Water shapes cultural, social, and ecological systems. Yet, dominant economic, political, and academic frameworks often treat water as a backdrop or passive resource, ignoring it as an active participant in meaning-making and relationship-building. Viewing water as “nonliving” obscures how it participates in and co-create relationships, limiting understanding about impacts of and responses to climate change and environmental degradation.
This thesis takes a mixed-methods and participatory approach including semi-structured interview, photovoice, and participatory mapping to examine relational practices between environmental advocates and the Great Salt Lake, a desiccating saline lake in Utah, U.S. As the lake continues to decline, dominant Western frameworks often position it as an extractive resource or a site of management, obscuring alternative ways of relating to the lake. However, some environmental advocates push back on this framework, instead conceptualizing the lake as a living, relational, and agentive entity through thought, language, and practice.
This research identifies widespread discourse about the animacy and agency of the Great Salt Lake in environmental advocate communities. Specifically, environmental advocates use several linguistic and conceptual strategies to construct the lake as animate including gendering or feminization of the lake, conceptualizing the lake as a living entity, and including the lake as an agentive body that shapes environmental action. These framings challenge anthropocentric assumptions while maintaining distinctions between human and nonhuman life. I argue that animate conceptions of the lake are not merely descriptive but constitute how relationships with the lake are imagined and enacted, in turn informing ethical responsibilities and responses to ecological change.
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Low-probability, high-magnitude crises, such as the 500-year flooding of the Yellowstone River in 2022 are predicted to increase in both number and severity in the coming years. Amenity and recreation economies, particularly those in the Intermountain West, experience the impacts of disasters and a changing climate acutely and across all elements of society. By shedding light on how to understand recovery and resiliency through the individual community experience, this study seeks to co-create actionable preparedness and recovery recommendations for disaster managers and local community leaders.
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Saline lakes around the globe are facing dessication and degradation caused by human activity and climate change. If not addressed, these changes hold severe risks for ecosystems and human health. While there is a long history of scientific studies on the ecology, geography, and hydrology of saline lakes, social science remains limited. This project seeks to review social science on saline lakes to identify key themes and gaps in literature.