Gretchen Henderson - Life in the Tar Seeps | Tanner Humanities Center

At Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty, a motley crew of scientists walk the mudflats of a reputedly dead sea to study diverse forms of life amid fossils in the making. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car in a crosswalk, made of manufactured asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made the Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing slowly congealed. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake and its entangled lives. How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? How do we move beyond narrow concepts of the beautiful and the ugly to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledge and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea contemplates the ways that others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than only this region of North America. As Henderson witnesses scientists, artistic curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering possibilities for environmental healing across the planet.

"Reimagining Biodiversity Narratives and Pandemics"

"Life in the Tar Seeps"

Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023) grew from her 2018–19 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and an Artist Residency at the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities. Her book has been seeping across media including Ecotone (Notable, Best American Essays 2020), Mining the West (with the UMFA & Marriott Library), Scholarly Texts (Holt-Smithson Foundation), ASLE Spotlight, exhibitions and co-authored articles in Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology (in collaboration with the Luc Hoffmann Institute/World Wildlife Fund). Her recent essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, The Kenyon Review, with more invited/forthcoming in LA+/Landscape Architecture Plus and Storied Deserts: Reimagining Arid Environments. Her fourth book, Ugliness: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books UK/University of Chicago Press) was translated across five languages. Gretchen is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, where she was a 2020–22 Faculty Fellow at UT's Humanities Institute. She also teaches at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia and, in 2023, is the Aldo & Estella Leopold Writer in Residence in New Mexico. She lives in the biodiverse Sonoran desert of Arizona.

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