possible solutions, including federal and state legislation that compensates farmers for losses and protects farmers who temporarily give up water rights. “All solutions to this problem,” he reminds us, “require trust.  We must ensure financial, legal, and professional support for farmers during this transition.”

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Scott Carrier, sitting next to me, a wonderfully skilled narrator himself, whispers that Ben just ended his extended elaboration at exactly the same place he started.  “How old is he?”  “I’m not sure,” I answer.  He looks at me askance.

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“How has this winter’s heavy snow affected the lake?”

“I see the winter storms as acts of divine intervention,” Ben says, “a gift of time to remedy the situation ourselves.  The only way to accomplish that will be to convert or shame promoters of the gospel of overconsumption.”

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"Divine intervention, my ass!"  I whisper to Scott Carrier.

 

"It's all good," he responds.  I don't know anyone who can speak to scientists, legislators, and Mormons like Ben can.  Whatever will spur people to action.”

Another member of the audience says he heard Ben say in an interview that if we would only grow food for humans to eat and not food for animals that we then eat, that would solve the water problem. “I had a good response to the question,” Ben says, “but Terry just suggested that I needed to eat more steak.  What can I say?  My faith tradition,” he continues, “tells us that we should only eat meat when it is absolutely necessary.  Unfortunately, most of us don’t pay much attention to that.”

In her Times piece, Terry also invokes her religious upbringing:

Utah is my home. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints raised me to care about community in the fullness of Creation.  We were taught through sacred texts, “The Pearl of Great Price,” among them: “For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.”  Great Salt Lake had a spirit before she had a body.  Brine shrimp have a spirit.  White pelicans and eared grebes have a spirit.  They are loved by God as we are loved.

Like Terry and Ben, I grew up in and developed an identity shaped by Mormon culture.  One day, however, walking across the campus of Princeton University, a thought stopped me short: I don’t believe in God.  That is still the case forty-some years later.  Heavy snow through divine intervention?  A lake with a spirit loved by God?  What’s an atheist to do with this sort of thinking?  Over the decades, I’ve learned to respect and to respond to Alex’s mysticism as metaphor.  I don’t have to believe to find the ideas and images powerful.  I’ll wear my atheism lightly in the presence of Ben and Terry, a man and a woman motivated and inspired by their own forms of belief.  Spinoza’s Deus sive natura (“God or Nature”) and “Nature’s God” as enshrined in our Enlightenment-inspired Declaration of Independence will be my creeds.

Mayor Wilson asks for final thoughts: “What can we do?”  Terry and Ben both recommend that we press our federal and state legislators for concerted action.  Ben lists specific legislative actions, recommends tiered water pricing, and asks that businesses, churches, and nonprofits work together in the service of Great Salt Lake.  Terry ends the discussion by reading
a passage from her Times essay:

On the surface of the lake, small waves broke toward shore, creating salt lines, but beneath the water’s surface there appeared to be an undertow, an inner tide pulling water back toward the center. If Great Salt Lake is in retreat . . .

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She stops reading here, looks up, and repeats the word “retreat.” “ As a writer,” she says, “I know my own vocabulary.  At this point something entered my mind that was not mine.  I believe it was the lake, and what I heard her say was: ‘I am in
retreat and it is not what you think.’”  Terry returns to her text:

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If Great Salt Lake is in retreat, perhaps she is holding her breath, as do we who worry about her prognosis.  To retreat, to withdraw momentarily to garner strength and perspective, can be a strategy.  Retreat can be a conscious action: a period of time called for to pray and study quietly, to think carefully and regain one’s composure . . . to commit to a different way of being, to change one’s beliefs.

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How, I wonder as I leave the auditorium, does such committment arise?  What can induce a change in beliefs?  What might replace a gospel of overconsumption?   At SITE Santa Fe this summer, art critic and historian Lucy Lippard co-curated a show titled Going with the Flow: Art, Action, and Western Waters.  She argues that in times of crisis “artists can expose the social agendas that have formed the land.”  Writers and scientists like Terry and Ben lead us toward re-forming our relationship to Great Salt Lake and its watershed.  What form that takes will reveal who we are.

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