Can storytelling save the Great Salt Lake?
That was the question posed at “Stay Salty: Storytelling, Community and the Fight for the Great Salt Lake,” a panel on Tuesday by The Impact Lounge.
The Impact Lounge was founded in 2024 as a way to bring storytellers and change-makers together in panel discussions. It operates at film festivals like South by Southwest, the Cannes Film Festival and, most recently, the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it was hosted at The Prospector Conference Center and Theater in Park City the first week of the festival.
Tuesday’s panel featured discussion from four activists fighting to bring awareness to the drying of the Great Salt Lake.
One of these activists was Chandler Rosenberg, co-founder of Save Our Great Salt Lake, a coalition to build awareness and education about the issue through rallies, social media and art. She said the problem with storytelling around the ecological crisis is that it often looks for someone to blame.
“I think we’re locked into this ‘us versus them’ narrative. Like, ‘The lake’s not saved. That must mean the decision-makers hate the lake,’” she said. “It breeds a lot of antagonism from our community against the decision-makers. It breeds mistrust. And then they are afraid to talk about anything with us because they think we’re going to call them out.”
Rosenberg said farmers are also pitted as scapegoats in storytelling around the crisis.
Agriculture, particularly crops like alfalfa and grass hay, accounts for 74% of water consumption from the Great Salt Lake Basin, according to a 2025 report prepared for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
“We urbanites in Salt Lake City are quick to cling onto that because it’s an easy narrative to say, ‘It’s their fault. It’s not us. They have to change. We don’t,’ when really, all of us need to be involved,” Rosenberg said. “We’re all in this together. We can’t afford to have division.”
Fellow panelist Meisei Gonzalez is democratizing narratives around the Great Salt Lake through podcast “Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories.”
The podcast explores personal impacts of the crisis: how the shrinking of the lake is impacting brine shrimpers’ livelihoods, how the disabled community is affected by the smog created by lake inversion and what it’s like to be an inmate at the nearby Utah State Correctional Facility.
“Whoever has the mic sometimes feels like the most credible. And we’ve given the mic a lot to the lawmakers, to the scientists, to the technical experts — Very needed. I love a graph,” Gonzalez said. “But handing over that mic to community members makes them feel credible.”
Rosenberg said ensuring community members’ stories are heard by policymakers remains a challenge for grassroots organizations.
“The goal is to have the community driving the policy agenda. And I think right now, we’re a little bit in the world of, ‘What are the short-term, reactive solutions or policy ideas to get water to the lake?’ which, of course, that’s what we need. This is an emergency,” she said. “But I think it does distract us. I think if we ask community members what they want, it would be more of the deeper, long-term systemic change.”
The panelists agreed that the drying of the Great Salt Lake is not just a water crisis, but a chance to examine overconsumption, giving back stewardship of land to Native American tribes and the interconnectedness of the Earth’s ecological health with humanity’s physical health.
While storytelling alone won’t save the Great Salt Lake, it certainly plays no small role.
The Tuesday panel took place five days after the Sundance premiere of documentary “The Lake” brought global attention to the crisis. Gov. Spencer Cox appeared at the Salt Lake City screening the next day and recommitted to his promise of filling the lake by 2034.
The final question of the “Stay Salty” panel was what kind of stories the panelists wished to tell about the Great Salt Lake in 10 years, two years after the passing of Cox’s deadline.
“I want to tell a happy story,” Gonzalez said. “But I also want to be able to tell a story that’s really honest, to be able to say, ‘It was a scary time. There were lots of failures. And we didn’t get it right the first time. But we kept trying.’”