Standing on the edge of Utah’s terminal Great Salt Lake is to witness the religion of over-water consumption in the desert. Our thirst is greater than this inland sea can bare as it is disappearing in the shadows of climate chaos, extreme heat and a megadrought not seen in 2,500 years. Twelve million migrating birds depend on this water body for food, rest and breeding. Flocks of Wilson’s phalaropes, small and handsome shorebirds, spin in saline waters creating water columns alive with brine shrimp and flies and resulting in a feeding frenzy. American avocets and black-necked stilts stand stoically in the shallows. Thousands of ducks are sprinkled on the lake like pepper. Water and sky merge as one. There is no horizon. All appears well in this serene landscape of pastel blues animated by birds. It is not.
The health of the Great Salt Lake is only as strong as the health of the human community that surrounds it. And vice versa. If the 2 million people living within the Great Salt Lake watershed with Salt Lake City at its center do not mobilize to put more water in the lake, the death of the Great Salt Lake will be their own. This will also be the demise of millions of migrating birds.
Why this ecological emergency does not move our state’s legislative body to act quickly by getting more water into a collapsing ecosystem is difficult to reconcile. Why they are advocating for measures to shore up the mining companies and lake-supported industries even more so.
If we see fascism as a system of authoritarianism under the rule of a dictator with disdain for democracy and pluralism of any kind, even other species; an insatiable desire for control that delivers a deleterious effect on those oppressed; and a fetish for righteous nationalism, then I do not think it is a leap to see our exploitive relationship with Earth – call her Gaia, call her Mother, call her home – as part of an ongoing agenda of a global fascist regime that for centuries has waged war on the environment. Money is the dictator. The value of a dollar weighs more than the life of a phalarope in most municipal decision-making.
This regime is not limited geographically to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany or Francisco Franco’s dictatorship over Spain for close to four decades after the Spanish civil war in 1939. We, as societal agents with an allegiance toward capitalism embedded in systems of dominance and species exceptionalism, are complicit. Our obsession with controlling nature has brought us to the brink of climate collapse, with species extinction and ecological fragmentation now a planetary health crisis.
Here is a footnote from history. During the Spanish civil war, the International Committee for the Salvation of the Treasures of Spanish Art, an international committee of museum curators and art historians, were concerned about the masterpieces in the Prado Museum being bombed by Gen Franco and his army who were fighting in Madrid. A plan was made to remove 525 paintings from the Prado and send them to Valencia in 1936. Under the cover of darkness, 71 trucks transported these priceless paintings from the Prado to Valencia.
These iconic works of art were finally stored in the safety of a silver-mine shaft in Figueras, Spain, where they stayed until 1939, having endured a harrowing journey of mountainous travel, broken-down vehicles and bombings. In the summer of 1939, these masterpieces were transported to Switzerland where they were greeted as ambassadors against facism, featured in an exhibition at the Palace of Nations during the Geneva Expo 39.
The exhibition catalog reads like a Who’s Who in the annals of European art: 34 works by Velázquez, 38 by Goya, and 25 by El Greco, as well as paintings by Rubens, Zurbarán, Tintoretto, Titian, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Brueghel, and Hieronymus Bosch.
People from all over Europe came to pay their respects. After the exhibition, the paintings returned to Madrid by train, carried “on roundabout routes, with all lights in the coaches extinguished”. Ironically, Gen Franco, now in power, signed the paintings back into the custody of Spain where they came home to the Prado.
This is a local story with global implications. It’s about a small group of people mobilizing in the name of beauty and protecting their artistic history. Can we mobilize our love worldwide on behalf of our natural histories? Do we have the will and imagination to dismantle the hierarchy of our species in favor of all other species with whom we share this planet?
Of course, we cannot hide nature’s “masterpieces” as the Spanish resisters did, but we can stand in their defense and uphold their right to live and flourish. We are at war with an authoritative power structure hell-bent on killing every living thing in their defense of a “belligerent nationalism”. It’s a war we must win.
If facism is an authoritative form of government, where does our own authority reside – within a dictatorship or our citizenship? Fascism can only go as far as the people will allow it. In Utah, we are making waves. There is a powerful citizen’s movement to protect and restore Great Salt Lake, a portrait of austere beauty. Indigenous leaders, ecologists, poets, artists, and musicians, with youth leaders from marginalized communities are calling for environmental justice honoring the intrinsic authority and priceless nature of all species. We will bring water to the lake we love – not only through the power of our tears in grief and in joy, but because as our consciousness rises, Great Salt Lake will rise with us.
Terry Tempest Williams is a writer, naturalist and activist
