Douglas Tolman

Inland Sea is a series of images and text made around the edges of the Great Salt Lake from 2017-2020. Taking influence from the Center for Land Use Interpretation ethos, I made my way around the lake trying to understand the language of land-use and my own personal narrative around the Great Salt Lake. This series was completed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and never exhibited completely, though select images were included in (in)land, a dual exhibition with Alec Bang in June 2021.

I have lived within a 15-minute drive of the Great Salt Lake for most of my life. To many, the lake is stinky, wasteland full of insects and mud. To some, it’s a source of income through mineral extraction, out of sight and out of mind from laws and regulations. To the Nɨwɨ (Goshute) people, this is an ancestral home. To me, it is an ecological wonder, the likes of which are only found in a few places around the globe. The Inland Sea has long been a source of inspiration for writers and artists, like Alfred Lambourne who lived in solitude on the Sea’s Gunnison island for a year in 1895-1896.

Hundreds of thousands of pioneers, my ancestors moved west to conquer and colonize the Great Basin. Within a few decades, they had found that the Inland Sea had financial potential through mineral extraction.

The Inland Sea would become diked off into hundreds of smaller ponds to moderate the salinity and content of other minerals. In this way, the extraction companies could pump water in and out of their leased compartments of the lake, using evaporation ponds to remove the minerals they wanted before returning the brine water back to the main body of water.

Very little research was done on the effects these companies had on the Inland Sea and its inhabitants. With financial gains as the main driver, the extraction companies would divide and conquer the Inland Sea into several tiny, manageable seas. The extraction of Magnesium in particular would become a huge asset to the local economy, providing thousands of high-paying jobs. It would also become the worst source of air pollution in the country, in the form of dioxins, a powerful neurotoxin.

It wasn’t until the 1970’s when several small groups of locals would begin to recognize the effects on the health of the people and environment around these extraction facilities. A study by the University of Utah in the 1990’s would show that Tooele County had 7 times the national average of Multiple Sclerosis deaths, one of which would be my biological Grandmother whom I never met. Though correlative evidence has linked this health crisis to the high concentration of dioxins from Magnesium extraction, along with the chemical and nuclear weapons being tested in the bombing ranges west of the lake, no officially recognized causation or legal repercussions have been solidified.