Living in Salt Lake City, most U of U students and faculty share concern for the health of the Great Salt Lake. In the Honors College, a tight-knit community of students and faculty are pursuing solutions for the delicate lake environment in a Praxis Lab on “America’s Inland Sea: Impacts of a Shrinking Great Salt Lake.” The Honors College creates and offers different Praxis Labs each year, which are specialty two-semester courses that provide foundational knowledge in the fall and immerse students in field work in the spring.

“America’s Inland Sea” is led by Dr. Kevin Perry and Dr. Molly Blakowski. Perry, known to some as the “Dust Doctor,” has been researching lakebed dust and its impacts on air quality, the climate, and human health for the last three decades. Blakowski works for the US Geological Survey, specializing in watersheds and dust. The two work in tandem alongside various guest speakers to develop their 13 students’ understanding of the Great Salt Lake and why it is shrinking. “The students have to do current events every week, so they’re staying abreast of what’s going on,” Perry explains. When I visited, student Eleanor Murdock gave a current events update on the impact of the avian flu on the lake’s Eared Grebes, and Gaby Karakcheyeva presented the class with information on the tundra and trumpeter swans wintering at the lake. Each sparked a full-class conversation on the impacts of these situations regarding the larger context of the Great Salt Lake’s ecology.

Perry’s work on the Great Salt Lake led him to become a leading researcher on the lake and on lake dust around the globe. Having studied Utah’s lake beds for the last eight years, he is involved in both data collection and risk mitigation. “I’ve probably spent 200 days or more out on the lake doing research, going to the dry parts of the exposed lakebed and trying to better understand, you know, which areas are dust sources and what’s in the dust. And basically, now I’ve transitioned into trying to come up with ideas on ways to mitigate dust, to try and reduce dust coming off the lakebed,” Perry explains. The mineral dust hotspots and the potential threats they pose are under active research, and the state’s equipment and funding tend to be lacking.

Perry has incorporated these challenges into his curriculum in the Praxis Lab, giving students the opportunity to explore them firsthand. “For a lot of the students, [the dust] is one of the things that drove them into the class, because that’s what they had heard about,” Perry says. “We did ecology, we did economics, we did cultural significance, we did air quality impacts—it was a two-week module that focused in on the dust, so they’d have a better understanding.”

Part of the focus of Praxis Labs is collaborative immersion, and people work more effectively together when given the opportunity to connect. To boost friendships, Perry and Blakowski organized a camping trip at the lake in the early fall. “That was a really nice bonding experience,” he said. “We got to learn about the geology of Antelope Island and the lake. We got to talk about some of the biology that’s going on out there, take some nice hikes, do some sightseeing, tell stories around a campfire about the history of Great Salt Lake.”

After a semester of exposure to the distinct elements of the lake and each one’s significance in the culture and livelihood of Utah, it was time to find and commit to a niche part of it all. At the close of the first semester, each student proposed and voted on a collaborative project for the spring. The winning proposal was Ethan Hood’s, the idea being to assemble and submit an application for the Ramsar Convention’s designation of the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands. Ramsar is an intergovernmental treaty that protects wetlands and guides the usage of their resources.

The Ramsar application process is complex and time-consuming. It requires obtaining permission letters from the landowners; designating an exact physical boundary, acquiring letters of support from local agencies and a member of the legislature; and completing Ramsar’s criteria sheet, a plan for management, and descriptions of the area’s ecology. Clearly, the cohort has their work cut out for them. To tackle such a lofty project, the students appointed one-to-two leaders per Ramsar criterion and are utilizing a collaborative, task-oriented software to create a clear path forward. Because of the complexity of the project, the cohort is gaining experience in practical workforce skills like document version control, effective and accurate usage of sources, and communication with authority figures, to name only a few.

Though the application is and will continue to be an involved process, the students are individually motivated and have are maintaining a great stride in their work. Ethan and Gaby have been appointed as co-managers of the overall project. “I’d say our Ramsar project is deeply meaningful to me. It’s a project that has ‘weight’ to it, and something I feel we can all be proud of once the semester is concluded,” Ethan says. “Progress is being made steadily, though we’ll have to be mindful of the semester deadline—it will catch up to us faster that we’d expect!”

Asher Ireland, who is in charge of the GIS component of the project, analyzed other Ramsar sites and compared their boundaries to the Great Salt Lake’s. During the group check-in, he presented his findings to the cohort, explaining the implications and plausibility of various boundary options. The boundary lines correspond to different jurisdictions, and therefore different protections for wildlife and resources, and processes for gaining permission.

The cohort for the Praxis Lab hopes to have completed and submitted the application by the end of the semester. Their work has the potential to protect the Great Salt Lake and its intricate ecology to an unprecedented degree. Perry explains, “There are no wetlands on the list of important wetlands in the entire Intermountain West, which seems like a travesty, considering how important Great Salt Lake wetlands are.”