When the life of someone you love is at stake you stay with them.

Since January of 2022, we have kept a daily vigil on behalf of Great Salt Lake throughout each Utah State legislative session. Every morning of the 2024 session, we Walked the Waves around the Utah State Capitol in silence; each evening we made joyful noise as we Celebrated the Species with puppets built by many members of the lake-facing community. We demonstrated our love for the lake in this way throughout the entire legislative session. 

After three years, we realize that the work of keeping vigil for Great Salt Lake is ongoing. The lake is the vital and still-beating heart of life of this basin. The center, not a periphery. A creator, not a commodity. We celebrate all the lives she sustains— from brine flies to bison, to twelve million birds!

The Dear Pelican Project

The current work of the vigil is to honor the Pelicans who have been displaced by receding water levels.

Until the spring of 2023, thousands of American White Pelicans nested on Gunnison Island in the North Arm of Great Salt Lake. The recently receding lake level caused a land bridge, exposing them to predators. The entire community had to abandon their nests last season. In spring of 2024, about a tenth of the refugee pelicans have returned to Gunnison Island and some are now trying to make a new home on Hat Island.  Following the lead of Mr. Josh Craner’s 6th-grade class from Emerson Elementary, we will fold over 10,000 origami American White Pelicans to show our love for them. Learn about our great-winged neighbors while helping to create a public art display to honor them. Mr. Craner's class has already folded 2445 pelicans. This weekend our project is featured at the ArtYard of the Utah Arts Festival and we are certain to add significantly to the count.

Help us fold origami pelicans to remember our beyond human kin in exile from Gunnison Island.

• Help us fold 10,000 pelicans! Fold pelicans and display them in your home or school.
• Write a little letter directly to the pelicans. Dear Pelicans...
• Count the birds you made and send your final pelican count with photos of your birds and letters to before January 1st of 2025. We will keep the count.
• The dear pelican project will be displayed in the gallery at the Main Branch of Salt Lake City Library next Winter. We'll keep you updated on the opening!

The life of Great Salt Lake is inseparable from our own.

We gather to bear witness to her beauty. We gather to grieve. We gather to create beacons of possibility. We gather to increase our tenderness towards brine shrimp, microbialites, and winged citizens of the air. We gather to carry each other through spells of despair. We gather to revere all that is vital and alive.

Even as the active collapse of our ecosystem challenges our notions of hope, we devote ourselves to a future shaped by human reverence, humility, and reciprocity. Everything we do matters. In the face of this crisis, who will we become?

8 Principles of the Vigil

1. Non-violence: Peaceful uprising in action and word. Our demonstrations make love visible
2. Devotion: We turn our hearts and faces towards the lake
3. Presence: We offer our calm, steady presence.
4. Reparative Returns: We uplift Indigenous leadership and seek to repair past harms. 
5. Sovereignty: We seek legally defensible rights for the lake to live, flourish, and be replenished. |
6. Behold the Future: We work to benefit kin who are coming, human and beyond-human.
7. Love Specifies: We cultivate tender regard for all life forms, landforms, and water bodies.
8. We belong to the earth and each other. Belonging is inherent and cannot be earned, sold, or bought.

More Ways to Be Present with Great Salt Lake

• Write with us! River Writing is a friendly, community-held writing practice. You don’t have to identify as a writer to participate. A great life is at stake and we stand together at a precipice. Your words matter. Details & registration.
• Monday- Friday at 7am MST we host a 25 minute lake-facing meditation on zoom. Participate from wherever you are as we turn our hearts and faces to the lake in silence together. Register here
• Write to Utah lawmakers and urge them to get water to the lake. Do not wait for legislative session. Write to them now to start a lake-facing conversation.
• Follow the Vigil Keepers and Great Salt Lake celebrants with Nan on Instagram

Invitations for Utah Lawmakers

• Get water to the lake this season.
• Proclaim and uphold Great Salt Lake’s legal rights to live, flourish, and be restored. Acknowledge and protect personal rights for the lake that are at least on par with the personal rights of corporations.
• Join us in the morning online for lake-centered meditation.
• Proclaim and support a minimum lake level goal of at least 4200 feet above sea-level.
• Permanently protect Bear River from any future development. Cease collecting sale tax for Bear River Development and other harmful water projects. Divert all existing funds to the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust.
• Seek guidance from Indigenous leadership to repair our relationship with water.

Resources for Lake-facing People

• Follow Save Our Great Salt Lake, HEAL Utah, and the Utah Rivers Council to engage lawmakers and track legislation.
• Stay current by following the award-winning reporting from Great Salt Lake Collaborative
• Sign up with Grow the Flow to help create a coalition of more than 100,000 lake-facing people throughout Utah and beyond. 
• Become a contributing member of Friends of Great Salt Lake and read their informative newsletters.
• Fall in love with the lake through the science with Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College
• Follow the birds with Mary Anne Karren, wildlife photographer

Reading List

• Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse
• The Bluff Principles for the Colorado River. This carefully articulated vision from Indigenous leaders also applies to Great Salt Lake.
• Statement by Jaimi Butler, vigil scientist-in-residence. (see below)
• Irreplaceable, a polyphonic love letter to Great Salt Lake by the poets of the 2022 Vigil
• The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry
• New World Coming, an Anthology edited by Alastair Lee Bitsóí and Brooke Larsen
• River Republic, The Rise and Fall of America’s Rivers by Daniel McCool
• Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
• What My Body Knows by Terry Tempest Williams
• Bloodtide by Eli Nixon
• Not Hope, But Possibility- The Literature of Restoration, an essay by Deena Metzger

A Statement from Vigil Scientist-in Residence, Jaimi Butler:

“Great Salt Lake’s ecosystem is collapsing before our eyes. Increasing salt content and habitat loss in the main body of the lake are making it uninhabitable for the brine shrimp and flies that feed entire species of birds. The birds have no other place to move. We have no time left to prevent the dire ecosystem consequences wildlife and humans will experience over the coming years. It will take us decades of sustained effort to return enough water to the lake to restore habitat and rebalance salinity. Furthermore, we must commit to adaptive management in perpetuity. 

The amazing thing about our lake and its creatures is their resilience and flexibility within  a wide range of environmental conditions.  Brine shrimp release durable and long-lasting eggs, tiny living time capsules, which hatch when conditions are right. With optimal water conditions I don't think we could stop shrimp from repopulating the lake. Microorganisms become dormant when encased in salt and can re-animate when released. Even some bird populations have increased despite vastly increasing human populations. For me, the uncertainty lies in how the parts of the ecosystem will reassemble once we return water to the lake and if this new balance will support the vitality we have known in the past.  

Great Salt Lake remains full of possibilities. It is imperative for us to work together to get water to the lake for the wildlife and humans that live in this important ecosystem.”

Thank You! 

• Wendy, Trish, and all the stewards of Antelope Island State Park. 
• To the many members of the River Writing Community whose support and presence made both vigils possible and improbably joyful.
• Therese Berry and Sarah May of Making Waves for Great Salt Lake for leading the community art builds!
• Utah Humanities for your essential support.
• John Meier and the filmmakers of PBS Utah for documenting this community offering to Great Salt Lake.
• Rachel for loaning your camper in 2022 to give the vigil its first home, and Amanda and Pablo for offering yours to house the vigil in 2023