Dependence Day

 On February 7th, I got a text from a dear friend.

"Happy Independence Day!"

I doubted myself for a few moments. I lose track of time often, but this seemed extreme even for me. Then it clicked. The seventh of February is the anniversary of my divorce.

The last year has been the most disruptive and challenging in my life. It has felt like falling down a cliff while trying to hold four children to my chest. I've hit my head a lot. Sometimes on the cliff. Sometimes with my own palm. At times, we have been closer than ever. At other times, the kids have felt completely out of sight. I have struggled with intense feelings of self doubt, helplessness, and vulnerability. This has stimulated the most growth and healing I have ever experienced. Gratitude flavors the bitterest moments of dread and danger. So far, nothing has dulled the consolation that whatever happens, at least I am not still in that relationship.

I thought this "sketch to image" AI by one of the kids captured the frazzled and beautiful vibe of the last year. I don't know if I am the one with big hair, or the tiny chrysalis on a twig.

One of the most painful and important lessons of the last year is that divorce, like baptism, is a beginning, not an end. The storms haven't stopped. 

I thought that there would be peace after the papers were signed. When that didn't happen, I hoped that the kids' needs would unite us behind a shared cause. When the opposite occurred, I prayed that establishing a second household would mark the beginning of reconciliation. Instead, it feels like my ex wakes up every day with hate in her heart and war on her mind. I now look back to messages we sent during the divorce and just after and marvel at the level of civility and cooperation.

One night when we were talking through some hard things, we went down to the lake. The tinkles of the ice and the wet heat of the open water helped the problem feel small.

Another friend mentioned that reconstruction after a divorce takes at least two years. I don't know about timelines, but I do know that my identity and sometimes my sense of reality have been deconstructed (or more properly torn down) by a sequence of realizations. Each came like a consecutive hurricane. No time to rebuild or even rush for cover. Maybe that is exactly what I needed. Skin against the storm. Hands protecting the back of my neck. Just my body huddled and sandblasted on a pitted foundation. 

The first realization was seeing how deep my denial had been about our relationship. It was so bad for so long, but I tolerated and participated in the daily disfunction. Sometimes I was willfully blind, pretending things were fine to avoid having to reckon with the needed upheaval. This wasn't something that therapy or even a new house could fix. Other times I was just ignorant of how dark and intractable the dynamic was. The distance and continued behaviors from my ex brought a deep sense of grief and relief. Leaving was the only choice. At least it was the only good and honest choice. 

Second, I realized how intertwined our lives still were. During the divorce, my ex pivoted from a place of resentment and resistance to a policy of full frontal attack. After the decree was signed, I think she experienced every act of compliance as a new concession towards me personally. Rather than feeling like we had negotiated a mutually supportive arrangement, she started using the language of exploitation. She had been forced to agree to those concessions. If the world were just, I shouldn't be a part of our children's lives. She is so committed to her grievance narrative that she can't fathom or condone a step toward something healthy for us or for me.

Third, I realized how minimal my influence was and always had been on this person. No peace offering or carefully worded message would soften her heart. If I resist, she fights harder. If I give in, she concludes her hard ball tactics are working.

As things have gotten harder, the sacred value of time together has become brighter. O, the joy of breakfast with these glorious children.

The one thing my ex and I agree on is that the kids shouldn't have to go through this. My ex believes that it is my fault for divorcing her. I believe that it is our fault for not figuring out how to coparent. The deepest feelings of loss and regret come from reflecting on the painful and impossible situations our children have been put in over the past year because of our failure to reconcile and move forward. Delayed ordinations, cancelled trips, conflicting accounts, and traumatic communication (both the opaque silence and the white-hot explosions).

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the following in L'existentialisme est un humanisme: 

In seeking freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on our own. Certainly, you can define personal freedom in a way that is independent, but as soon as there is interaction, I am obliged to seek the freedom of others at the same time as my own, I cannot reach for my freedom without making my goal the freedom of others at the same time.

Though I have often yearned to divorce my ex a second time to see if that could create more distance, I see now that independence isn't the goal. Our lives are forever linked, and to wish that away would destroy the best things in my life. I now believe that a loving dependence is the goal. My friends Bob and Gloria Rees often say, "In a conflict or disagreement, make sure to take a breath and ask, what is the most loving thing I can do next?" In this coming year, I will make that my guiding question. In my relations with my ex, my new love, my children, my political opponents, my students, and all who I encounter, how can I better show sincere love? How can we move from a wish of solitary independence to a relationship of connection and love?

Let us not make any weapons of war...except wooden swords. Caspian bought the spray paint himself.

Happy Dependence Day.

“freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

Jean Paul Sartre 1972

Crossing Utah Lake on a bike

 On January 24th, I woke up with a fully-formed thought in my mind.

"I bet the lake is frozen."

Utah Lake hadn't frozen yet this year, but we had had highs in the teens. The lake is huge and powerful, and the ice conditions can change in a matter of hours, so I knew the window was short.

I rearranged my plans, and I took off from my office around 3:30.

I started just north of Utah Lake State Park. The ice was thin near the shore, but it often is. There isn't any lake ice report, so it's crucial to assess conditions continuously and be super careful. I've done a lot of frozen river and lake travel in Alaska, but Utah Lake is by far the most intimidating (and dangerous) frozen water body I've ever traversed (read to the end for the ending).

There were a lot of pressure ridges where the ice had buckled and stacked.

It made for slow rolling, but I always like to have a few extra layers of ice under me.

Things were smoother away from the shore. The lake's size and power always awes me. Whenever there was a change in ice texture or color. I would stop to tap and assess. This gap had frozen over enough to hold me.

Crossing a pressure ridge. There was a little bit of overflow on the ice.

The lake is surrounded by cities, but it feels every bit as wild as it ever has been out in the middle.

This frozen slush ice texture was the most common. I love to think what it would be like to watch it form.

My favorite mountains and lake.

As I neared Pelican Point on the west side, the sun illuminated Vineyard, Lindon, and American Fork.

Ever since I frostbit my nose in Alaska, I wear this stylish nose guard.

The ice thinned out substantially 100 yards from shore. I almost turned around, but found a path on the ice ridges.

The ridges were around 8 feet tall.

Smoother riding, but I don't like how it cracks and creaks.

Peeking over the ridge.

I just spent a minute on Pelican Point and then hit the ice again.

It was starting to get dark, and I wanted to get back for a date with Emily. I didn't stop a single time to take pictures, so I don't have anything to show for the ride back. I used the new Orem Temple as my main waypoint, and it kept me on course. 

When I was 200 yards from shore, I decided to head to the boat dock. There was a car driving there, and it seemed like I would avoid the thin ice near the shoreline. I turned my back on the temple and headed straight south. The ice was buckled and bulged around the dikes at the mouth of the marina, so I walked the last few feet. Just before stepping onto the rocks of the dike, I broke through the ice. I thought it was just my leg, but then my whole body slipped through. I pushed my bike to the side to keep it from sliding in and in the hopes that I could use it to pull myself out.

The water pressed around me like a weighted blanket until my elbows hit the ice. I was able to pull myself out almost immediately, and I laughed loudly as I carried the bike up the rocks. A reminder of how real the risk is.

It felt like a metaphor for the last few years of my life. There have been some major dips in the water (the island lawsuit and divorce first of all), but they all occurred near help with a way back to the shore. I won't ever take this wild existence for granted. I am so grateful for all the lifeguards who have fished me and my kids out of the cold water so many times.

Open letter about UPR and the Salt Lake Tribune's three-part series on Great Salt Lake

17-December-2024

To whom it may concern,

On December 16th, the Salt Lake Tribune published an article titled, “Researchers warned the Great Salt Lake could dry up in 5 years. Now, they’re being mocked.” It was based on a three-part series on Utah Public Radio’s UnDisciplined podcast titled, “The seagull and the snowpocalypse.” I love criticisms, hot takes, and frank discussions,  and I found the series to be engaging. Unfortunatley, there are multiple ethical, journalistic, and scientific issues in both the Tribune and UPR pieces. Given that our report was the target of their criticisms, this open letter likely seems like me being defensive about our report, but please read on. Our report took a lot of heat, which is understandable and positive, and I haven't felt the need to respond publicly about anything until now.

The most concerning aspect of the series is that it misrepresents the scientific evidence on the causes and rate of Great Salt Lake’s decline, potentially creating confusion and reducing support for water conservation, which is crucial to the stabilization and restoration of Great Salt Lake. I provide some detail on the issues below, but the main points of concern are:

1. Dr. LaPlante never discloses that he is the lead author of the single study that the series is based on 1. The study has its merits, but it is speculative, published in a low-impact journal, and contrary to the consensus on most points. Regardless of the strength of the study, representing his own scholarship as an independent study raises ethical and journalistic questions.
2. The series states multiple times that the decline of Great Salt Lake is primarily caused by climate change, which has been disproven by multiple peer-reviewed studies and state reports. Consumptive water use is estimated to account for 67-73% of the lake’s decline, with climate change accounting for only 8-11% 2. Every episode of the podcast, especially the final one, emphasizes climate change as the primary driver of the decline of the lake, or at least equal to consumptive water use.
3. The conclusion of the series is that there is nothing we can do, but it doesn’t really matter because the lake is unlikely to dry up before the end of the century. This is false scientifically and not supported even by the statistics in LaPlante’s study, which relies on extrapolating correlative relationships between historical groundwater and lake level.
4. Dr. LaPlante creates a false sense of security about the likelihood of returning to or dropping below 2022 levels, claiming that it is highly unlikely that the lake drops below that level until several decades from now. As of November, the lake is at its 2021 level 3, and despite important legislative and management efforts, there has not been a measurable increase in water flow from changes in human behavior 4.
5. The series misrepresents the content of our 2023 study and the interview the study authors engaged in by decontextualizing the five-year scenario and disregarding the rest of the content. In effect Dr. LaPlante and the other contributors are engaging in the kind of oversimplified journalism that they claim to take to task with this series.

I hope that the authors, Utah Public Radio, and the Salt Lake Tribune will consider these criticisms as they decide whether to keep the content up or publish the forthcoming parts of the series.

Sincerely,

Ben Abbott

Issues:

1. Journalistic ethics and errors
1. Matthew LaPlante never discloses that the study he bases the series off of and repeatedly cites simply as a “peer reviewed article” is his own work, not an independent piece of research (A Nuclear Bomb or just a Joke?). His article is published in a low-impact journal, and it does not reflect the consensus view, making it likely unreliable. It uses a downscaled climate model and a correlative relationship between groundwater and lake level to extrapolate potential future lake behavior, neglecting the fact that both of these factors are impacted by lurking variables (consumptive water use, weather, and climate). More generally, this is classic “one-study syndrome” where reporting focuses on a single study without comparing it to the current consensus. This is particularly problematic because Dr. LaPlante’s lack of disclosure of his participation in the study and misrepresentation of the paper in both the written piece and podcasts (details below).
2. An extended quote by Bonnie Baxter is attributed to Lynn de Freitas:
1. “I got asked a lot, ‘Is it really five years?’” said Lynn de Freitas, a co-author of the report and the executive director of the nonprofit group Friends of Great Salt Lake, which was founded in 1994 to advocate for the lake’s preservation. “And the timeline is interesting, because it’s actually from that trajectory downward that was extrapolated from the data. You could follow the line, how it was going down, and just continue the line and ask the question: ‘How long before we get here?’ And that was five years.”
2. Scientific inaccuracies
1. Climate trends are mischaracterized, claiming that wet and dry periods occur at regular intervals since we have records. This is contradicted by the broader literature, which has described the “Millennial Drought” extensively, attributing a portion of the nonstationarity to climate change5,6. Overall precipitation and runoff have decreased, but human water use dominates the lake level, likely creating a 15’ differential between where it would be naturally and where it is today7. The claim of regular intervals of drought is also contradicted by Dr. LaPlante’s own paper, which identifies multiple decade-or longer periods of extreme low flows where the lake may have reached similar levels over the past several hundred years.
2. In both the podcast and his peer-reviewed paper, Dr. LaPlante claims that climate is as least as important or more important than consumptive water use. For example, he writes that it is only a possibility that “human diversion of the major streams that feed the lake may be a substantial contributing factor in the lake’s decline.” Multiple studies have demonstrated the dominance of local water use, which accounts for around 80% of the decline of saline lakes globally and 67-73% in the specific case of Great Salt Lake8,9. In fact, the misattribution of the decline of Great Salt Lake to climate change has specifically been addressed in the scientific literature as a phenomenon called “climatization” and described as a major threat to the Earth sciences because it undermines rigorous attribution of environmental problems and potentially undermines appetite to act locally10–12.
3. There is misrepresentation of Dr. Ibrahim Mohammed’s research. The series says that his work supports the claims that climate is primarily responsible for the decline of the lake and that the lake is resilient to desiccation in the future because of salinity-evaporation stabilizing feedbacks. In fact, Dr. Mohammed’s work concludes that the lake is much more sensitive to consumptive water use than changes in evaporation, and that human water use can and has overcome the stabilizing salinity feedback13,14.
3. Mischaracterization of the report (and the interview with Bonnie Baxter, Lynn De Freitas, and Ben Abbott)
1. The series disregards content of the report (other executive summary points and virtually the whole body of the report), only focusing on the five-year scenario, which itself is mischaracterized. The report never claims that GSL will be completely desiccated within five years. The executive summary states, “If this loss rate continues, the lake as we know it is on track to disappear in five years.” As specified in the report and reiterated to the producer of the podcast when they interviewed us, we were referring to the lake’s overall function, which was already collapsing in 2022. At that time, the lake was only months away from salinity thresholds where neither the brine shrimp or brine flies could reproduce. Dr. LaPlante’s paper similarly only takes the strawman argument of total lake desiccation rather than the functional collapse described throughout the report.

Links

UnDisciplined podcast

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3



Salt Lake Tribune adaptation

Part 1

References

1. LaPlante, M. D., Dahal, P., Wang, S.-Y. S., Hakala, K. & Mukherjee, A. A ‘Nuclear Bomb’ or Just ‘a Joke’? Groundwater Models May Help Communicate Nuanced Risks to the Great Salt Lake. Water 16, 2221 (2024).

2. Great Salt Lake Strike Team. Great Salt Lake Policy Assessment. 36 https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/GSL-Assessment-Feb2023.pdf?x71849 (2023).

3. Winslow, B. Great Salt Lake drops back down to 2021 levels. The Salt Lake Tribune (2024).

4. Steed, B. The Great Salt Lake Strategic Plan. 42 https://greatsaltlake.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/Great-Salt-Lake-Strategic-Plan-1.pdf (2024).

5. Williams, A. P., Cook, B. I. & Smerdon, J. E. Rapid intensification of the emerging southwestern North American megadrought in 2020–2021. Nat. Clim. Chang. 1–3 (2022) doi:10.1038/s41558-022-01290-z.

6. Great Salt Lake Strike Team. Great Salt Lake Data and Insights Summary. 24 https://www.usu.edu/today/pdf/great-salt-lake-strike-tream-report-2024.pdf (2024).

7. Merck, M. F. & Tarboton, D. G. Evaluating Variations in Great Salt Lake Inflow to Infer Human Consumptive Water Use, A Volume Reconstruction Approach. Preprint at https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.170688956.67127321/v1 (2024).

8. Wine, M. L. Irrigation water use driving desiccation of Earth’s endorheic lakes and seas. Australasian Journal of Water Resources 0, 1–12 (2022).

9. Wine, M. L. & Laronne, J. B. In Water-Limited Landscapes, an Anthropocene Exchange: Trading Lakes for Irrigated Agriculture. Earth’s Future 8, e2019EF001274 (2020).

10. Wine, M. L. Climatization of environmental degradation: a widespread challenge to the integrity of earth science. Hydrological Sciences Journal 65, 867–883 (2020).

11. Wine, M. L., Null, S. E., DeRose, R. J. & Wurtsbaugh, W. A. Climatization—Negligent Attribution of Great Salt Lake Desiccation: A Comment on Meng (2019). Climate 7, 67 (2019).

12. Wine, M. L. & Davison, J. H. Untangling global change impacts on hydrological processes: Resisting climatization. Hydrological Processes (2019) doi:10.1002/hyp.13483.

13. Mohammed, I. N. & Tarboton, D. G. An examination of the sensitivity of the Great Salt Lake to changes in inputs. Water Resources Research 48, (2012).

14. Mohammed, I. N. & Tarboton, D. G. On the interaction between bathymetry and climate in the system dynamics and preferred levels of the Great Salt Lake: GREAT SALT LAKE DYNAMICS. Water Resour. Res. 47, (2011).

Can the fight for Mono Lake trace a path for restoring Great Salt Lake?

 Last weekend, a group of four of us drove 600 miles to Mono Lake.

Ski tour of East Provo Peak in May

My favorite time to ski is the summer. The real fun starts long after the resorts close and most people are thinking about tomatoes and river floats. During the summer ski season, if you can get to the snow, you can ski it.

Neither of us thought we'd need snow pants, but we both got home with frost-nipped fingers.

Provo Peak April ski tour

The winter of 2022/2023 was the best backcountry season of my life. The record snowfall combined with the personal challenges I was going through made a good excuse to get into the mountains. This year, I haven't been out nearly as much, but we worked in a spring tour yesterday.

Greg picked me up at 6, and we were geared up at the Rock Canyon parking lot by 6:30. We decided to climb Provo Peak. It is just of 11,000', and it felt like a good choice since I had broken my ribs on that mountain in June of 2023 on my last ski tour of the year.

Rock Canyon never disappoints. There were a couple of avalanche tongues across the trail about a mile up.

Above the Rock Canyon Campground, there was just enough snow on the road to put on our skis.

We didn't plan our matching creamsicle outfits, but we were pretty pleased.

We took a hard left a couple miles up the snowy road and followed this ravine almost all the way to the top of the mountain.

The sun came out, and the lake was beautiful.

We had to boot up about 50 feet at the top of the ravine (can you find me looking like a tree?).

There was about an inch of fresh snow, but it had been blown around. It accumulated on my skins, which added weight, but let me climb straight up (no switchbacks needed).

The final approach from the north was glorious, and not too windy.

You can see Cascade and Timpanogos in the background.

Greg is a much better skier than me, so he dropped off first into the main cirque.

Skiing is always fun, but especially with views like this.

We were expecting icy crust or corn snow at best, but instead the cirque was filled with graupel. It was super surfy and stupid fun.

We leapfrogged down the mountain. It turns out going downhill is almost as fun as climbing uphill.

The snow was good all the way down. Not bad for the end of April.

The pitch is super regular, and the snow was consistent enough to make endless turns.

Maple Mountain and Utah Lake in the background.

We traversed to find a fun and fresh line down the bottom third of the mountain.

The snow got slushy and grabby on the wide apron slope that leads back to the valley.

Still darn fun, IMO. I like the lower angle stuff better anyway.

Our snow line home had melted appreciably during the tour, so we put our skis back on our backs early.

It felt like summer at the mouth of the canyon. This view kills me every time. It's like a reminder not to lose yourself in the minutiae.

What's behind the governor's changing rhetoric on Great Salt Lake?

I'm grateful for Governor Cox's leadership on Great Salt Lake. As a farmer, I think he has the understanding and credibility to spur the profound changes in agricultural water use that we need to ensure a vibrant future in northern Utah.

Examples from around the world show that when a saline lake dies, farming goes down with it. Agriculture accounts for the vast majority of humanity's water use, and when demand exceeds supply, farmers are the the first to feel it. We need to learn from the more than 100 saline lakes in decline from Lake Poopó in Bolivia to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. 

If we are serious about supporting Utah farmers, we have to reduce water demand to a sustainable level.

In early 2023, Governor Cox was publicly providing that leadership. He told Fox 13, "On my watch we are not allowing the lake to go dry. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen." He doubled down on the topic in his State of State address, where he referenced our emergency report and committed Utah to pioneering a path to saline lake stewardship.

It was more than just talk. Under his leadership, the state made generational changes to water law and policy, including creating a mechanism for the lake to hold its own water rights. That let the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints give 20,000 acre-feet of water to the lake in perpetuity.

Things seem to have changed.

After the wettest winter on record and a temporary rebound of the lake level, Governor Cox's recent remarks have been markedly different. Starting in March of last year, he began to be defensive and critical of those describing the risk. He "governorsplained" (his term) an audience of environmental lawyers and scientists at the Stegner Symposium: Stop with all the doom and gloom. He had things under control.

On All Things Considered a few weeks ago, he excoriated our observation that the lake was on track to collapse within five years in 2022. "That prediction is laughable. It's a joke and everybody knows it's a joke. They were never serious about that...That's the 'doomerism' that is terrible for people."

Last week at the Spring Runoff Conference in Logan, he had a similar message. There is nothing to worry about. The state is spending a lot of money on the issue, and they have a plan. He'll take us out on the lake in five years for a picnic. Everything will be fine.

I hope he's right. However, the stakes are too high to stop at hope. We need to be looking at the risk with clear eyes. No one has figured out how to save a lake like this. Whole countries have failed, including nuclear powers, autocracies, and democracies. Utah's efforts have been preparatory so far, and as the Great Salt Lake Commissioner's strategic plan highlighted this winter, we still haven't saved enough water to make a measurable difference.

Is the change in rhetoric just a defensive pivot for the election year? Is it his sincere belief that there's nothing to worry about with the lake? 

I don't know, but I'm going to keep my focus on getting water flowing to our inland sea. Our health, economy, and ecosystem depend on a healthy lake. I used to get mad at politicians for not providing the leadership we needed, but I don't anymore. They are the followers, and they look to we the people for leadership.

Join the movement to help Grow the Flow.