Anna Pocaro Photography
When the life of someone you love is at stake you stay with them.
Vigil for Great Salt Lake 2026
Join the Making Waves Artist Collaborative for the 5th annual Vigil for Great Salt Lake!
Since 2022, we have kept vigil on behalf of Great Salt Lake. In 2026, we will once keep vigil at the state capitol building throughout the Utah State legislative session. Everyone is invited!
Celebrate the Species with us every Friday at 5 pm from January 23rd to March 6th at the capitol building.
Walk the Waves with us every Monday at 8 am from January 26th to March 2nd at the capitol building.
We can't wait for you to meet our new baby bison, kestrel, and coyote puppets!
Why keep vigil?
Celebration is resistance. Reverence is resistance.
We gather to bear witness to her beauty. We gather to grieve. We gather to create beacons of possibility. We gather to increase our tenderness towards brine shrimp, microbialites, and winged citizens of the air. We gather to carry each other through spells of despair. We gather to revere all that is vital and alive.
Even as the active collapse of our ecosystem challenges our notions of hope, we devote ourselves to a future shaped by human reverence, humility, and reciprocity. Everything we do matters. In the face of this crisis, who will we become?
Values for keeping vigil
1. Creative Resistance: We facilitate demonstrations to make love and grief visible through poetry, art, and song.
2. Devotion: We turn our hearts towards the Lake and toward our neighbors who are on the frontlines of this crisis, both human and beyond-human. We commit ourselves to caring for them through collapse.
3. Presence: We bear witness through calm, steady attention.
4. Reparative Returns: We uplift Indigenous leadership and stand in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty & liberation.
5. Sovereignty of Bodies: We seek dignity and rights for the Lake’s body and all bodies, especially Queer/Trans and Disabled bodies, so they may life, love, and flourish.
6. Geological Time: We acknowledge the ancient sentience of this ecosystem and the Ute, Shoshone, and Goshute Peoples who have always been stewards of this place. We work to protect future generations, both human and beyond-human.
7. Tenderness: We cultivate gentle regard for all life, landforms, and waterbodies.
8. We Belong to the Lake and Each Other: Belonging is inherent and cannot be earned, bought, or sold.
9. Justice at the Center: Environmental justice, multispecies justice, and disability justice guide our work.
Vigil Photo Highlights
Featuring Anna Pocaro Photography
