Author to discuss salt lakes, queerness and climate change in Phoenix

• Caroline Tracey’s new book, “Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History,” explores the overlooked ecosystems of endorheic lakes.
• The book argues that diverting water from salt lakes for human use has severe environmental consequences.
• Tracey will talk about her book at Changing Hands Bookstore in uptown Phoenix on Monday, March 30 at 6:30 p.m.

The American West and other arid landscapes are dotted with “endorheic” lakes, meaning they have no natural outlet and instead fill as the low point of landlocked basins until the water evaporates away.

Because this runoff often picks up salts from the soil on route to these lakes — and as a warming atmosphere and competition for fresh water accelerates the minerals’ relative concentration there — these vanishing water bodies are more commonly known as “salt lakes.”

They are offbeat and often desolate features that are frequently passed over as wastelands of crusty, smelly mud in favor of more conventionally picturesque or lush destinations.

But not by Caroline Tracey.

Tracey, a Tucson-based essayist and PhD geographer, found herself repeatedly drawn to the specially adapted lifeforms and mirage-like vistas of salt lakes as she navigated adulthood. In her world travels, she also found these oases helped draw out a more nuanced vantage on beauty and ways to experience love in her own life.

Her debut book, “Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History,” published by W. W. Norton on March 17, 2026, takes readers on a road trip tour through time and desert ranchlands that spotlights an overlooked casualty of western water wars — one that could become a dusty liability as a regional megadrought persists — while making the case that the shapeshifting resilience of salt lake systems is an existential gift for those willing to dive in. It is a lyrical, scientific, soulful call to heed the risks of climate change while learning to live with unjust loss and appreciating the unexpected treasures revealed by shrinking, sequestered shorelines.

“Queer ecologies celebrate the need not to manicure spaces so that they will radiate orderly, pastoral, insipid, and inoffensive visions,” she writes. “When we experience the joy and meaning of the natural world in places that feel unusual and engineered, it shows us, in a bodily way, the need to protect marginal spaces and ways of life.”

Tracey will talk about her exploration of salt and self at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix on Camelback Road on Monday, March 30, at 6:30 p.m. The event is free, but the hosts ask that attendees RSVP at this link: https://www.changinghands.com/event/march2026/caroline-tracey.

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‘Beneficial’ is in the eye of the beholder

The convoluted and contested history of western water management has, in the third decade of a climate-intensified drought, accumulated a long list of aggrieved and dehydrated victims. Salt lakes may be one of the first and most neglected.

Though many of these salty oases existed as natural terminal water destinations long before humans took control of river flows, they have been among the first to be cut from water law dictated by concepts like “first in time, first in right” and “beneficial use.” (The Salton Sea is an interesting exception to this, as Tracey explains in her book, having been created by accident when high flows on the Colorado River one year overpowered irrigation ditches and flooded the lowlands of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys.)

As water demand for desert agriculture, industry, population growth and ever-warming environments expanded beyond what nature provides, it became politically and practically convenient to divert river flows heading for endorheic lakes of indeterminate worth to more “beneficial uses” like rural crops or comfy turfgrass in capital cities. The largely voiceless and out-of-sight saline lakes shrank and became more concentrated with salts as a result.

This is the story of the Great Salt Lake bordering Salt Lake City, Utah, which has receded as more inflows from the Bear River are diverted to uses that legal water systems deem “first in right.” After decades of this, the consequences are manifesting as altered weather patterns, reduced snowfall at nearby ski resorts and blowing dust that puts generations of chemicals from agricultural runoff into the air residents breathe.

The issue has risen to the attention of President Donald Trump, who recently called for solutions to make the Great Salt Lake “GREAT AGAIN.” (Environmentalists have been ready with and advocating for specific solutions for a long time.)

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Tracey takes on this topic in her first chapter, also touching on the complex social dynamics of tension between science and religion in Mormon Utah.

“It was this pointless, smelly lake whose water you can’t even use,” Salt Lake Tribune reporter Leia Larsen, who has chronicled attitudes about the Great Salt Lake and efforts to refill it for years, told Tracey.

“Salt Lakes” shines a white-as-salt-flats bright light on the mainstream and unimaginative concept of what counts as “waste.” Water that ends up in these salt lakes is certainly not wasted there from the perspective of the brine shrimp, the nematodes adapted to hypersaline conditions, the salt grasses, the fish with specially evolved digestive tracts or any of the millions of birds that rely on a constellation of salt lakes during annual long-distance migrations.

There’s a reason that birding, a hobby that has captivated an estimated 37% of Americans, inspires road trips to salt lakes. They are biologically remarkable and unique ecosystems. But that doesn’t mean that these species’ evolved adaptations to high-saline environments can keep up as water levels rapidly drop and salt concentrations increase.

In subsequent chapters, Tracey explores the “richness in damaged places” showcased at southern California’s Salton Sea, the impact of cotton production (for better or worse) on the Aral Sea, marking the boundary between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and how a receding shoreline and deceptive redistricting at Mono Lake in northern California have cut off local tribes from traditional plants. She visits Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico while working as a ranch hand, confronting ideas about land use. And she falls in love with the dried-out basin of Lake Texcoco in Mexico City.

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‘Queerness and biodiversity: both forms of difference that enrich the world’

In between deeply reported scenes with scientists and stakeholders, Tracey weaves her own story of redefining priorities for lifeforms and lifestyles into “Salt Lakes.” After spending her 20s in a relationship with a man, she explores what a life-loving woman might look like. She connects the two themes with nuanced and astonishing insights that render the book a unique contribution to ecological and queer literature, as salt lakes are to desert landscapes.

In her chapter about Lake Albert in Oregon and Laguna Mar Chiquita in Argentina, two stopover sites important for the Wilson’s phalarope, she asks readers to imagine themselves as one of these tiny, delicate birds — the only species to migrate the entire length of the Western Hemisphere, fueled by brine shrimp and alkali flies found only at salt lakes. In 2014, 2015, 2021 and 2022, Tracey writes, these birds arrived to find those feasts dried up in crusty mud as a result of human-influenced drought, human-caused climate change and diversion decisions to benefit human economies.

What’s at stake in these situations, Tracey argues, isn’t just a white and grey bird species that nearly blends into its background. It’s a wondrous corner of biology in which a bird has evolved to spin its shovel-like feet through the water in such a way as to force its prey to the surface in a mini vortex. It’s a chance to stand on salt-crusted banks in a strange, offbeat place and marvel at how it has become home to such lively, light and miraculous creatures. It’s the right for those creatures to thrive in an environment labeled uninhabitable by most everyone else.

“Birds feel like symbols of absolute freedom and transcendence,” Tracey writes, first quoting a songwriter, then adding her own observations. “That ascendant sacredness, birds’ flashes of color and joy brightening the mundane, came to feel for me like an explanation for how queer love felt so surprisingly natural, and so surprisingly holy. Queerness and biodiversity: both forms of difference that enrich the world.”

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Recent political developments have made life harder for the Wilson’s phalarope, and in many ways for queer communities across the world as well. But hope is on the horizon. In January, the bird species moved one step closer to being listed under the Endangered Species Act, which could trigger protections and ensure inflows for salt lakes within the U.S. as a habitat type on which they heavily depend.

In between outlining threats to her favorite landscape features and species, Tracey seems less worried about the resilience of the human communities in which she has found a home. Throughout the book, she shares observations revealed to her in adulthood of uncommonly subtle and quiet forms of beauty that seem unique to queer households and that mirror the underappreciated majesty of sidelined salt lakes. Juxtaposed against many setbacks, these joys, once discovered, are not easily suppressed or ignored.

“When loss is unavoidable, there is solace in grasping the ephemeral,” she concludes. “We grieve the fleeting and celebrate what remains. We catch the dense instants of life and hold tight to their richness.”

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her journalism for various outlets has won national awards for investigative reveals, feature writing, business reporting and innovative climate coverage. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology with a focus on native bees. Send tips or questions to joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com or follow her work on Instagram at @joan_bikes_arizona.