Throughout Abby Ellis’s feature film debut about the Great Salt Lake, scientists offer grim forecasts of the lake’s future as it shrinks from drought and overuse.
Her documentary, “The Lake,” tells the stories of scientists Ben Abbott and Bonnie Baxter and Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed as they work to win support and funding from state leaders to save the lake.
Ellis said the film is, in part, a story of changing public opinion. When Abbott and Baxter estimated in January 2023 that the lake could dry up in five years without drastic action, Gov. Spencer Cox said that wasn’t true.
“At that time, the governor was casting a lot of doubt on the work by this group, and I think he has since turned a corner and is moving in the right direction with everybody,” Ellis said on KPCW’s “Sundance Reel” Jan. 23.
Ellis told KPCW she has seen a “huge shift” over the past few years in how state leaders perceive the Great Salt Lake crisis.
“Honestly, I started this [project] horrified and deeply pessimistic and not wanting to raise my six-year-old here and ended it feeling really optimistic – not just about Utah, but our country,” she said.
To film “The Lake,” Ellis and her team traveled with biologists along the shores of the lake to collect samples, into labs to see the ubiquity of arsenic in the dried-up lakebed, and to Gunnison Island, which has transformed from a refuge for American white pelicans into a graveyard.
Almost every saltwater lake in the world is dying due to unsustainable water use, according to the University of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Project. If the Great Salt Lake can be saved, it would be the first lake of its kind to be brought back from the brink.
Cox told audiences after a screening in Salt Lake City Friday, Jan. 23, he believes the state can do it.
“The Great Salt Lake will be full in 2034, and we will be the first great saline lake in the world to make this happen,” he said. “They didn’t do it in California; we’re going to do it here.”
Many in the audience made their skepticism of state leaders known during the screening, booing when Cox asked Utahns to pray for rain and when lawmakers only gave a fraction of the money requested for dust monitors. They applauded when one of the ecologists asked, “Where are our leaders?”
When the lights came up, Cox said it’s not so simple to make major changes.
“I don’t need to convince the people dressing up like birds that this is important, right?” Cox said, to chuckles from the crowd. “I have 104 legislators, and they see the world very, very, very differently. And so, it may come out that some of us don’t care, but it’s the way we’re trying to communicate, in a way that the people we need to convince will understand.”
Faith is a throughline in the documentary. Abbott, one of the ecologists, calls the record-breaking 2023 snowfall a miracle; some farmers insist God did not lead Latter-day Saints to Utah to see the lake dry up.
Already, though, a public health crisis is looming. Most of Utah’s population lives downwind of the toxic dust kicked up from the exposed lakebed. Biologist Baxter has trouble breathing due to the decades she’s spent studying the Great Salt Lake.
In September, leaders announced a $200 million effort to save the lake. Onstage Friday, Cox promised more “really big investments” this year.
“I’m just telling you, over the next six months, you’re going to see some really big investments – some of them coming from the state, some of them coming from other places – that will just dwarf anything that you’ve seen in the past,” he said.
He urged festivalgoers not to forget about the Great Salt Lake once the credits rolled.
“We need you here,” he said. “We need you here, supporting the changes that are happening. We need you here, advocating. We need you here, donating. We need you here until the lake is full.”
In-person screenings of “The Lake” are sold out, but online tickets are available from Jan. 29 through Feb. 1.
