For the past decade, Professor Bowen has been focused on how human activities alter landscape processes. She points to the Bonneville Salt Flats as a local, illustrative example of a landscape where the impact of human activity has altered the Earth. In this case, the salt crust has changed.

The flats are famous as the fastest place on Earth. Bowen says, “The hard white, flat surface is perfect for race cars to set world speed records. But then the racing community started to say, ‘This place is changing. We used to get 13 miles of salt racetrack and now we can only get six or eight miles.’ And they need that distance to both get up to the high speeds, but also to safely slow down.”

The altered landscape has a broader impact than merely on speed racing, though. Bowen led the most recent study commissioned by the Bureau of Land Management to assess what’s happening with the salt crust. “Just as the racing community informally suggested,” she says, “we found that indeed the volume and thickness of the salt crust has diminished in recent decades.”

Bowen explains salt is an important commodity and economic resource for the state and the Salt Lake Valley. “We mine groundwater from below the salt crust to make potash, which is a potassium salt that is a vital part of agricultural fertilizers. It’s sold globally to enhance food production,” she says. “So there’s this tension between the importance of salt as an economic resource with a crucial purpose and the local impact of that extraction and what that means for a unique but very passionate community of stakeholders who really value this celebrated landscape.”

“It started with a handful of faculty from few different departments such as law, geography, atmospheric sciences, and so on,” Bowen explains. “We realized we were all working on air quality, water availability, how infrastructure fits within our ecosystems, and many complex sustainability ideas, yet we were all in different buildings and in our different disciplinary silos.”

Not anymore.

After many years operating as the research and faculty arm of the Sustainability Office, the GCSC was recently reorganized to become part of the university’s graduate school. Bowen admits that “Working in sustainability can be highly emotional and intense because there’s a lot of bad news.” But she says it’s less overwhelming when she sees what her colleagues are doing so that they have more insight to the serious issues they all face.

Professor Bowen credits the university, alumni, and other supporters for helping the GCSC establish an effective interdisciplinary community.

“There are opportunities for, say, engineers to learn about policy or for planners to consider art as a part of their work, or all of these interdisciplinary components where each discipline can bring a certain part of the solution,” Bowen says. “I’m just a geologist looking at the sediments and the chemistry. I need to work with engineers and policy makers, and artists to inspire, and philosophers to help me understand why we should do this—and why it’s our moral obligation.”

by William Sorensen