Posted on Oct 9, 2023
Her antidote for 'climate grief' and a shrinking Great Salt Lake? Don't look away
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https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/ [login to see] /climate-grief-great-salt-lake-utah-terry-tempest-williams
"We all have those places where we feel most inspired, content — most alive.
For me, it's Teton County. That stretch of high plains and higher mountains that extends from the southeastern most corner of Idaho and into Wyoming. I've spent a lifetime watching the sun rise and set over the Teton mountains. But a couple of summers ago, I watched those same sunrises and sunsets with dread.
Wildfires from as far as Oregon had blown so much smoke into the valley that you couldn't make out the tops of the mountains. And the sun was an electric orange fireball — the most stark kind of warning that things on this Earth are not as they should be. I felt sick. Not just because of the smoke that seeped into our clothes and our lungs but because of what it meant. I had understood the effects of climate change from an intellectual level for a very long time. But this was the first time I felt it in a much deeper, more personal way"
"We all have those places where we feel most inspired, content — most alive.
For me, it's Teton County. That stretch of high plains and higher mountains that extends from the southeastern most corner of Idaho and into Wyoming. I've spent a lifetime watching the sun rise and set over the Teton mountains. But a couple of summers ago, I watched those same sunrises and sunsets with dread.
Wildfires from as far as Oregon had blown so much smoke into the valley that you couldn't make out the tops of the mountains. And the sun was an electric orange fireball — the most stark kind of warning that things on this Earth are not as they should be. I felt sick. Not just because of the smoke that seeped into our clothes and our lungs but because of what it meant. I had understood the effects of climate change from an intellectual level for a very long time. But this was the first time I felt it in a much deeper, more personal way"
Her antidote for 'climate grief' and a shrinking Great Salt Lake? Don't look away
Posted from npr.org
Climate Change
Wildlife
Flood
Water
Posted 8 mo ago
Responses: 2
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passed the Salt Lakes in 2005, I can only imagine almost 20 years later what they look like: PO1 William "Chip" Nagel good day Brother William, always informational and of the most interesting. Thanks for sharing, have a blessed day!
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Sometimes it can be hard to talk about the effects of climate change in the aggregate — it's all so massive — the loss is so hard to wrap your head around. Williams has been writing about how she has seen a very particular place change over time — a place knitted close to her sense of identity — the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Here's an excerpt from an essay called, Believe:
Believe the long-legged birds who are circling above us desperately looking for water. Believe the forests that are burning whose surviving trees will later stand as sentinels, charred witnesses to animal bodies reduced to ash. Believe in flash floods roaring through burnt canyons gathering debris in rivers running black in the desert even in times of drought. Believe Great Salt Lake is retreating in plain sight, leaving what's left to the dust devils whipping up clouds of chemicals resting on the dry lakebed as we inhale the toxic world we have created. Believe in the once shimmering bodies of water on the horizon that are now nothing more than a mirage made of heat waves death-dancing on the salt flats. Believe in the silences. Before we can save this world we are losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains. This is more than an ecological crisis or a political crisis — it is a spiritual one.
I wanted to talk with Williams about how she is processing her own climate grief, what advice she has for the rest of us, and her lifelong relationship with the Great Salt Lake."...
..."Sometimes it can be hard to talk about the effects of climate change in the aggregate — it's all so massive — the loss is so hard to wrap your head around. Williams has been writing about how she has seen a very particular place change over time — a place knitted close to her sense of identity — the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Here's an excerpt from an essay called, Believe:
Believe the long-legged birds who are circling above us desperately looking for water. Believe the forests that are burning whose surviving trees will later stand as sentinels, charred witnesses to animal bodies reduced to ash. Believe in flash floods roaring through burnt canyons gathering debris in rivers running black in the desert even in times of drought. Believe Great Salt Lake is retreating in plain sight, leaving what's left to the dust devils whipping up clouds of chemicals resting on the dry lakebed as we inhale the toxic world we have created. Believe in the once shimmering bodies of water on the horizon that are now nothing more than a mirage made of heat waves death-dancing on the salt flats. Believe in the silences. Before we can save this world we are losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains. This is more than an ecological crisis or a political crisis — it is a spiritual one.
I wanted to talk with Williams about how she is processing her own climate grief, what advice she has for the rest of us, and her lifelong relationship with the Great Salt Lake."...
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