Honors

Energy & Environment, Policy & Social Justice 2005-2006

Narratives of the Great Salt Lake

The Narratives of the Great Salt Lake Think Tank was fortunate to have academy award winning producer Geralyn Dreyfous as a team instructor. She was instrumental in helping students in their efforts to tell their own stories about the Great Salt Lake.

Students also participated in the College of Humanities' Evening of Conscience. The event featured Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, whose work on connections between globalization, consumerist ethics, worldwide mass migrations, and environmental destruction called upon students to shift perspectives about their place in the web of life. Homero Aridjis, the renowned Mexican poet and environmentalist, and Terry Tempest Williams, the powerful Utah spokesperson for a sense of place, were featured along with Salgado.

For many students in the class, even those who grew up here, the Great Salt Lake was not a familiar place except as a backdrop to the landscape. The lake's reputation seemed defined by its pungency more than anything. Yet going to the lake, watching the light change, listening to the conversations of birds, and envisioning the activities of the lake's many other inhabitants evoked a sense of wonder for the students. And they began to write about the lake, to go back to the lake, to listen to the lake, to photograph the lake, to paint and draw the lake, to dip hands and feet into the lake.

The students assumed a depth of spirit from all these experiences and carried it into their projects. Their work concentrated on interdisciplinary approaches to stories about the Great Salt Lake and included photo essays, a children's book, a portfolio of poems and short stories, a "green" economic analysis of manufacturing that impacts the lake, narratives of the consequences of mercury in the lake and larger watershed community, a radio program, and a design for a sustainable writer's retreat on Antelope Island. These are stories told by students from an array of disciplines-creative writing, English, political science, economics, and architecture-and stories told about an array of species. The Environmental Think Tank students came to understand that although our access to the larger world is vital, it is through close observation and reflection that we can tell the stories of ourselves and others within a place and ultimately connect this kind of seeing and telling to other places.