This Watershed Moment

This Watershed Moment: Envisioning Place-Based Futures

As the Intermountain West continues to get drier and hotter, Utah’s watersheds are imperiled. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, and the Colorado River is waning. A great change is needed. This is our watershed moment. We’re forced to ask: how can I live well in uncertain times; how can I stay in a place; how can I give back, be a good neighbor, steward, community member?

Before we drew maps with rigid political and property boundaries, watersheds informed our relation to the land and to each other. Watersheds were both a source of life and ethics. The flora and fauna that grew in a watershed influenced how people ate, built homes, and even the music they created. Who and what you lived upstream from governed how you lived on the land. In a changing climate, we are forced to remember or reimagine our connections to our watersheds to build futures we can live in sustainably, resiliently, joyfully.

Call for Submissions

We cannot bring about a future we cannot imagine. Courageous vision, it turns out, is an extremely viable strategy. So, we invite community members of these unique and endangered watersheds to invoke their imaginations. What does your watershed look like in 150 years if we answer the charge of climate change responsibly? What would it feel like? Smell like? Taste like? Sound like?

Tell us about your great great great great grandchild’s life. What could their community look like? Write us a recipe based on the food they might grow in their garden. Send us the sheet music for the folk songs they croon while cooking their dinner. Paint us a portrait of the statue they erect to honor and remember the what they’ve lost. Write from the perspective of a budding juniper. Be playful. Bend genre. Have fun with form. Show us: what are the futures you imagine for your descendants?

What We’re Building Together

This Watershed Moment: Envisioning Place-Based Futures seeks to bring together voices from across Utah’s two major watersheds – the Great Basin and the Colorado River – in a collection of imaginative futures. Selected written submissions will be printed in a small booklet available for free to the public. Poster art submissions will be shared on Save Our Great Salt Lake’s social media.

Who Can Submit

This is an open call to all people living in Utah’s watersheds. You need not consider yourself a writer or an artist. We want to hear from those who’ve lived by the lake for 80 years, those who are young and anxious about their future, those whose roots in the redrock reach back generations, those who are only recently calling these waters home, and, especially, those whose identities have historically been left out of conversations that imagine a just future.

What Can You Submit

Flash fiction (limit 2,000 words)
Poetry (limit 3 poems and/or 2,000 words)
Essays/creative non-fiction, interviews (Q&As, as-told-tos) (limit 2,000 words)
Other forms of creative writing: recipes, song lyrics, a fictional to-do list in the future, social media posts, your great-grandchild’s diary entry, etc.. (limit 3 selections and/or 2,000 words)
Poster art (limit 3 images of different works)

Offer your Submission Here

This Watershed Moment: Panel Conversation

On May 30, 2024, at the Salt Lake Public Library, we convened a panel conversation to ground this call for submissions in some essential truths about climate change, social justice, intersectionality, ethics, and the undeniable power of imagination.

Listen to recordings of the panel here, and watch the full panel conversation below:

Panelists

Dr. Bonnie Baxter is a Professor of Biology and Director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster University. Dr. Baxter’s research focuses on the lake’s extreme microbiology, especially the foundation of the ecosystem- the algae and cyanobacteria that feed the brine shrimp and flies. She has published the first academic book on the biology of Great Salt Lake, and the first children’s book about this lake. Dr. Baxter has become a “spokescientist,” explaining the water crisis at the lake to government representatives, the media, and the community.

Dr. Thomas H. Bretz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, where he is also the Environmental Ethics Fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics. He is involved with various sustainability efforts on campus. His research agenda is overall characterized by a concern with inclusive, just and sustainable communities. Specifically, he investigates the possibility of norms and practices that allow for reciprocal relationships between and among humans and non-humans. 

Forrest S. Cuch is an enrolled member of the Ute Indian Tribe. He was raised on the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Reservation in northeastern Utah. Forrest was previously the education director for the Ute Indian Tribe and executive director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs. He is the author of the book, A History of Utah’s American Indians. He’s also on the board of the Warm Springs Alliance, which is working to restore hot springs in northern Salt Lake, which were important to the Ute people and other tribes. 

Olivia Juarez is a lifelong Utahn based in Salt Lake City. They are the co-host of the podcast Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories and the public lands director for GreenLatinos. Olivia has nurtured Latino/a/e joy and leadership in conserving public lands, with other groups as well such as Latino Outdoors and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Olivia was recognized as one of “10 Under 40” in 2021 by the National Parks Conservation Association for their commitment to creating safe, equitable access to public lands for Latino community health.

Brooke Larsen is a journalist, writer, and storyteller based in Salt Lake City. She is currently a Fellow with High Country News, covering conservation, agriculture, and rural communities across the West. She also reports on water, climate, energy transition, and labor. She frequently writes about issues at the Great Salt Lake, and she's currently producing the podcast Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories, which explores what it means to stay in the Great Salt Lake Basin as the lake recedes. She is the co-editor of the anthology New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings, and Climate Crisis and a recipient of the High Country News Bell Prize. She received her MA in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah, where she researched the role of story in movement building and climate justice issues in the Southwest. Before that, she studied environmental policy at Colorado College and researched land and water issues with the College's State of the Rockies Project.