What Salt Lakes Can Teach Us About Queer Life, Grief and Living Beautifully

Arizona author Caroline Tracey’s debut book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, is hard to classify.

It is a nature book about salt lakes — ranging from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the former Lake Texcoco in what is now Mexico City to the fast-drying Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It explores the history of these briny bodies of water, their ecological importance and their imperiled state as climate change and development threaten them and the many organisms — tiny shrimp, buzzing flies and birds — that inhabit them. 

But the book is also a queer coming-of-age story, chronicling Tracey’s drifting away from her longtime boyfriend, her budding interest in queer culture, and her relationship with her now-wife.

What ties the threads of salt lakes and Tracey’s coming of age together — and provides a prismatic lens for readers to follow her nuanced, sometimes esoteric observations of the world — is “queer ecology.”

Tracey has a doctorate in geography and conducted research for the book in Argentina, Kazakhstan, Mexico and beyond. She is a writer at Border Chronicle and lives in Tucson.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

John Washington (LOOKOUT): How do you define “queer ecology”?

Tracey: For me, it’s three things. One is identifying animals that have nonnormative or nonheteronormative family structures and reproductive practices. Another is recognizing the vitality of unusual or damaged landscapes. And the third is a perspective on doing science that I take from a trans hydrologist, Cleo Woelfle Hazard, who talks about making practices of mourning developed in queer and trans communities translatable into science. As climate change accelerates, scientists face a lot of change and loss in their fieldwork, and it’s helpful to have a framework for dealing with that emotionally.

LOOKOUT: What does queer human culture teach us about mourning, and how do we apply that to nature?

Tracey: Queer and trans traditions of mourning really stem from the AIDS crisis, a very different era of queer life than we’re in today. The queer social networks I’m in don’t foreground mourning. And I think when you talk to people from older generations, they sometimes feel frustrated that younger people don’t have the same sense of gravity. But there is still a sensitivity to the ephemeral — the understanding that things, politically and environmentally, can be lost. In a moment like this, when there are political rollbacks and people are worried about their futures, that awareness gets activated. People know not to take things for granted.

LOOKOUT: What can nature teach us about being gay?

Tracey: All kinds of reproductive forms and family structures exist in nature, and those things are natural. There’s no reason to prohibit them. Environmentalism teaches us that we want more biodiversity — more complexity, more creatures filling different niches. That’s also true in human life.

LOOKOUT: Did being a cowboy help you come out? You write that working as a cowboy “allowed me to inhabit myself queerly before making any utterance to the effect.”

Tracey: I always really wanted to be a cowboy. Part of the draw was aesthetic — I liked the landscape, the clothes, the tools. I relished every sensory element of it. There is and isn’t a gendered aesthetic in cowboy culture. Everyone has to participate in a kind of masculinity to do the work.

If you go to the Tucson rodeo, you’ll see rhinestones, embroidered jeans, pink cowboy boots. But in the day-to-day work, there’s something more equalizing. You have to be prepared, practically, for whatever the day brings.

LOOKOUT: Talk to me about the “queer quotidian.”

Tracey: When I would go to queer friends’ houses, especially older people, I was curious about how they built their lives. What does commitment look like when it’s not about marriage or kids, but a kind of constancy? How do you derive meaning outside that heteronormative forward motion?

The queer quotidian became my way of understanding that. I noticed a lot of attention to daily life and sensory pleasure — caring about what dishes you eat off, what fabric you wear. That attention to detail became a counterbalance to the pressure to always be moving forward.

LOOKOUT: Any recommendations for readers who may also want to vivir bonito?

Tracey: Detail is a big part of it. It doesn’t have to be consumptive or Instagram-driven. It can be simple. Maybe you don’t have many objects, but you care deeply about the ones you have. It’s about imbuing everyday tasks with meaning.

LOOKOUT: Where are we at with salt lakes these days?

Tracey: It’s rough. The American West had a severe snow drought this year, with record-low snowpack. There’s concern in Utah, but the legislative session left many Great Salt Lake advocates disappointed. Recently, there’s been talk of a federal push to “Make the Great Salt Lake Great Again,” including a potential billion-dollar rescue package.

There’s a lot of interest in technological solutions, but less political will for more straightforward approaches like buying water rights. The challenge is the entrenched system of large-scale agriculture and water allocation. Saving salt lakes, like saving the Colorado River, will require a willingness to change that we’re not fully seeing yet.