Salt Lakes
An Unnatural History
by Caroline Tracey
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Pub Date Mar 17 2026 | Archive Date Feb 28 2026
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Description
An acclaimed nature writer’s dazzling love letter to a strange ecosystem and a moving odyssey into her own identity.
More than a hundred salt lakes dot Earth’s surface, most of them hidden away in remote desert valleys. But today nearly all of them are at risk of drying up. Their death is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse.
Writer and geographer Caroline Tracey didn’t know this when she began crossing paths with salt lakes during her early twenties. From the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea, across the American West and around the world, the unusual beauty of these shimmering, uncanny bodies of water captured her imagination. In Salt Lakes, Tracey travels across four continents to seek out and describe these extraordinary vanishing lakes and the people dedicated to saving them. She takes readers along on her adventures by train in Kazakhstan and on an inflatable raft in California, on her encounter with Mormon environmentalists in Utah and an Australian Aboriginal painter seeking to capture her country for her children. In evocative prose, she traces shorebirds’ seasonal migration and the history of water law.
As Tracey chronicles the decline of the lakes, she also experiences dramatic changes in her own life and conception of self. Running parallel to Tracey’s environmental journey is an intimate, human one: her story of finding queer love and building a home in a world fast being remade by ecological crises. By the end of Salt Lakes, she shows us how seeing the environment through a queer lens could help save our water system.
An exquisite blend of travel writing, memoir, and reportage, Salt Lakes is an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.
About the Author: Caroline Tracey holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in English and in Spanish has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Advance Praise
"Caroline Tracey shows us the beauty, vitality, and necessity of landscapes both strange and familiar. This is nature writing as it should be." -Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
"Precise, lyrical, and at once deeply personal and epic, Salt Lakes brims with brine shrimp and birds and charismatic bacteria—and an unexpected sense of life pushing through against the odds. I was gripped from the first page to the last." -Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
"Salt Lakes is a perceptive, poetic ode to one of our planet’s most vital, and most overlooked, ecosystems. Caroline Tracey plumbs law, science, and literature in a debut as gorgeous and vibrant as the lakes she loves." -Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
"A stunning illumination of a peculiar landscape, from a writer fueled by devotion, curiosity, and rapture. Caroline Tracey deftly demonstrates the human impact on fragile ecosystems, and what these ecosystems can reveal to us about ourselves. Salt Lakes made me feel a deeper kinship with the world." -Lauren Markham, author of A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
"Salt Lakes is not just a book of nature writing, not just a memoir, but like the salt lakes themselves, something much more wondrous and precious. Caroline Tracey leads readers through her growing understanding of herself and the strange beauty of the ecosystems around her, and along the way reminds us of the abundance and possibilities inherent in queer lives and landscapes." -Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
"Strange, overlooked, and unloved places find a voice in Salt Lakes, a brave and openhearted book. Caroline Tracey shows the world’s salt lakes as real places worthy of protection, but also as mirrors reflecting human history, identity, and desire." -Melissa L. Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324089025 |
| PRICE | $31.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 288 |
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