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Sandy’s new female speaking club strives to amplify women’s voices
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These women have entered their public speaking era.
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"It [is] so important to Utah history that we don’t brush this under the rug."
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“When you forget your history, you repeat it,” says a 94-year-old Japanese American in the University of Utah student-made documentary.
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They meet with alfalfa farmers, lobby lawmakers and talk easily about the impact of Great Salt Lake on the economy — all while thinking about what they want to do after high school.
They’re members of the Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake — teenagers from across the Salt Lake Valley focused on education, collaboration and legislation regarding the capitol city’s namesake body of water, said Liam Mountain LaMalfa, the group’s founder.
“Our greatest accomplishment … is bringing to the forefront the notion that the youth care about Great Salt Lake,” said LaMalfa, 18. “The [lake] is directly tied to our future — our future quality of life in the state.”
On April 20, LaMalfa and the group will build on that goal by hosting a “Saline Symposium and Celebration” at Salt Lake Center for Science Education. Open to all ages, the free event will include a youth-led panel discussion, teen speakers and state leaders discussing how to save the lake. Register here.
The coalition launched in the summer of 2023, after the First Unitarian Church’s Environmental Ministry – a group of like-minded adults – started talking to the teens about how they might want to get involved in saving the lake. Lisa Mountain, LaMalfa’s mom, was part of that group.
“I very quickly thought that it would be really important to involve youth, west side residents and youth of color,” she said.
Mountain said the high school group “resoundingly” decided to lobby the legislature. After taking several field trips to the lake and being featured in a July 2023 PBS Utah episode of “Utah Insight,” LaMalfa decided he wanted the group open to all high-school and college-age youth in Utah.
That’s when the group became the Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake.
The coalition has a three-pronged approach, said Mountain, who acts as an adviser for the group. The teens focus on informing and educating themselves, collaborating with other advocacy groups and lobbying for legislation on Capitol Hill.
She added the group takes initiative, and in less than a year, have toured Bear River Canal Company, participated in vigils at the Capitol and met with lawmakers like Sen. Nate Blouin and leaders like Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed.
Sen. Nate Blouin talks with members of the youth coalition inside the Utah Capitol Building and during Youth Lobby Day. (Photo: Lisa Mountain)
“They inspire me constantly,” Mountain said. “They are motivated and dedicated and passionate about saving Great Salt Lake and about protecting their future in Utah and in the world.”
In early March, at one of their biweekly meetings at First Unitarian Church near the University of Utah’s campus, five of the group’s 15 members shared what the coalition means to them and why they believe saving Great Salt Lake is important.
India Elliott, a senior at Granger High School, said she joined the group because she’s always been interested in activism and is concerned about the shrinking lake’s future and its long-term environmental impact. She wants, she said, to be able to grow old in her home state.
“I noticed every winter, and even in the summer, when the air quality gets really bad, and I can barely see the mountains,” she said. “I'm literally looking through dirt and crud … and it makes me feel emotionally worse.”
Great Salt Lake generates around 15 dust events a year, according to reporting by The Salt Lake Tribune. Spring and summer are becoming more unhealthy, and dust from the exposed lakebed could carry arsenic, copper and mercury.
Cloud Garcia-Ruiz, a senior at Salt Lake Center for Science Education, said they’ve always felt a deep connection to the environment, which led them to join the coalition.
“When I heard that the Great Salt Lake was in trouble, I thought, ‘Maybe this is like a chance to finally do something about it,’” Garcia-Ruiz said.
One of their favorite activities was a tree-planting event, they said, because restoring a part of nature that used to be there felt nice. The event last October with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation allowed the teens to work with the tribe’s mission of stewardship of the land and environment, Mountain said.
For Elliott, attending the vigils for the lake – which took place every morning for all 45 days of this year’s legislative session – stood out as a highlight. Community members interested in saving Great Salt Lake gathered on the steps of Capitol Hill every day. Members from the youth coalition joined every Tuesday at 8 a.m., alongside Nan Seymour, a local poet who has spent the last three legislative sessions holding some sort of vigil for the lake.
“We sing, we dance,” Elliott said. “It's light-hearted when you're kind of, like, surrounded in doom and gloom.”
Great Salt Lake generates nearly $2 billion for Utah’s economy annually, according to the state’s website. It contributes 5 to 10% to the lake effect snow, creating $1.2 billion for the ski industry.
“We're looking at a serious economic downturn, which is a scary thought to think about the workforce being impacted by losing billions upon billions of dollars in economic growth — gone,” LaMalfa said.
Part of the coalition’s approach is educating others and informing themselves of the science behind Great Salt Lake. Soon after the coalition’s founding, the group toured the Bear River Canal Company, which oversees 126 miles of the Bear River, Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary.
Mountain said they’ve also met with alfalfa farmers and other stakeholders, like Commissioner Steed, to get a variety of perspectives on the issue of the lake. Steed discussed with the group what youth could do to help save the lake, which includes a cultural shift, LaMalfa said.
“To really understand his perspective and cement the notion of cultural change is the thing we need,” he said.
Elliott made a slideshow about saving the lake to educate classmates and friends and to present at events. In it, she argued shifting the culture means changing how people think about using water and made suggestions like removing non-functional turf grass, installing water-wise landscaping and metering water use.
Izzy Khachatryan, a junior at Skyline High School, said she knew she wanted to get other youth involved in the issue of Great Salt Lake.
“Culture drives policy, and we need policy changes in order to get water back to the lake,” Khachatryan said. “In order to do that, we obviously need people to be aware of the issues and be committed to the issues and that starts with advocacy, which is what one of our groups' main focus is.”
While Utah lawmakers dubbed 2022 “the year of water,” the most recent legislative session did not deliver the same vigor around issues related to the lake. The number of bills passed was deemed “average” by experts who said lawmakers made enough “technical changes” like measuring, tracking and saving water to keep water policy moving in the right direction.
During the session, members of the youth coalition met with lawmakers – including Blouin, a Democrat representing the South Salt Lake City neighborhood – to discuss how they could be most impactful. Blouin, who has been working with the group since last summer, said engaging with the teens has been great.
“The legislators are not particularly representative of the population as a whole, definitely from an age perspective,” Blouin said. “Giving younger folks an opportunity to get up there and to feel like their voices are being heard even when it can be challenging … that’s important.”
Elliott said it was rewarding to experience lobby day on the hill — asking people to support bills or thanking them for their support.
“It was very empowering to talk to the important people and be heard,” Elliott said.
Utah is a young state, with the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing a median age of 31.3 years with the country’s highest share of people under 18 at 29%.
“These are … young people who are going to have to live with the consequences of the actions that we take as legislators and the decisions we make as a state,” Blouin said.
Students will join other state leaders and lawmakers – including Steed, Rep. Angela Romero and Sen. Luz Escamilla, both Democrats from Salt Lake City – at the event on April 20 as part of a panel discussion about the lake.
As for the future of the coalition, LaMalfa said he would like to bring chapters to high schools and the University of Utah. The group, he said, has made it clear Great Salt Lake is their future.
“The more I talk to people, the more people seem to have a little bit of an understanding of Great Salt Lake,” he said. “That understanding seems to be getting steadily larger … [and] when every person in the state really knows about Great Salt Lake, it'll be impossible to do anything but save her.”
Vanessa Hudson, 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.
Vicky Wason eats meals with her neighbors in a common house and takes her turn doing community chores. Her children grew up playing with friends in the commons. She's never bought a lawnmower because she can always borrow someone else's.
Wason, who teaches linguistics at the University of Utah, is one of 50 people living in a tight-knit community on the west side of Salt Lake City. While they use the same spaces and things, Wason said residents of the Wasatch Commons cohousing community in Glendale also share values like cooperation, diversity, accessibility, affordability and sustainability. They’ve made it their goal, Wason said, to prioritize eco-friendly practices in their everyday lives, which they said could help places like the Great Salt Lake.
“We like living simply, and this place has allowed us to do that,” said Wason. “That's part of our values – not consuming too much.”
Established in 1998, Wasatch Commons is made up of 26 clustered townhouses sharing amenities. The first and only cohousing community in Utah, the founders dreamed of a place where families shared values and companionship, said Wason, who served two years in the Peace Corps before becoming one of Wasatch Commons’ first residents.
“All the things that normal Americans buy, we didn't have to,” said Wason. “I've never bought a shovel or a lawnmower – this community shares everything.”
According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, there are currently over 165 cohousing communities in the United States and another 140 in the planning process. Co-housing communities like Wasatch Commons started in Denmark in the late 1960s and spread across the country.
“We’ve created a community here on the west side, and I know my neighbors really well, they’re down-to-earth people,” said Wason.
Wasatch Commons residents, who live in a cluster of 26 townhomes, say they share everything from lawnmowers to shared values of environmental sustainability. (Photo courtesy Vicky Wason)
The members of Wasatch Commons said they crave community. Every aspect is orchestrated to foster interaction. Residents share garages, outdoor equipment and yards, Wason said. When walking through the commons, visitors will see children playing inside the shared common house or the adults cooking breakfast together. Meticulously planted flowers and plants adorn the pathway through the neighborhood, a testament to efforts made to beautify their community.
“The children always wanted to play with each other in our community,” said Wason, recalling raising her own kids at Wasatch. “They had a lot of loving people to watch out for them. They got a lot of smiles, hugs and support. People loved on them for their whole life.”
It’s not uncommon to see parties and potlucks with all the neighbors in attendance. Every week, one resident, Wason said, hosts a Saturday cafe and turns on an “open” sign above her kitchen window to announce it’s time to eat. It started, Wason said, when the woman’s husband died suddenly.
“She needed a reason to get up every day,” said Wason. “During the week, she's preparing, cooking, and gathering ingredients, thinking about what she's going to make. That keeps her busy Monday through Friday, and then she hosts cafe Saturdays.”
‘The best we can’
Residents aren’t just bonded by their shared space, they also have a sense of shared responsibility towards the environment around them, including Great Salt Lake. Wood from a railroad line that crossed the lake was reused at Wasatch Commons for beams on porches and inside the common house dining room.
Gerome Bosteels-Tcaciuc and Vicky Wason gather nearly every Saturday with other residents of Wasatch Commons for brunch. (Photo: Tess White)
Just 17 miles east of Great Salt Lake State Park, Wasatch Commons residents, like Gerome Bosteels-Tcaciuc, said the attention the ecological crisis at the lake has received in recent years creates a sense of hope.
“We are trying to save the lake,” said Bosteels-Tcaciuc, who works for Great Salt Lake Artemia, a brine shrimp harvesting company, “but there's a lot of work that needs to be done.”
Like his son, Thomas Bosteels collects brine shrimp cysts, which are harvested as food for commercially grown fish and shrimp. He moved in at Wasatch Commons two years ago, he said, but has been working at Great Salt Lake far longer.
“I’ve been working with this lake since 1985,” said Bosteels, 60. “It means a living, you know, but I think there's an emotional connection there …It’s just beautiful when you are out there in the winter, and you wake up in the morning and see those sunrises and sunsets.”
Bosteels-Tcaciuc, like his father, said the lake is more than a body of water – it’s deeply connected to who he’s become.
“My favorite, favorite memory of the lake,” he said, “is when we went to the lake with my dad and harvested the brine shrimp together.”
While replenishing the lake to ideal levels will require households, lawmakers, industry and farmers to make significant changes, even small adjustments to lower water waste can help to preserve Utah’s environment, according to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
With sustainability as one of their core values, residents of Wasatch Commons said they have made it their goal to live as simply as possible, prioritizing eco-friendly practices in their everyday lives.
To help preserve water, for example, residents xeriscape, use drip irrigation and collect rainwater. They know they are only one small community, Wason said, yet they are doing what they can to make a change.
“We’re not perfect, and we don't shame each other,” Wason said. “We’re human beings doing the best we can to meet up to our values.”
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Tess White, 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.
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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