Push It Somewhere Else
Elizabeth Wenger
My aunt lived out past the city where things stopped being so city-like. The rural-suburban in-between. She had potbelly pigs, and big birds, a goat. She grew tomatoes the reddest and biggest I’d ever seen. A little Eden in Jenks, OK.
Then they decided to build a housing development behind her place. Paved roads and homes that backed right up to her fence. I say they because it’s always a they. That’s how development goes. Land gets bought and houses get thrown up overnight. It’s all in the passive voice. The invisible machinations of development. A march of contracts and plans and money.
We walked around the development once when it was still a ghost town of half-constructed houses. Quiet roads kids would one day bike circles in. Hollow frames that would one day hold beds and tables and lives.
I can't remember what was behind her home before the development went in. Places have this funny quality of changing and giving you a sort of amnesia so they no longer contain a ‘what was’ — they become a singular ‘what is.’ And that is part of the process of development. Wiping the land so clean, not even memories stay.
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For the first half of 2022 I worked in Utah, doing drywall in luxury homes. The homes are giant complexes. Private movie theatres, indoor saunas, tennis courts, hot tubs, two or three kitchens, a thousand stairs, vaulted ceilings, and slides that go from the second to first floor. Castles for single families that take an army to build.
I was working on a mansion in Holladay, outside of Salt Lake City in this woody, developing neighborhood. The new mansions spread out like wildfire in the huge lots. Cleared trees make way for manors.
We were installing a tray ceiling when we got to chatting with a carpenter about a development plan in Utah Lake. The lake’s been a problem for years. Sewage dumping devastated its ecosystem. Frequent cases of harmful algal blooms. Almost half of the lake’s water evaporates out. And at the lake’s floor, a toxic bed.
Thousands of years ago the lake provided food to the Fremont people, and later to Ute, Paiute, Northern and Western Shoshone, and Timpanogos people. When the Latter-day Saints came in the 1840s, they settled the area. Settling here implies a process of killing and pillaging the native population. Developing the land. Again, the process of ‘wiping clean.’
The carpenter called the plan a dream. The sort of miracle solution made by guys with lots of money & little knowledge. “They want to dredge the lake and build islands out of what they dig up. Build a little city out there.”
When we talk about this plan—futuristic islands in a dying lake—I think about the SpongeBob episode where a giant worm is heading straight for Bikini Bottom. It’s going to destroy the town, but then Patrick comes up with the brilliant idea to “take Bikini Bottom and push it somewhere else.”
So that’s what they do. Push the whole town out of the way. Like in movies where they shoot rockets at meteors to keep them from destroying Earth. Just push it somewhere else. It’s a fictional fix.
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The other day I listened to a podcast about salmon migration—how some of their migratory pathways have dried up, so now some aquarists take the salmon from hatcheries, pump them into semi-trucks, and drive them across the country so they can spawn.
The journalist telling the story notes how you might drive by a truck of salmon and never notice. The trucks look just like fuel tankers, only they’re full of fish.
Making islands from shallow lakes. Driving fish across the country. Last-ditch efforts to reverse a disaster of our own making.
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My aunt’s house no longer seems so rural. With the development came a huge mall nearby, and a big movie theatre. The city came to her.
Development begets more development. A self-propelling force. Growth like a tumor we can’t stop feeding. The land a sacrifice to the God of human progress.
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Back at the house in Holladay, a colony of bees moved into the worksite. They built honeycombs in the walls. We had to take down the drywall panels to let them out. Hundreds of them flew around like they owned the place. Like it was their home.
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In my time as a drywaller in Utah, I drove all over the Salt Lake and Utah Valleys to new developments built on pristine lands. It was hard not to see the lots around the housing developments—full of wildflowers and tall grasses, untouched, but for the for-sale signs stabbed into the soil—and not think of the things to come.
There is loss in development, though they wouldn’t have you think so. The idea is to focus on newness or on the idea of improvement – best to center the attention on the erection of a building, not on the ground beneath it, bulldozed and cemented over. And it isn’t just the earth that disappears beneath the bricks and steel. Cultures fade from memory under the violence of development.
Ancestral knowledge is lost without a place to enact and practice that knowledge. That way of life.
I look out on Utah Lake and imagine an island for the rich jutting up from the water. New construction sutured onto the landscape — an afterthought. The horizon of mountains over the lake blocked by cranes and concrete.
Elizabeth J. Wenger is a former member of the Utah Conservation Corps. She became interested in the impact of human development on ecology when working construction in the Utah Valley. She left Utah to start an MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. Utah still occupies her mind and appears in her writing.
Owning and Being Owned by Utah Lake
Andrew P. Follett
Utah Valley is the perfect place to be disoriented and reoriented. In my early adulthood there, I became disoriented and reoriented around the landmark of Utah Lake. Like the religious community to which I belong, I am owned by the lake, and I argue that the Latter-Day Saint population of Utah must reorient around it and its history to sustainably inhabit the “Mormon West.” We are bound by a duty to stay and care for it. This is both a moral obligation and, poetically, a microcosm of the Public Trust Doctrine—the legal principle which stands poised to conquer the islands proposal.
It was, in large part, for Utah Lake that the Mormons came to the Great Basin in the first place. Once they arrived, settlers competed with the native Timpanogos people for access to the lake and, as a result, committed atrocities in 1850. In my own life, it was in large part for Utah Lake that, in 2018, I was studying environmental science at BYU, where I worked with titan professors Ben Abbott and Brigham Daniels. Upon learning of the violent history surrounding Utah Lake, I decided I needed distance from the homeland and left BYU. Then, it was for Utah Lake—in the name of fighting the islands development proposal—that I oriented myself towards law school.
But from my current, sea-level vantage point in the Northeast—as hydrologically and culturally far-removed as one can get from Utah Valley—I’ve realized that I had it all backwards in trying to leave. I believed that fleeing the scene of my people’s atrocities would wash me of their blood and sins. However, I failed to understand the relationship between community, violence, and place: that is, what it means to own and be owned by a place.
In a country founded on bloodletting—and, in eyes of the earliest Mormons, thereby redeemed—violence and ownership are deeply linked. In this tradition, “[k]illing fosters a connection to property. The mob’s ancestors killed for the land, so now the mob will die for it.” Through our ritualized relationship with the landscape, the Mormon people have married ourselves to “our” place, sealed by the sacred token of bloodshed. But instead of a right to own, these past atrocities create a duty to stay—inverting the common Anglo-American idea of property. Justice demands that the conquerors do not flippantly put off what they’ve taken by force. Our generational relationship to the place becomes one of servitude, not mastery or exclusive dominion.
That is, rather than owning the land, we’re owned by it.
But instead of grappling honestly with this violent past and assuming our duty of servitude, we’ve engaged in collective forgetting—a kind of disorientation. We’ve substituted the real violence committed against Indigenous people with a sanitized story of religious exodus. We’ve incorporated a tale of settling an uninhabited, unwanted desert wasteland—the mythic narrative of Farmer’s cornerstone of the Mormon sociological canon, On Zion’s Mount.
Remembering the history of Utah Lake, and comprehending how it owns us, will recontextualize our shared obligation to stay. It may guide us to promote sustainable environmental management. In fact, I’d argue that it’s only by appealing to this sense of cultural and identarian connection within the Mormon people—rather than outsider political-environmentalist values—that sustainable management of Utah Lake and these valleys is possible.
This obligation to stay mirrors the legal relationship between the State of Utah and Utah Lake. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, written into the bedrock of Utah law, the state not only owns Utah Lake, but has an inherent, nondelegable obligation to own Utah Lake. Its possession of the land is no more flexible than the basic responsibility to govern and regulate community safety—hence the inherent futility of the privatization and islands development proposal. The Public Trust Doctrine captures the inversion of ownership and our collective obligation, as Mormon heirs of colonial violence—“the rock our fathers planted” —to stay and care for Utah Lake.
Our ancestors imprinted this place deeply on the collective Latter-Day Saint identity. Better yet, perhaps, they imprinted us deeply into this place. To ignore this, or to forget how they did it, reiterates atrocity. Remembering means accepting the obligation to stay and care for this landscape. This is what it means for Utah Lake to become a monument to true remembrance, and it is a first step towards atoning for the sins of our past.
Andrew P. Follett is a student at Yale Law School and eighth-generation resident of Utah, interested in the intersection between history, law, and the Mormon identity. Andrew became involved with Utah Lake issues as a BYU student in 2018 and has spent the last four years writing about Utah Lake, the public trust doctrine, and the Utah constitution. He has worked with a range of grass-roots Utah organizations to lobby against the Utah Lake Islands project.