Maria Archibald

The first time I visited the Great Salt Lake after moving to Utah in 2020, I was blown away. It was one of the most spectacular places I had ever seen — unlike anything I’d witnessed before. 

Later, I realized that many of my friends who lived here their whole lives had grown up with the belief that the Great Salt Lake was smelly, ugly, and buggy — somewhere to avoid. I couldn’t reconcile their experiences with my own. But then I realized that this story was crafted on purpose by powerful interests that want to suck the lake dry. Our apathy makes their job easy. We don’t fight for a place we think of as a wasteland.

Maria Archibald is a co-producer of Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories. She has spent a decade organizing regionally and nationally with youth-led climate justice groups such as UYES and Uplift. She was previously the producer and host of the Sustain podcast with the University of Utah’s Sustainability Office.