Wholesale Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History

An acclaimed nature writer’s dazzling love letter to a strange ecosystem and a moving odyssey into her own identity. More than a hundred salt lakes dot Earth’s surface, most of them hidden away in remote desert valleys. But today nearly all of them are at risk of drying up. Their death is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse. Writer and geographer Caroline Tracey didn’t know this when she began crossing paths with salt lakes during her early twenties. From the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea, across the American West and around the world, the unusual beauty of these shimmering, uncanny bodies of water captured her imagination. In Salt Lakes, Tracey travels across four continents to seek out and describe these extraordinary vanishing lakes and the people dedicated to saving them. She takes readers along on her adventures by train in Kazakhstan and on an inflatable raft in California, on her encounter with Mormon environmentalists in Utah and an Australian Aboriginal painter seeking to capture her country for her children. In evocative prose, she traces shorebirds’ seasonal migration and the history of water law. As Tracey chronicles the decline of the lakes, she also experiences dramatic changes in her own life and conception of self. Running parallel to Tracey’s environmental journey is an intimate, human one: her story of finding queer love and building a home in a world fast being remade by ecological crises. By the end of Salt Lakes, she shows us how seeing the environment through a queer lens could help save our water system. An exquisite blend of travel writing, memoir, and reportage, Salt Lakes is an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.