Her antidote for 'climate grief' and a shrinking Great Salt Lake? Don't look away

We all have those places where we feel most inspired, content — most alive.

For me, it's Teton County. That stretch of high plains and higher mountains that extends from the southeastern most corner of Idaho and into Wyoming. I've spent a lifetime watching the sun rise and set over the Teton mountains. But a couple of summers ago, I watched those same sunrises and sunsets with dread.

Wildfires from as far as Oregon had blown so much smoke into the valley that you couldn't make out the tops of the mountains. And the sun was an electric orange fireball — the most stark kind of warning that things on this Earth are not as they should be. I felt sick. Not just because of the smoke that seeped into our clothes and our lungs but because of what it meant. I had understood the effects of climate change from an intellectual level for a very long time. But this was the first time I felt it in a much deeper, more personal way.

The experts call this "climate grief." I wanted to understand what this felt like to someone who has spent their life writing and thinking about our psychic and spiritual connection to the natural world. Terry Tempest Williams immediately came to mind. I first