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'I think we deserve to start telling our own narrative rather than let others do it for us.'
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The “uncensored version” of the Unity Conference began outdoors. When weather forced participants inside, they were told to adhere to the limits of Utah’s anti-DEI law.
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Rowers practice their strokes as the sun starts its descent in the west over the waters of the Great Salt Lake. A recent April evening is their first time on the water, part of the second lesson of the season for this new group. If they like it, they could be ready to move beyond the stone-walled mariana and into the open water by the end of the two-week session of lessons. It's a chance to learn to row and appreciate the lake, which is in the midst of a long decline as its water level drops.
Despite the shrinking lake and the constant concerns surrounding it – environmentally, politically and economically – new people still come to Great Salt Lake to learn to row alongside others who have been on the water for decades. Instructors from Great Salt Lake Rowing, a nonprofit club based at the lake’s marina, promote rowing as a competitive sport and a recreational activity for people of all skill levels.
“I grew up here and always took the lake for granted,” said Sarah Waters, who joined the club in 2022 after taking one of the beginning rowing classes. “It wasn’t until I started rowing that I realized just how beautiful and amazing it is. I wish more people would be able to experience it, and I feel really fortunate that I found rowing and have the opportunity to be out on the water.”
The club, Waters said, leans into a shared passion for rowing. The “Learn to Row” lessons take place throughout the spring and summer to introduce the sport to Utahns living in the lake’s surrounding communities.
Both seasoned members and new rowers said people are drawn to the sport for various reasons, whether it’s to stay active, be a part of a welcoming community, or simply enjoy the beautiful nature of the lake. Reagan Bartholomew, who took the class in April, said she has been rowing on an indoor machine and recently decided to take her exercise to the water.
“I love nature, and I wanted to do actual rowing,” she said.
Learn-to-row lessons are for beginners who want to get out on the water and see what the sport is all about, said the club’s president, Meghan Saunders. Lessons cost $160 for a five-session course and focus on water safety, erging (land training), basic stroke, boat maintenance and how to row in a single boat. The club also offers private lessons and training for experienced rowers.
“I missed being on the water,” said Amber Schiavone, another learn-to-row student who spent considerable time on the waters back in Michigan, her home state.
Rowing on Great Salt Lake, she said, was “cooler” and more interesting than what she was used to back east.
While Utah’s ski resorts and national parks tend to garner more attention, Great Salt Lake has been a recreational hub in Utah for more than 150 years and is visited by swimmers, boaters, bikers, hikers and hunters. The lake is also home to the Great Salt Lake Rowing Club, which for over 20 years, has offered community to a group of rowers who hit the water up to three times a week from late spring to early fall and train for national competitions.
“[It’s] a community of incredible, supportive people,” said Kay Denton,who has spent the last 32 years rowing on the lake. “I’ve watched the board grow and enrich the club over the last 20 years.”
Crew from Great Salt Lake Rowing in an eight-seater boat. (Photo: Diane Horrocks)
Irene Lysenko used to row competitively and said she was looking for a club to join when she moved to Utah from Connecticut 11 years ago. The lake itself, she said, was a major draw.
“[It’s] a place that’s really unlike any other place in the state to be able to recreate,” she said. “It’s very personal to all of us.”
Once lessons have been completed, membership applications open to anyone who wants to join the club and continue to row on the lake. Registration and waiver forms must be completed or renewed each year to be part of the club. After officially joining, there are rows and competitions for members.
Club rows are held each Saturday on the lake, weather permitting. A different board member will “host” or organize the session, Saunders said. There is also indoor training in the winter from January to the end of March, with members practicing two days a week on land at a complex at the Utah State Fairpark.
Rowers said they’re finding more land these days as the lake loses more and more water each year, save for the last two years which brought heavy snowfall. The once deeply submerged reef near the marina, for example, is now regularly an obstacle, said Malika Homo, a member of the Great Salt Lake Rowing Club.
“We would just go straight out of the mouth of the marina, wherever the heck we wanted, and we didn’t even know that we were rowing right over a reef,” she said. “Then the water dropped, and we could see the reef, and then it didn’t cover back up the next year. And that was really scary.”
Saunders said she has also noticed decreasing water levels and expanding shoreline and is concerned not only for the rowing club but for the environment.
“The Great Salt Lake is a constantly changing body of water, but in the nine years I’ve spent extensive time on the lake, I’ve seen it shrink a fair bit,” she said.
When water reached its lowest on-record level at the end of 2022, the club was unable to finish its season on the lake, Waters said. By the end of August, the club had to find other locations to row.
A rower takes in the sunset from the waters of Great Salt Lake. (Photo: Sarah Waters)
Not only is the shrinking lake a concern for the environmental aspects, such as a dying ecosystem and unhealthy air quality, but it also has economic impacts that affect recreation activities in the lake, like rowing, and in the surrounding mountains. The Wasatch mountains, home to 11 major ski resorts, also benefit from the lake due to the environmental process known as the “lake effect,” which causes increased precipitation in the mountains.
“Utah is a destination for outdoor recreation,” Saunders said, “so it’s massively tied to tourism and growth. Many people move here for the outdoors or end up staying.”
While recreational activities draw people to the lake, whether to the marina’s boats or Antelope Island’s biking trails, Waters said the capitol city’s namesake body of water is much more than a place to play and relax.
“It's part of who we are as a state,” she said. “It’s an important environmental feature. It’s critical for our natural ecosystem. It’s important that we don’t let it die.”
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Makena Klinge, a student at the University of Utah, wrote this story as part of a College of Humanities journalism course in partnership with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative and Amplify Utah. The collaborative is a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake – and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
The stalks and husks of corn plants — the waste product left by combine harvesters — could be a key tool in the fight against climate change, and the University of Utah is putting up $500,000 to test the idea.
The U.’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy recently awarded its half-million-dollar Wilkes Climate Launch Prize to Applied Carbon, a Texas-based startup.
Applied Carbon won the prize for its mobile farm technology, which turns crop waste into a soil additive that decreases the need for fertilizer and stores the remaining carbon in the earth’s soil.
William Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center, said one of the main selling points of Applied Carbon’s technology is its potential to be made for scale.
“The scalability is very exciting, and you can see a path for them to really scale up across many different agricultural fields in the next couple of years,” he said.
The crop waste is produced when combine harvesters sail through tall corn fields, their rotating blades slicing through the stalks, filtering them into the machine’s mouth, where its spinning cylinders rip the corn kernels from the husk and stems. The combine saves the kernels of corn in its body and spits out the stalk and husk remnants, leaving it to waste on the flattened field.
The prize, one of the largest university-run climate prizes in the world, was created in 2023 to help jump-start promising climate solution ideas. At a September reception in partnership with the Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine, Anderegg awarded the prize money to Jason Aramburu, Applied Carbon’s CEO and co-founder.
At the reception, Aramburu said that “as a startup company … there’s often a funding gap, particularly in this sector, to get your technology to market.” He later added that the prize money will help the company produce more of their biochar machines and get them into the field.
Applied Carbon now has four mobile pyrolizers, a machine that can reach high temperatures without oxygen, and the company will apply the prize money to its field operations in Texas, Aramburu said. These operations, he said, work in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“We’ve got about 4,000 acres of corn that we’re working with. We will test our equipment [in Texas] and also test how effective the biochar is on the soil,” he said.
The yield and soil chemistry testing, Aramburu said, will determine if the process works and to measure the impact of the technology. The project, in its first multi-season trial run, is expected to remove 100,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2026, he said.
“That figure is still a bit in flux,” he added.
Biochar, a charcoal-like substance derived from biomass waste, is made through pyrolysis, a heat-driven process that uses virtually no oxygen and stores carbon in the waste product, according to Utah State University. Biochar, Anderegg added, is promising as a nature-based tool for fighting climate change because its carbon storage is stable and lasts hundreds of years.
“By contrast, a huge number of companies and governments are interested in tree planting, … but forests are at increasing risk from fire and drought and climate change,” he said. “We really worry about planting trees in one area that may be dead in 10 to 20 years.”
Darren McAvoy, an extension professor of forestry at Utah State University, said applying biochar at a global rate of 10 tons per acre over 30 years could put more carbon into the soil than has been released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s a completely academic example that will never happen, but it’s useful in that it shows that we could potentially get a handle on [climate change] with just this one approach,” he said.
In 2019, McAvoy developed Big Box biochar kilns, a low-tech method for producing biochar from timber, brush and logs. He said this “glorified dumpster” reduces hazardous fuels and preserves 35% of its carbon in the soil for hundreds of years. This method, he said, only works on wood waste, not on agricultural waste.
Applied Carbon’s technology, Aramburu said, works by moving in-field with agricultural residue, but it can also run stationary and convert wood biomass into biochar. The company, he added, is interested in expanding to Utah at some point.
“There’s a huge opportunity with forestry waste and forestry residue to process, particularly for fire prevention, and there’s also quite a bit of agriculture in the region,” Aramburu said. “So we are absolutely interested in entering Utah [and] the Mountain West in general.”
McAvoy said he sees the promise of Applied Carbon’s farm technology.
“It’s a great idea. I love the principle of it,” he said. “The big questions always are, is it economical? Will the farmer … benefit enough from the service to pay for it?”
ValJay Rigby, president of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation, said he is unaware of any farmers now using Applied Carbon’s product, but he said he supports continued efforts in research and innovation.
“The future of agriculture will always rely on innovative solutions to the challenges we face,” Rigby said via email. “... We appreciate the dedicated innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers working to come up with tools to help us be successful.”
When scaling the technology for mass production, Aramburu said one challenge includes integrating the pyrolizers without slowing down farmers’ operations. Running a combine is the most expensive time for a farmer, he said, and the mobile pyrolizer could slow them down during that “small window of time that the farmer can do his work without any interruption.”
Still, Aramburu said the technology runs an acre per hour, fast enough to be commercially viable. Farmers using the technology have responded positively, with one hay farmer increasing his yield by 60%, Aramburu added.
“That was a lot more than we would have anticipated,” he said. “But the response has been really positive. [Farmers] like the potential yield benefit of biochar, and they like that they’re doing something good for the environment.”
Applied Carbon is also among the top 20 finalists for the carbon removal XPRIZE. The company will use the Wilkes Prize funds to scale up its pyrolizers as it competes for XPRIZE’s $50 million award, Anderegg said.
Giovanni Radtke wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune. Radtke’s class partnered with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake — and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of the collaborative’s stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Giovanni Radtke wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Over the past four years, the University of Utah has reduced its annual water consumption by 55 million gallons – enough to fill more than 83 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Sustainability experts say that drastic drop is proof large institutions can play a key role in water conservation across Utah.
Water conservation “has been a really big priority on campus,” said Lissa Larson, the associate director of sustainability and energy at the U.
Larson pointed to a bill passed in the 2022 Utah Legislature, HB121, which mandates water use protections on state government facilities — such as the U campus — to swap out irrigation for water-wise landscaping that then uses drip irrigation.
HB121 requires state agencies to decrease water use by 25% by 2026. The U is on track to meet this goal by swapping out thirsty Kentucky bluegrass for more drought-tolerant plants, upgrading new irrigation systems for more controlled water use, seeking out and fixing leaks, and installing waterwise fixtures in new buildings.
The measures have reduced water use on campus from 376 million gallons in 2020 to 321 million gallons in 2023, according to the U’s sustainability office.
The U. has created a landscape master plan that includes increased water sustainability on campus and incorporates water-wise landscaping to reduce unnecessary water use, said Ali McKelvy, landscape architect at the U.
“The [plan] is something that the university does every 10 years,” she said. “It is an opportunity for entities – in our case, the university – to think about our future. How do we want to grow? How do we want to have a physical infrastructure that supports our goals as an institution?”
Over the past five years, McKelvy and her colleagues have started swapping turf that uses a lot of water with biograsses that work better with Utah’s dry, semi-arid climate, she said.
Once established with a watering schedule, the grass becomes self-sustainable with minimal maintenance.
“When we get funding available, we will identify areas that have turf that isn’t being used by students,” McKelvy said. “We’re finding those areas, and we’re replacing them with low-water use plants.”
The U. did not want to get rid of all high-traffic grassy areas, she said, because students use those spaces to relax between classes.
“[There’s a] balance of what green space looks like on campus, because having grassy areas is a part of student enjoyment,” Larson said.
In addition, the U. is saving water through its irrigation schedule, said John Walker, campus ground supervisor. The waterwise irrigation schedule encourages biograsses to go dormant, meaning campus lawns will survive Utah’s summer heat and become green and lush again with cooler temperatures and rain.
“We rely on an awesome irrigation team to make sure the work gets done, make sure [sprinkler] heads get fixed, make sure the system’s running how it’s supposed to be running,” Walker said. “The irrigation techs out in the field are checking on it, making sure it’s running how it should be, getting that feedback from them so we can make those tweaks in the software, and … we save water where we can.”
The U., he added, also implemented a smart irrigation system, called WeatherTrak, in 2018 that reduced outdoor water usage by 25% while saving on labor and maintenance costs.
“We can see this flow sensor is reporting this amount of water used,” Walker said. “We didn’t have that kind of capability before. Things talk to each other a little bit better and work together better with our irrigation system.”
The system, Larson said, sends automatic alerts when a sprinkler breaks or another water-related issue occurs on campus.
“That is the beauty of having these automatic shutoff valves,” she said. “It can … send tickets immediately to irrigation staff saying, ‘Hey. Come fix this.’”
Water savings on campus have come from both outdoor and indoor conservation, Larson said. Construction uses a considerable amount of water due to activities like mixing concrete, suppressing dust and cleaning equipment. If not managed efficiently, this can stress water conservation, according to Bluebeam, a construction software company.
According to the University of Utah, student enrollment increased by 5% in 2024 over the 2023 fall semester, leading to the need for more housing. The campus is expected to grow by 5,000 new student housing units by 2030 for incoming first-year students, according to @theU, bringing with it more construction.
Larson said her team is working to make those new buildings more water-wise.
“There are water-sense fixtures that are required, and toilets [that] flush less with water. So, as … the university grows and buildings are installed or torn down, things naturally become more efficient,” she said.
Since Gov. Spencer Cox signed HB121 into law in March 2022, the U. has decreased water use by 15%, and is on track to meet the goal of 25% by 2026, as the law requires. But officials want to continue conserving water on its campus and would like the Salt Lake community to adopt the same mindset, Larson said.
McKelvy said her team wants students to be involved and heard regarding water conservation on campus and Utah in general.
Larson said the future of water conservation lies in students actively participating or sharing their ideas.
“Supporting that big picture of sustainability on campus is also addressing our community,” she said. “Our choices around pollution, energies, et cetera, also impacts all of Salt Lake Valley.”
Caitlyn Homolya wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune. Homolya’s class partnered with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake — and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of the collaborative’s stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
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We also request organizations include the following text either at the beginning or end of the story text :This story is jointly published by nonprofits Amplify Utah and [Your Media Organization's Name] to elevate diverse perspectives in local media through emerging journalism. Caitlyn Homolya wrote this story as a journalism student at the University of Utah. For more stories from Amplify Utah, visit amplifyutah.org/use-our-work.
Salt Lake Community College is stayng focused on its commitment to sustainability efforts with renewable energy, transportation, and water conservation.
Among some of the more visible efforts are the solar panels installed across campuses. Clint Gardner, co-chair of the SLCC Sustainability Committee, highlighted current installations.
“We have several,” Gardner said. “There’s a parking structure [at Redwood] by the [Academic and Administration Building] that has solar panels on it."
Garder said there is also a larger parking structure at Jordan Campus.
“I believe there are solar panels on top of the science building, that’s an industry building here at the Redwood campus,” Gardner added.
According to Gardner, plans for additional solar parking structure panels are planned for the Redwood Campus and Jordan Campus, as well as other campuses.
Jacob Toone, a solar panel designer from Intermountain Wind and Solar, emphasized the improvements in solar panel technology.
“Wattage per square foot of solar panels has almost doubled in recent years,” Toone said. “A similar-sized panel that once produced 300 watts now generates closer to 590 watts, making solar energy more cost-effective without increasing installation costs.”
To help cut pollution, SLCC provides free UTA transportation passes to all active students, faculty and staff, enabling access to buses, TRAX, and FrontRunner.
According to SLCC’s sustainability plan, the school supports electric vehicle (EV) users by offering 19 EV charging stations across campuses and plans for more. These stations have already prevented over 26,000 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions — the equivalent of planting 667 trees.
As part of its sustainability efforts, SLCC has installed EV charging stations at several campuses, including South City Campus, pictured. (Courtesy of ChargePoint)
Belen Leon, a general studies major, has a positive outlook on the SLCC initiatives.
“I love the idea of solar panels. It’s a great idea,” Leon said. “The cost of power is much lower afterward. It helps with climate change, and I think that’s great.”
However, not everyone shared the same sentiment regarding schools shouldering the burden of reducing emissions.
“I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to try and minimize their own carbon footprint, so I don’t think it [should be] required for schools,” said Keegan Stout, a journalism and digital media major.
Water conservation is another priority at the college. The Redwood Campus uses a WeatherTrac system to adjust irrigation based on real-time weather data. Xeriscaping projects, which require minimal water, are in progress across SLCC properties, according to SLCC’s sustainability plan.
Through these efforts, SLCC aims to lead by example in reducing its environmental impact. With continued plans for renewable energy, sustainable transportation, and efficient water use, the college encourages the community to participate in building a greener future.
