S3E10: Can the Wilson's Phalarope Save the Great Salt Lake?

[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]

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0:00:53 - (Chris): It's a cold, rainy day in late March, and I'm watching the water at the Great Salt Lake roll up towards my toes on the shore of Antelope island, the largest island in the lake east of me. A storm is dumping rain and sleet and a little bit of snow down into Salt Lake City and its suburbs and the mountains beyond.

0:01:14 - (Chris): Antelope island, where I'm standing, is right at the edge of that storm. Every once in a while, I feel a raindrop on the back of my neck, my face, my hands. The beach where I walk, trying not to sink too far into the mud, is mostly made up of little pieces of dark gray tufa, or limestone. Looks almost like tropical coral. The temperature is not the only reason I'm glad I have my boots on. Walking barefoot across this sand would be pretty uncomfortable, I think.

0:01:45 - (Chris): I look west across a broad expanse of saltwater and the sky opens up. There's blue beyond, maybe 30 or 40 miles to my west, and there is an immense stretch of salt flat left behind by the Great Salt Lake's immediate ancestor, Lake Bonneville, one of a number of ice age lakes that once dotted the deserts of the southwest. It's been a very long time since I've seen this Great Salt Lake, and I'm reminded of how beautiful the place is. But despite the beauty of the lake, it just looks wrong.

0:02:22 - (Chris): There should be a whole lot more water in this lake where I'm standing should be 100 yards offshore. The shoreline I'm walking is 4194 ft above sea level, give or take a couple of inches. That's a good 6 ft below the 4200 level that has been identified as the absolute minimum lake level for the lake to survive into the future. In November 2022, which is not that long ago, the lake level dropped to a record low of 4188 ft.

0:02:54 - (Chris): That's a problem because the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake. It has no drainage, no water flows out of it. And so fresh water coming in from the lake's tributaries, the Bear river, the Weber river, and the Jordan river, brings dissolved solids. As fresh as that water is into the Great Salt Lake, the water evaporates and those dissolved salts and other substances stay in the lake. And this has been going on for tens of thousands of years, the Great Salt Lake, even in its prime, was significantly saltier than the ocean.

0:03:32 - (Chris): Even in the best of times, no fish live in this lake. That's a normal fact of life in Utah. But what's not normal is that the lake has gotten so saline in the last few years that the lake's brine shrimp are likely to have trouble surviving in the lake. That's sad enough, but the brine shrimp are a critical food source for migrating birds. Without brine shrimp, those birds are out of luck. One of those birds, the Wilson’s phalarope, depends on Great Salt Lake, along with two other large lakes, as a stopover for its spectacular migration from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America.

0:04:09 - (Chris): Even if you're not an expert birder, phalaropes on the water are pretty easy to identify. They swim in tight little circles which create little whirlpool currents that bring invertebrates up from the bottom to the surface where the birds can eat them. This lake, along with Abert Lake in Oregon and Mono Lake in California, are three critical places for Wilson's phalaropes to stock up on brine shrimp, brine flies, and other food before their long migration down to the southern cone of South America.

0:04:39 - (Chris): None of those three lakes are in great shape. Abert Lake dried up entirely recently. Mono Lake is caught in a web of case law and overwhelming demand for water from the tributaries that feed it. Most of that demand from the city of Los Angeles and the Great Salt Lake right now is about a third its optimal size. Last year and this startled a lot of people, biologists, and just about everybody else that was paying attention.

0:05:08 - (Chris): The lake's renowned breeding population of white pelicans just up and abandoned their nests. That is an unprecedented event. And the Wilson's phalarope may not be far behind. And it's the phalarope that has brought me to Utah. Earlier this morning, I joined about 150 people gathered on the steps of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City to celebrate a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups to list the Wilson's phalarope as threatened under the federal Endangered Species act.

0:05:44 - (Dita): Our first speaker is going to be Patrick Donnelly from the center for Biological Diversity and definitely a person who had a lot to do with making this event happen today. He's the director of our Great Basin program.

0:06:00 - (Patrick Donnelly): Thank you, Dita. Today we submitted a petition to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect Wilson's phalarope under the Endangered Species act. The group of scientists and organizations we've been working with on this project have determined that Wilson's fallow rope is threatened with becoming extinct if Great Salt Lake collapses its other important saline lakes, like Lake Aberton, Oregon. If these lakes collapse, Wilson's phalarope has nowhere to go before its migratory journey. And so the Endangered Species Act is an essential tool to preventing its extinction.

0:06:36 - (Patrick Donnelly): And why is that important? Wilson's phalarope and the rest of the birds out there and the invertebrates, the alkali flies and the brine shrimp and the humans, here in Salt Lake City, we're all part of the biodiversity that makes the world go round. Biodiversity is essential for life on earth. And without biodiversity, we don't have clean air to breathe and we don't have clean water to drink, and we don't have food on our plates.

0:07:00 - (Patrick Donnelly): And biodiversity is essential. And there is a global extinction crisis. The UN has estimated that a million species are at risk of extinction right now, and it's getting worse every day. And so our organization, the center for Biological Diversity, was founded to save life on earth to stop the extinction crisis. And the endangered species act is the best tool to do that. The Endangered Species Act has a 99% success rate at preventing the extinction of the species protected under the act.

0:07:27 - (Patrick Donnelly): And I want you to find any other government program in the world that has a 99% success rate. And so we believe that the Endangered Species act is the tool to protect Wilson's phalarope. And how do you protect Wilson's phalarope? You protect Great Salt Lake, you protect the water going into the lake, you raise those lake levels back to ecologically sustainable levels. That's how we save Wilson's fallow rope. And the Endangered Species act is a tool that can help make that happen.

0:07:55 - (Patrick Donnelly): And it isn't everything. We can't put the fate of Great Salt Lake on the backs of the tiny Wilson's fall rope. But Wilson's phalarope and its plight can help us get there. It can provide tools to get water to the lake, to prompt policymakers to take the actions necessary to save Wilson's phalarope and save Great Salt Lake and save the other saline lakes around the Great Basin. And so we're really grateful to you all today for coming out and supporting this important petition.

0:08:22 - (Patrick Donnelly): And we need to save Wilson's phalarope. So let's use the Endangered Species act to do it. Thank you.

0:08:36 - (Chris): As I mentioned before, in November 2022, the Great Salt Lake dropped to a record low level of 4188ft. And scientists at the time said the lake's ecosystem was likely to collapse within five years if nothing was done. Now, in 2024, a year and a half after that low mark, Utah has seen a couple of wet winters with good snowpack, and that has helped the lake a little bit. Scientists have revised their estimates slightly, saying those two good years gave us two years.

0:09:08 - (Chris): So five years from now, 2029, is when they fear the lake's ecosystem, with its immense riches of brine shrimp and alkali flies, nematodes, migratory birds, may well collapse ecologically due to extreme salinity. The lead author of the petition to list the phalarope, biologist Ryan Carl of the group Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, spoke at the Capitol about some of the implications for the phalaropes should the ecosystem of the lake collapse.

0:09:38 - (Chris): Let's listen.

0:09:41 - (Ryan Carle): I just want to say it's really filling my heart to be here at Great Salt Lake. I've been talking about this place for many years and its importance to phalaropes. Finally being here again, seeing the lake is really quite impactful for me, and seeing all the love that is being outpoured right now for Great Salt Lake. I grew up at a place called Mono Lake. Like many of you, a giant salt lake was in the background of my existence my entire life, and has really shaped who I am.

0:10:09 - (Ryan Carle): And Mono Lake has been in danger of disappearing and becoming a toxic dust bowl my entire life, too. And the story of how people came together and banded together to save Mono Lake, using science and policy and advocacy, is a really powerful story that has inspired me to do what I've done with valor hopes. So about five years ago, I started really intensively studying phalaropes, as I said. And the more that I have learned about this species, the more I have gotten very worried about them.

0:10:42 - (Ryan Carle): From a conservation perspective, it's not just Great Salt Lake that we're worried about. Great Salt Lake is extremely, enormously important to this species. It is one of the most important places on the planet for this species. I will say it's one of the two most important places. And the other is Laguna Mar Chiquita in Argentina, that I'll talk a little bit more about. But throughout their entire range, from the breeding grounds to the places that they stop and feed like Great Salt Lake, throughout their migration through the andes, where they're going to stop at other saline lakes, and down to the big lakes in Argentina, every one of those places is very threatened right now, and Great Salt Lake is at the forefront.

0:11:26 - (Ryan Carle): But places like Lake Abert in Oregon, another giant salt lake that phalaerobes need, has dried up twice in the last ten years completely dried up in the andes, where the phalaropes will go once they get to South America. There's a network of saline lagoons and they go there to feed on shrimp and flies, just like here. That region is basically being sacrificed to lithium mining right now. There's very little chance that much of it will remain in ten or 20 years in terms of habitat. They dry up the aquifers, extracting groundwater for lithium mining and we're working on those threats throughout their range. You go to Laguna Mar Chiquita, the biggest saline lake in the Americas, because Great Salt Lake has shrunk.

0:12:09 - (Ryan Carle): It used to be the second biggest lake and now it's the biggest lake in Laguna Mar Chiquita. That lake, happily, has been protected recently as a national park, but its water is not protected just like here. And they are watching very closely what happens here. Many people have been working on this around the hemisphere. It's been very inspiring scientifically and to build this coalition of people. Everyone is very worried and everybody is watching Great Salt Lake.

0:12:36 - (Ryan Carle): So I just want to very quickly illustrate the importance of Great Salt Lake and these habitats through a story of a phalarope that I'm going to call Briny Bob, the fallarrope. Briny Bob is a male. He's going to take care of the eggs and chicks all by himself because the females mate and then they take off. Coming down from Canada. Yeah, it's a good story. Coming down from Canada. After raising the chicks all by himself, Briny Bob's going to stop at Great Salt Lake. And Briny Bob weighs about as much as one and a half AA batteries.

0:13:05 - (Ryan Carle): Briny Bob's really tiny and here he's going to gorge himself on shrimp and flies until that weight doubles to about the size of three AA batteries of weight and also drop all of the feathers that he had and regrow a completely new set of feathers before. Briny Bob's going to one day take off and fly three to 4000 miles to South America, where he's going to go to the Andes, maybe to Laguna Mar Chiquita. He needs all those habitats. But this is a crucial stop for those phalarope individuals to make it on that next leg. And there's only three big saline lakes in North America that can provide this habitat. And Great Salt Lake is by far the most important. We have an order of magnitude more Wilson's phalaropes here still than at any other stop.

0:13:51 - (Ryan Carle): The other two places are Mono Lake, where I'm from, and Lake Abert in Oregon. As I mentioned Lake Abert has dried up twice in the last ten years. Mono Lake is protected, but in a precarious position. And Great Salt Lake has by far the most phalaropes. About a quarter of a million Wilson's phalaropes are coming to Great Salt Lake in the last five years annually. We used to have more years where there would be half a million. Here we've had up to 600,000, which is about 60% of the world population at Great Salt Lake at once.

0:14:23 - (Ryan Carle): But every year, about a quarter of the world population is here at Great Salt Lake. And I want to emphasize there's no replacement for Great Salt Lake or Lake Everett or Mono Lake. There are no other big salt lakes that have the shrimp and the flies. There's smaller places they sometimes go, but those places are even more threatened by climate change and water diversion because they're smaller. So Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake and Lake Abert need to be here for the future of these species. They're on the road to extinction without Great Salt Lake.

0:14:56 - (Ryan Carle): So I want to just end by saying, at Mono Lake, there has been really inspirational solutions that have been found to share water and prove that people in these lakes can coexist. We can have our wildlife. Phalaropes can have a future. Great Salt Lake can have a future. And people in Utah and around the hemisphere who use water can also have a future with that water. We just need to find out how to share it, and we need to do it now, because Great Salt Lake is in trouble, as are many of these other places. And phalaropes need us to act now in order to have a future for them.

0:15:29 - (Ryan Carle): So thank you. Thank you so much for being here and for all the outpouring of love and thank you.

0:15:41 - (Chris): Of all the universal laws of physics and existence, Murphy's law is the one that affects me most and most often. When I noticed that the batteries on my recorder were getting painfully low, I counted on there being a couple of minutes between speakers at the end of Ryan Carl's remarks to throw some new double as into the recorder. And of course, the batteries that I grabbed and put in the recorder were also dead. So it took me an extra minute or two to find AA batteries weighing slightly more than a pre feeding Wilson's phalarope to throw into the recorder that were actually fully charged.

0:16:14 - (Chris): And that's why I don't have all of Terry Tempest Williams' remarks at the Capitol recorded. And that's a shame, because there are very few people who more completely represent in their personal and professional lives the health of the Great Salt Lake than Terry Tempest Williams. She's a prolific author. She's a really wonderful spokesperson for environmental justice and feminist and human rights issues.

0:16:40 - (Chris): She's a writer that I have read assiduously for quite a long time, but that portion of her remarks that I did manage to get recorded. Good stuff.

0:16:53 - (Terry Tempest Williams): As a naturalist, I have to tell you, I love these birds. They are a progressive species where the female phalarope wears the bright colors and males sit on the eggs and raise the young, the female engages in polyandry, the female equivalent of polygamy, a bird worthy of our respect, especially in Utah. It's time to embrace the wholeness as holiness as our sense of place in Utah becomes unethical place where our ute leader, forest cut, reminded us at our last rally, invited all of us to not only see but embrace our sacred lake.

0:17:42 - (Terry Tempest Williams): My faith resides in this arid landscape that calls us home again and again in beauty. So why should we care? Because the majesty of creation is an irreplaceable gift, and it is honored in our sacred texts. This text I continue to love and hold in my heart from my own cultural roots. The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light as they roll upon their wings in their glory.

0:18:18 - (Terry Tempest Williams): In the midst of the power of God, unto what shall I liken these kingdoms that ye may understand? Behold, all these are kingdoms, and any man who hath seen any or the least of these has seen God moving in all his majesty and power. When we witness the kingdom of phalaropes in the fall, spinning their magic amongst us, they deserve our attention. And they deserve federal protection. Protection under the law.

0:18:49 - (Terry Tempest Williams): The Endangered Species Act is an act of compassion for all life, not just our own. We are the phalaropes, intrinsically bound to the future of the Great Salt Lake watershed. We can write a different story to a dying great salt lake and all the marvelous creatures, large and small, whose populations are at stake in the decline of the lake. They are vulnerable. We are vulnerable. And today we are taking action as a community who cares on all our behalf, extending the boundaries of our concern beyond this state of denial, beyond the state of Utah, to a national and global embrace of actions.

0:19:32 - (Terry Tempest Williams): This is what love looks like, as Tim DeChristopher reminds us, in the name of a whole community, this is our wild promise. We can come together with restraint and responsibility, with a collective commitment to restore Great Salt Lake with a whole and healthy ecosystem with our whole beings. We are the phalaropes. We, too, are a threatened species. Bless us. Bless us all.

0:20:07 - (Dita): Thank you so much, Terry.

0:20:10 - (Chris): Jumping ahead just a little bit: after the event was over and the crowd on the Utah State Capitol steps largely went home, Terry Tempest Williams was kind enough to sit down with me on the cold concrete benches in the wind out in front of the state capitol building. And here is what we talked about.

0:20:28 - (Chris): I want to thank you for talking to us. This is a nice moment for me personally, because I think it was 30 years ago this summer that I became familiar with your work, sitting not too far from Mono Lake, reading refuge by Coleman lantern light. Obviously, the Great Salt Lake is really important to you. Why are you here today?

0:20:52 - (Terry Tempest Williams): I'm here on the steps of the Utah State Capitol because I think this is a threshold moment to petition the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the Wilson's fowler up under the Endangered Species act, which, as I said today, is an act of love. I think this heralds a different moment for the state of Utah. There can be a state in denial that this is no longer a local issue or a state issue, but a national one with global implications.

0:21:24 - (Chris): I'm wondering how the public is responding to this issue in Salt Lake or elsewhere in the state. Is there an increasing level of concern for the lake and support for its defenders, or is it going some other direction?

0:21:40 - (Terry Tempest Williams): Utah is a very complex place, as you know, and I think there is a tremendous groundswell for the restoration of Great Salt Lake, but not enough. It won't surprise you that the water barrens, you know, are still looking at development. There's a movement to put a dam across Great Salt Lake and divide it to the south arm and the north arm. The north arm, which is largely exposed now. The white pelicans left as a result.

0:22:13 - (Terry Tempest Williams): They've been there 12,500 years. Last year, June 29, they left their nesting site of thousands of years. Industry has their concerns. The shrimpers have their concerns with the brine shrimp cooperative. I think there is a common ground that a healthy Great Salt lake is a healthy population of brine shrimp, a healthy population of fallow ropes, a healthy population of brine flies that feed, you know, 12 million birds.

0:22:44 - (Terry Tempest Williams): But I think if you look at our lawmakers, they've been. To say they've been timid is kind. I think they've done very, very little on behalf of Great Salt Lake, I'm going to be critical. The czar of Great Salt Lake, the Great Salt Lake commissioner and our governor have said it's 30 years? I don't think we have 30 years. Ben Abbott, who's the lead scientist of the BYU report that came out in January of 2023, said, as of last year, we had five years with these two large years of precipitation. He said, it's maybe bought us two.

0:23:23 - (Terry Tempest Williams): So we're looking at a crisis. And the Wilson's phalaropes are threatened. So are we. We, too, are a threatened species. And my brother, Hank Tempest, who works on the edge of Great Salt Lake day in and day out, has one lung. And that's not an accident, you know, and it's the short term effects that are worrisome with the toxics, arsenic, et cetera, that are being blown up by the dust devils. I mean, I was just out at Great Salt Lake for ten days with 15 students from the Harvard Divinity School for a pilgrimage to Great Salt Lake.

0:24:03 - (Terry Tempest Williams): 85 miles per hour winds. It's windy now, you know, so this is not nothing. And as you know, the batting average if we use a sports metaphor for saline lakes to recover after a certain point is zero. So what are the odds? Not great. But I also think Utah is always underestimated. And as you saw today, there's. There's a lot of people who care, and there's a lot of religious leaders who care. Another concern I have is the Mormon church.

0:24:38 - (Terry Tempest Williams): You know, they could be doing so much more advocating for the, like over the pulpit, a general conference for the masses. I mean, we're the Vatican. You know, this is Rome for the Church of Jesus Christ of latter day Saints. They could be doing more with delivering water rights to Great Salt Lake. Another reason why the Endangered Species act is important, because if the fallow rope is listed by law, Utah will have to put water in the lake.

0:25:09 - (Chris): Has the church adopted a formal position with regard to the campaign or the lake itself and what it's going through?

0:25:15 - (Terry Tempest Williams): You know, they gave some water rights last year. That was important. It was an important gesture that mattered. They said they're going to do more, but we haven't seen that yet. Also, I think they could be helping the farmers. If the farmers were encouraged by the church members, you know, and by the church itself to have two crops instead of three, that would be significant. 80% of our water is exported in the name of alfalfa to feed cows.

0:25:46 - (Terry Tempest Williams): So that's a huge issue that the church could weigh in on that they have not. Our governor is an alfalfa farmer, you know, so I have heard. And so we've got a problem in leadership. On the other hand, we have an abundance of leadership that you saw today with Ben Abbott, with Nan Seymour, with Dida seed and youth. So on one hand, I'm very encouraged. On the other hand, we just have to keep working day in and day out.

0:26:17 - (Terry Tempest Williams): And the birds, to me, have always been the mediators of heaven and earth.

0:26:23 - (Chris): That's a good segue into the last question I had, which is, you know, speaking as a writer, obviously refuge talked about a very different process happening with the lake. But I wonder if you see a strong through line between your work then and your work here now.

0:26:45 - (Terry Tempest Williams): It's, you know, thank you for that question, Chris. It's. It's everything to me. It's great. Salt Lake is my mother, you know, Great Salt Lake is a body of water in flood and a body of water in retreat. Grief and love are siblings. So I find myself when I'm away from the lake, I feel the grief of the loss of her. And when I'm at the lake, I am overcome with joy, you know? And it was the same when my mother was dying.

0:27:24 - (Terry Tempest Williams): When I was with her, my heart was calmed. When I was away from her, I was terrified. And just having been out there last week for ten days, you go to the north arm out by the spot feral jetty, and it's a bloodletting, you know, the water's red from the halophiles, a bacteria that are. It's Greek for “salt lovers.” And it's the high salinity. You can taste it. And today I was talking about a whole lake, even holy.

0:27:56 - (Terry Tempest Williams): The lake is divided right now. It's divided by opinion, it's divided by salinity. And if you ask me what I really pray for, it's a lake that is whole, even holy, with Great Salt Lake seen as its own sovereign being. That's how I feel about our inland sea.

0:28:22 - (Chris): Terry Tempest Williams, thanks for talking to 90 miles from needles.

0:28:26 - (Terry Tempest Williams): Thank you so much for your voice. I really appreciate it.

0:28:33 - (Chris): There is only so much justice you can do in a podcast episode to an event like the one that happened on the steps of the Utah state capitol, for instance. We're not sharing the song that closed the event, which was a joyous rendition of a hopeful song to the tune of when the saints go marching in. Talking about the water and the wildlife coming back to the lake was really wonderful to see. I'll see if we can find it online.

0:28:57 - (Chris): Link to it in the show notes. We also didn't include remarks by Deeta Seed of CBD, though we did have her playing master of ceremonies we were treated to wonderful statements by Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University, who founded a group called Grow the flow, as well as from Sarah Johnson, from Utah physicians for a healthy environment. Perhaps as interesting and sad to leave out were the conversations that were happening in the crowd. This is a group of committed activists.

0:29:28 - (Chris): There was a whole lot of wisdom there that was not getting in front of the microphone just how things work. I did want to share with you one final set of remarks because they just really struck me from someone who is likely to still be fighting the good fight after people like me are long turned into the kind of dust that is blowing around dry lake beds in the desert. Adelaide Scott of Utah youth for environmental solutions really knocked it out of the park, expanding the context of the fight to save the lake.

0:29:59 - (Chris): Here's Adelaide.

0:30:04 - (Adelaide Scott): Mike's a little tall. You all are a lot taller than me. I've heard a lot about science today and a lot about the reason why we're here for the fallaropes. But I see as a member of Utah youth environmental solutions, to talk about something that I think is equally as important. For as long as I can remember, my life has been tied up with the Great Salt Lake. This valley is my home, and we are at a crossroads where we and many other organisms face the prospect of losing it.

0:30:30 - (Adelaide Scott): Most of us have never been faced with this insecurity. The peril of the Great Salt Lake reminds us that we are indeed in imminent danger of losing our homes. When we talk about the drying at the Great Salt Lake, there is a lack of acknowledgement of power. I want to invite everyone here to take a moment and consider, why does the Great Salt Lake matter to you? Is it because you love the lake? Is it because you love this valley?

0:30:54 - (Adelaide Scott): Is it because you enjoy living here for its numerous recreational opportunities? Or is it because of a sense of urgency? Is it because if this lake dries up, you face the prospect of health issues, loss of jobs, and even death? How many of you, if the lake dried up tomorrow, have the privilege to leave? And what has enabled you to have that privilege? The acknowledgement of privilege is an absolutely essential characteristic to ensure the success of any movement.

0:31:22 - (Adelaide Scott): I and my family lie in the first group of people. This value is our home, and we choose to live here. But when faced with the danger of our lives, I know and must acknowledge that we have been given immense privilege and we would leave our home. I have privilege in the fact that I am here speaking to you today. It is undeniable that there is a sizable portion of people affected by the loss of the lake who are not being listened to.

0:31:45 - (Adelaide Scott): I can't speak for any of them, but I can tell you that this movement has a serious issue. We are intertwined with the idea that we have one narrative when it is in fact incredibly complex. I will promise you right now, as a lover of science, that this is as much a social issue as it is a scientific one, and it will never be solved without the acknowledgement and the voices of everyone who is affected.

0:32:08 - (Adelaide Scott): To those of us who have been given such power institutionally, this is our most essential task to guide progress towards equitable outcomes by giving others a seat at the table when we have been given one by proxy. Among the marginalized people living here, there is another group we have marginalized that calls the lake home. Around 60% of Wilson's fallow ropes in the world depend or have depended on the Great Salt Lake for their survival.

0:32:32 - (Adelaide Scott): The creatures that we share this land with have been neglected and denied their rights to preservation time and time again. And just as we have stolen the voices of so many people from a movement that so severely affects them, we have stolen the voices of the birds by killing them. What do I think it means to be endangered? I think that every species deserves our conservation. I believe that they are in danger, and indeed were endangered the moment that we plundered their homes and consequently forced them to live in our world.

0:32:59 - (Adelaide Scott): I believe that there are people in this valley that are at risk of being killed by apathy and greed, and I believe that the same goes for the creatures of this lake. The question is, will we as a movement, stand up and give voices and power to those who have been withheld from it? Or will we continue to perpetuate this cycle where power is given to only the elite and only the white upper class? I will promise you that I have seen progress in our movement.

0:33:22 - (Adelaide Scott): I'm proud of the progress we've made. But I will hope, and I continue to hope, that we will continue in a trajectory towards justice, empathy, preservation, and equality towards all. Thank you.

0:33:37 - (Chris): That about wraps up this very watery episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I have a number of people I'd like to thank, starting with Terry Tempest Williams, with whom I greatly enjoyed the conversation. Whether the mic was hot or completely turned off, it was great to spend some time getting to know you a little bit. Thanks as well to friend of the podcast, Patrick Donnelly, for giving me the heads up about the event and to our donors for providing the resources necessary to get me up to Salt Lake and with someplace to stay that wasn't a cardboard box on the sidewalk. It was a little cold in town in particular.

0:34:14 - (Chris): As regards donors, I want to thank Leland means for a generous donation, which might have been prompted by the Aviquamai national monument episode, though maybe it was just because he is that kind of guy. And also thanks to Shelby Logue for upgrading their membership at Patreon to the cholla level. You can join the wonderful people that help support this podcast by going to 90 milesfromneedles.com.

0:34:40 - (Chris): Donate a couple of different options there. Pick the one you like best. You can also text the word needles to 5355. Remember, we couldn't do this without you. Your support is absolutely crucial in what we do. I would also like to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artist. Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. Thanks to them and to you for listening.

0:35:07 - (Chris): And speaking of web addresses for the podcast, we had a little bit of a situation this past week where our website was down for a couple of days. Frustratingly started while I was traveling back from Salt Lake City. It's back up now. Just took a little figuring, problem solving. I like a puzzle now and then, but this is as good an excuse as any to let you know about the website that belongs to the Desert Advocacy Media Network, home of 90 miles from needles.

0:35:36 - (Chris): It's another place where you can catch every episode we put out, and that is@thedam.org t h e dash dash dash n.org dot I'm going to be taking a little bit of time to work out some of the snags in the new website. It's not perfect yet. As a result of that and a couple other things, including some family health stuff, there will not be an episode next week. April 9 is going to be an episode free Tuesday.

0:36:05 - (Chris): Look for another episode on April 16. I gotta say in parting, my first image of the desert, the first part of the desert I ever saw a six year old in the back of the Turquoise Malibu station wagon in 1966 was of the Great Salt Lake and of the Salt Flats west of the lake. I have very clear memories of a motel we stayed at in Wendover, Utah, which was pretty much the classic 1960s desert motel with pastel blue and sort of salmon y pink walls and furnishings, paper sanitized for your protection banner across the toilet seat.

0:36:46 - (Chris): I don't think there was a soundtrack of Patsy Klein playing constantly in the motel room, but there should have been. Anyway. I am just really glad to have had a chance to see the lake again. And here's hoping that your grandkids. I'm not having any grandkids, but hoping that your grandkids will be able to see lake as well. And maybe I'll still be around and they can drive me because I'll be 193 years old.

0:37:11 - (Chris): Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of yourselves. The desert really needs you. And we will see you at the next watering hole. Take care.

0:39:32 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles, is a production of the Desert advocacy media network.

0:39:42 - (Sarah Woodbury): Hi, thank you so much for having us. I'm Sarah Woodbury, and I will be performing with my collaborator, Bryn Watkins, who you will see come in the phalarope head in a moment. And we have been working with phalaropes as students of phalaropes for the last four years, working to bring phalarope movement and story into our body. So what you'll see here is a story about their migration, which is pretty, pretty extreme and incredible.

0:40:07 - (Sarah Woodbury): All species of phalaropes have incredible migrations, but Wilson's phalarope specifically goes from Canada to Argentina. And so this is just a little look into their world, their story of their migration. So thank you for having us. And it's called what phalarope saw.

0:40:28 - (Sarah Woodbury): Once there was ocean, salt, waves forever darkness plunging down, down into the world of lights and long teeth and scales that turn like rainbow before sliding back into black. Once there was sky, cloud and long light. A wind crack lightning and shimmer of rain against backs. Drops rolling from wide wings drops. Little marble oceans falling down, back down to sea. Who roils, shatters jewel offerings, keeps wings beating hard.

0:42:15 - (Sarah Woodbury): Once little sisters see on beneath us, opening glinting desert mud to our tatters, conjuring hordes of tiny pink bodies down to clutter our bellies, sing us down in circles to rest and flush our bodies warm for a moment, rising only when we must. Once there was tundra wriggling muck women circling, men spinning love up from the soft blue sides of marshes. Grasses plucked long and green and careful laid and woven down, down around clutches of eggs.

0:43:50 - (Sarah Woodbury): Thick yoked secrets kept by fathers until puffs of young crack, float up. Now again singing sound. Whoa.