Craig Denton, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Rob DeBirk, 28 March 2008

Transcript (36 pages) of interview(s) by Rob DeBirk with Craig Denton on March 28, 2008

Denton grew up on the east side of Salt Lake City. He attended Highland High School. A non-Mormon, he had the perspective of being on the outside looking in. Topics discussed include empty spaces like vacant lots that have since been filled in, the concept of wilderness, proposed wilderness areas of Utah's West Desert, the Las Vegas water grab, his love of fishing and the Bear River, his career at the University of Utah, and the fight against the MX missile. Denton also talks about literature that influenced his thinking, including the works of Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman and Rachel Carson. He also talks about the photography of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde. Interview is part of the Utah Environmentalists Oral History Project. Interviewer: Rob DeBirk

CRAIG DENTON Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Rob DeBirk 28 March 2008 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project u-1855 American West Center, Environmental Humanities Program, and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah MY NAME IS ROBERT DEBIRK. IT IS MARCH 28, 2008 AND I AM MEETING WITH CRAIG DENTON. CRAIG, WOULD YOU PLEASE SPELL YOUR LAST NAME FOR ME? D AS IN DOG, E-N-T-O-N. AND THIS IS AN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED FOR THE UTAH ENVIORNMENTALIST ORAL HISTORY PROJECT, THE PROJECT OF THE AMERICAN WEST CENTER AND THE MARRIOTT LIBRARY. RB: Craig, could we just start out with some basic information about your life such as where you were born? CD: I was born in Salt Lake City. RB: Have you lived in Salt Lake City your entire life? CD: Most of my life, yeah, except for a short period of time going away to school as an undergraduate and then some time in the army, and the just periodic... a couple of other episodes. A graduate...post-graduate fellowships or travel, but for the most part, I’ve been here all my life. RB: Where in Salt Lake City did you grow up? Where in the valley? CD: On the east side. [ went to Highland High School. RB: And would you mind telling me just a little bit about what it was like growing up on the east side in Salt Lake City? CD: (Chuckle)—Well, I... it’s an awfully long story, but it’s... RB: I like long stories. CD: Yeah, well... It probably for me the story is less about growing up on the east side versus the west side, since I didn’t have... don’t have any experience growing up on the west side, with all the meanings of the differentiation between the socio-economic split. I really don’t know how to characterize it, but I can say that in my high school, Highland High School, at the time, and this would be in the period 1963-1965, we had one person, one student, who could be even possibly termed a minority student. She was a Japanese CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 American. Today, in that same high school, it’s my understanding that there are ten different languages spoken in that high school. So, there’s definitely been a dramatic change in at least my area of the east side from when I was going through high school to what it is now. It just reflects the overall demographic changes in the valley and of course in the state. For me though, probably, what was more meaningful rather than the east side designation is the fact that I grew up as a non-Mormon or a gentile in a predominantly Mormon community, and that had more of an effect on me than the fact that [ grew up on the east side. RB: Would you mind speaking for a moment about what that was like growing up as a gentile or non-Mormon in Salt Lake City in the 1960s? CD: Well, it always provided me with an outside-looking-in kind of perspective. And so, I remembered, and it certainly struck me when I first read Ralph Ellison about the notion of being an outside man, and that really reverberated a lot with me, that a lot of my experience and I realized it was based upon the fact that because of that experience I developed a certain perspective, like I say, outside looking in. I think at times when you’re not part of the dominant culture you become more sensitized to cultural differences. And while I certainly don’t want to suggest that my experience would be equivalent to Ralph Ellison’s or somebody else who is a minority, still, this is the only place in the United States where you can grow up being a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and be in a minority. RB: (Chuckle)—That’s very interesting. Growing up on the East Bench, did you spend much time in the foothills or in the canyons? CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: Oh, I was always outside as a kid, yeah. You know, we a... unlike children today, we spent most of our time outdoors, whether or not it was, you know, sports, playing catch, playing games in the neighborhood with other kids. We didn’t have the same sort of technologies that draw kids indoors today. But even beyond that too, that we had an appreciation I think for the wild, for instance like at the bottom of our street, the Emigration Creek was still above ground at that time, and it was an area that my mother was always cautioning me not to go there because it was perceived as being dangerous to her. You know, dangerous in the sense that there was a lot of trash thrown in the area, it really wasn’t treated with a lot of respect but we loved it because it was a little bit of wildness in our neighborhood, and we liked to go down there and play cowboys and... [recording paused] RD: Okay, back on. CD: Okay? Well, we were talking about the outdoors and my neighborhood growing up, and we had this place that we called the gulley, and it was just simply where Emigration Creek was continuing to meander through town. And so we liked to go down there, because it was a little bit of wildness in our neighborhood, and we would play army or cowboys and Indians and it had a certain aura about it, partly because mothers thought it was a dangerous place and we kind of thought, well that makes it even that much more attractive, so it was a place for us to get away to. Oddly enough, or sadly enough that stretch of Emigration Creek now is all underneath a culvert. It’s been turned into one of these regional neighborhood parks, which has a kind of a nice polished, but plastic sheen to it, you know with the kid’s playground equipment. It doesn’t provide the same sorts of wildness that it did for us growing up. When I grew up in Salt Lake it was... there were a CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 lot of areas that were yet to be filled in. And so while the subdivisions, post-World War II subdivisions were certainly expanding rapidly, there were places where there were still fields, you know, where alfalfa was grown. And so we had a feeling that we were still somewhat attached to a larger environment that wasn’t citified, wasn’t urban. And we weren’t too far away from areas where it was largely sagebrush steppe. So it was certainly a much different feeling than kids would have today. RB: Yeah. I wonder if we linger for just a moment over the idea of wildness and what it meant as a child to be growing up with that sense of wildness, because that’s something that quite a few people I have spoken with have mentioned and I’m interested in the different ways we think about wildness because... the way... and also in the way we conflate both wildness and wilderness, which is a common occurrence. And so I guess broadly speaking do you have any thoughts on the way in which wildness and wilderness seem to come together in some narratives? And then also if you want to make it perhaps more personal, if you can speak specifically to the concept of... or the idea of wildness and maybe the importance of that for kids. [ mean maybe just an elaboration of what you were just speaking of, if that’s okay. CD: Well, I think I would make a differentiation between those two words in the sense that wildness is something that’s internalized to some degree, and it’s a feeling of being attached to something that existed, certainly mythologically before we were here, but that is still present and is still active and that it’s a feeling that’s internalized and there’s a yearning for it. A returning to it let’s say, or at least a willingness to experience it on a weekend—it’s okay to retreat, maybe from the rest of your workaday world, but to still have wildness present in our lives, but more particularly a sense of wildness in the self. CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 Okay, so it’s a feeling that’s internalized. Wilderness, though, is a place outside of the self where you go to, where you are guaranteed to experience wildness. And it’s like a...treated like a preserve in the sense that wilderness has an official designation, at least that’s what the term means for us mostly now, but I think wildness is possible in other places other than wilderness. Wilderness is a region or a place that has boundaries, whereas wildness, because it can be internalized, it’s something... it’s a perspective that you can carry with you. It needs refreshment and it needs nurturing, but it doesn’t actually have to be nurtured in a particular place that’s bounded by a legalistic interpretation or a jurisdiction that says wilderness. RD: I just want to make sure that [ understand... I want to clarify the concept of or the idea of this being internalized. When you say that it is internalized, do you mean that it is something that is constructed in the same way that if you were talking about Foucault or someone like that, you are talking about internalization of authority as a way of also selfcensorship and so that’s not to say that’s what’s going on but, are you talking about the same kind of constructed... CD: No, I don’t think it’s constructed, I would prefer to use the term that it is rediscovered. That it’s a fundamental attachment somewhat atavistic for human beings as we become socialized and civilized and urbanized, but that there is still this latency that is attached to wildness and wildness in the outdoors, but kind of a primeval, primordial sort of thing that we rediscover that we don’t construct. RB: Okay, all right. So, I really like this conversation of wildness and wilderness and so I’m wondering if you could talk more about wildness in the sense that, what is its role? CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 What is its purpose, of having an internalized sense of wildness? Then I’m also kind of thinking about a political context for this. CD: Yeah, right, and I think that that right now it’s that rediscovering the wildness or having an appreciation for the wildness naturally leads to a preservationist approach and in that sense it enters the political context. And that people who sense wildness, or who have rediscovered it, or haven’t lost it, they certainly then juxtapose it against what seems to be a counter condition of people who have lost any understanding of wildness and that from that position we... you become concerned that we see an evolution of society that without being grounded in a sense of wildness, or in wildness as an attachment to the environment, okay? An environment that, while it evolves based upon how human civilization is forcing changes, that wildness, from my understanding is something that is not immune to civilization, in fact it could be harmed by civilization, but for those who sense a kind of wildness that we realize that not only may we lose something in a public psyche, okay, but more important if we lose track of wildness that we are more likely to make mistakes in the way that we interact with the environment. RD: Do you see those two things, wildness and civilization as necessarily being binaries of one another? How do you see that relationship? CD: Yeah, [ would say that they’re potentially binaries. RD: Uh-huh, okay. CD: I mean, we have to recognize... binaries in the sense... that’s the way that it has become, or that’s the way it is becoming, okay? As civilization, as urban Americans lose track or lose sight or lose the feeling of wildness, then they do become... I think they start to develop a binary relationship, oppositional relationship to the environment. What CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 we have to do is we have to realize that we human beings are definitely still a part of that environment, that we can’t be separated from it. And that we lose track of the fact that we are part of the environment if we think that we can control it, or that we have the science or that we have the public, potential public and political will to do things to overcome the environment, to make it work for us. That kind of a positioning, which is a kind of binary position is ultimately fatally flawed, and I think that we are starting to understand that now in a halting kind of way as we look at these very fundamental and wrenching issues, for instance, like global warming or the energy crisis or the water crisis that are all just being folded together, and we realize that we can’t control our environment. That’s because we’ve positioned ourselves outside of it. We don’t see ourselves as having limits, as being creatures that have to move within that environment, like all creatures understand that you have to live and function within what the environment provides for you. And you can’t labor outside of it, otherwise you’re not going to be successful. RD: I realize by asking this question, risking it for a lot of your life, which I would like to get back to at some point, but it just seems the proper place to begin discussing your recent work with the Bear River, and your recent book about the Bear River. I’'m wondering if um... Could you please take what you were just discussing about how we must learn to live within our environment, you were just discussing that more on a global scale, and now take that back to the Salt Lake Valley? Take that back to the Wasatch Front. CD: Well, as you point out, my recent work on the Bear River is more about water, water policies, use of water in the so-called New West. And the essential problem that we are wrestling with, and I think the point’s made in the book, and I try to make this in every CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 kind of public presentation I make, is that we have a finite supply of water in our area, and I’'m going to define our area by watershed, which is what John Wesley Powell encouraged American western civilization to organize itself around—watersheds. Unfortunately, we didn’t pay much attention to him. I think that’s a flaw, a fundamental flaw that we’re still having to wrestle with, um, but if we don’t recognize that we have a finite supply of water, we’re not going to get any more... Now we can, you know, we can play with these schemes of trans-basin water transfers like is being played out right now with Las Vegas trying to tap into underground water supplies in Spring Valley, Nevada, and even in Snake Valley, Utah, or as Los Angeles did with Owens River that yeah, we can forestall the point of recognition, but ultimately there is only a finite amount of water and you can suck another region dry. Urbanization provides a way to accumulate economic resources to do that. But ultimately there is a day of reckoning. We can’t generate water. And yet we have a steadily expanding population, especially in this New West, that demands more development of a finite supply. You can’t have a steadily expanding population that demands a certain level of water use that it demands right now and then ask that of a finite supply. It won’t work. Eventually, something has to give. And so that’s where [’'m talking about and understanding the environment and resources that we have to come to grips with those kinds of very difficult questions that says that we do have limits—that human beings have to understand our place in the environment, and we can only ask so much of it, and in fact, we’ve been asking more of it than it can provide and that’s leading us to a point of crisis, and not too far into the future. RD: How did your project with the Bear River begin? CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: Well, Sebastiao Salgado always points out that the seeds of one documentary are usually found in one that’s just been finished or has been done in the past, and I think that was the same for me, that in the middle 1990s I began the second half of an earlier work, that this work eventually became People of the West Desert, and eventually 1’1l have to go back and talk how that originated, but in the People of the West Desert work, which also became a book, that I surveyed the lives, lifestyles, aspirations, and senses of self-in- place in this area that we call the West Desert of Utah. And, as I was doing that ethnographic study in the form of a documentary, I came to realize how important water issues are in the lives of these people who live in this high desert of western Utah and eastern Nevada. How critical it is not only to their lifestyles and their ability to live where they do, but also the way that they’ve absorbed it into their psyches and how it is so fundamental to them. And so when I finished that work, I had learned a lot about water and been sensitized to water issues, and, of course, when you finish one work, especially when you’re in higher education, you are looking for something else to do, and you are in this constant gerbil cage of looking for something else to publish. And so I wanted to continue doing something along that line. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. I thought water issues were a good thing to be working on, because I knew it was going to become an increasingly more important issue in the future. So when I started to see these news reports of talk about damming the Bear River to harness what would seem to be one of the last developable water supplies of a large nature for northern Utah, and some of the public opposition that was starting to mount against putting in dams in certain places, that within the larger context that I think it was... I’'m not sure which president it was...whether or not it was Clinton or Carter, but I think it was Carter, because he asked CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 the West to start to deal with the fact that you can’t have the Central Utah Project and Central Arizona Project...that there are limits. But ultimately everybody realizes that the era of dam building was over, and yet here in Utah we were still talking about putting in more dams. So I thought, well, here’s another way to talk about water issues that are more immediate and have already entered the political sphere, because the state legislature had decreed that we will develop our portion of water from the Bear River system that’s been guaranteed to us by the Bear River Compact. And we’re out in front of the other two states... Wyoming and Idaho... in trying to develop that resource, so I thought, well, here’s a political issue that also is a water issue that is also an issue that could be a very interesting documentary because this river, the Bear River, really has kind of flowed underneath public consciousness. It lacks the charm or the majesty or the excitement of let’s say the Colorado or the Green River, and it’s one that seemed to be more readily sacrificed to this inexorable urbanization and growth of the West and consequent need for these resources. So I said, well, here’s something else I can do, and it had that extra added effect of keeping me outdoors and allowing me to use my talents in photography and writing and I saw definitely a book project and a public exhibit project, so it seemed like everything was coming together, so that’s where I went. RD: Can you speak for a moment about the way in which you chose to construct the book.... The way in which you have these very interesting personal narratives—people that have been living with the river for a while and then your photography. Had you thought of different ways of laying the book out? CD: Well, my original thought and one of the things that I wanted to do early on, because when I say the Bear River has kind of been underneath the level of public consciousness 10 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 and that we’ve treated it with a certain amount of disrespect in the sense that we’ve lost any sight its...of a river as having a place. We tend to look at rivers now as just parts of municipal plumbing systems. You know, they’re just a way to convey water from one place to the next, or more appropriately, to convey water rights from one rights holder to another rights holder downstream. So rivers have just...we’ve completely lost sense of what we used to see as a river... as it having a kind of, certainly, not only a place in the environment, but a place in our lives, and it was something we weren’t in opposition to. In fact, we oftentimes looked at rivers with a sense of awe or majesty or we saw them as partners beckoning us into the West let’s say, for settlement. We followed them into the interior West, so we are necessarily tied to them in ways that we’ve completely lost track of. And so, because of the power of our civilization, or at least our perceived power of our civilization to control our environment, we’ve allowed rivers to become much less important in our political ideology than they were at one point. And so, what I wanted to do was to say, well, can I capture the spirit of the Bear River and tell its story from its point of view? So that’s kind of a dramatic perspective. Can I tell the story of the Bear River from the Bear River’s point of view? So the next step is, well, how do you do that? And, there are ways to... that poets have developed in terms of metaphor but especially personification where a poet can adopt the spirit of something else and allow the words to speak the spirit of the thing. So I thought well, could I write the narrative from first person perspective? In other words, become the Bear River. And talk about these issues that were important, because the river interacts with the land so the river takes... is always carrying the land mark in the waters that constitute the river, so I could talk about the ways that I abrade against the land and I pick up certain minerals or sediments. I 1l CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 would have to talk about how I as the river interact and nurture an ecology that not only is riparian, but extends beyond the riparian areas to steppes... in other words the river’s influence is not just immediate. It extends to a wider geographic area, and I would have to become the voice of the river and talk about how I affect things at a distance. How I affected history, and ultimately how I interact with stakeholders. So I thought, well, boy that would be different. So I tried to think about ways of doing that, and I had a brief discussion with one Utah poet, Emma Lou Thayne, about this possibility, and she encouraged me to think about doing that because she’s a poet, but what I was concerned about is that there would... as I tried to think about ways of doing it, that this wasn’t going to be some sort of an epic poem. I’'m not a poet. [ have no experience writing poetry. So I was afraid that if I went that tack that the result would wind up being kind of pretentious perhaps, precious, and it would ask me to perform in a mode of communication of which I have no experience doing. And, that really my writing skills are more of a journalistic, documentary nature so that’s what I should be doing. And I recognize that it’s silly for me to place myself... to assume the voice and the spirit of the river when really I am part of this human enterprise that is putting pressures on the river, and the very fact that [’'m doing a documentary and I’m in the publish-or-perish syndrome is that I recognize that I’m acting as an agent of a certain part of a human culture and I have to recognize that. And so, I decided to... okay, that I had better use a third person perspective. I can still write about the river in trying to capture the spirit of the river and certainly represent it, and that was the key. That [ can represent the river’s issues as if I were the river, but I have to speak and be honest with the fact that ’'m a third person observer, and recognize that. And then I also went to a visual communication 12 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 conference, and I asked people, okay, how as a documentarian, as a photographer, is it possible to photograph from a river’s point of view, which is what I would have to do if I’'m going to have a written narrative from the river’s point of view, then the photographic narrative would also have to be from the river’s point of view, which becomes an even more difficult proposition because the river’s point of view would probably have to be some sort of a... your vehicle, your... if it’s a journey piece, would be the journey of a water molecule as it happens to be caught in the water cycle and gets deposited through rain or snow into a river and then works its way, in this case, into the Bear River and the Great Salt Lake. Well, obviously, people say, well, you can do critter cams. You could have an underwater camera, and you could float that down the river. And I point out, well, in a lot of places this river’s very silty and you’re not going to be able to see anything whatsoever. And, plus, I don’t have that technology, and so [ realized that, (chuckle) okay, there’s no way that I can photograph a river from the river’s point of view. It too is necessarily from a person on the outside looking to the river. And I had to recognize that as a limitation of what I was going to work within. So after I went through playing with those ideas, I realized that it’s not workable, and if I really want to get something out that’s going to have some sort of communicative and rhetorical impact, I’m going to have to recognize who I am and the limitations I have as a narrator in a documentary. And so I went from that point. RD: I guess I want to hear more about that. So you actually did end up including some poetry, because I remember reading it. CD: I did. RD: Could you maybe discuss why you decided to keep some poetry? 13 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: Well, I didn’t want to give up completely the idea of adopting the voice of the river, to try and maintain a spirit of the river, because I’m afraid that by losing track of the spirit of the river, we’ve allowed ourselves to do things to the river that are not just harmful to rivers, but ultimately are harmful to ourselves as human beings who have to live in an environment. So, but I knew that it was not going to work if I attempted to do it all the way through, so I reached a point of compromise, where I said, well, what I’ll do is I will introduce each one of the chapters. And the chapters in the book are organized around these various perspectives whether or not they are geologic, geomorphologic, hydrologic, ecologic, historical, and then finally stakeholders, so that at the beginning of each chapter I would write a poem, I guess. I hesitate to call them poems. I call them interludes. But I would adopt the voice of the river, and I would use personification as my figure of speech, as if I were a poet assuming the spirit of the river, and writing about the issues that are about to be developed and unfold in the following chapter from a third person perspective. But I would adopt the voice of the river and speak from “I” in other words. I would be speaking as the river to a human population and I would lay out the issues that the human population was going to read in the subsequent following chapter, but from a river’s point of view. And, I had never written poetry before. It’s free verse poetry; I guess that would be its classification. So I decided I would do that. I took a risk doing that, not having written poetry before, but I wound up writing one of these poems to introduce every chapter. And, I think I have a consistent voice that I have been able to capture of the river, which is of course, my perception of how the river would feel about things that are going on. And as I look back on it I realize that the voice of the river that I have captured in these interludes is an angry voice. And that the river is angry at the way 14 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 it’s been treated and the way it’s been positioned in a much more subordinated position in the ideological hierarchy, let’s say, of the West. And it’s angry about the way it’s been treated, and as it provides messages to us that we should listen to what it has to say, we seem to be deaf to it. And when I went through this process, I realized that the voice was an angry voice, and I said, well, was that too much so? Is the voice more complex than that? And I said, well, that’s the voice that I found in the river that I think the river is really saying to us, and that’s what it’s going to be. RB: What did you find... Why did you feel that the river had an angry voice? What did you find as you were writing this book that made you... I don’t know... I’m just kind of interested in that personification... CD: Yeah, so what’s my place in this? s this my anger or is it the river’s anger? And that’s part of the personification—that tool of the poet that you’re allowed to project a voice that obviously is the poet’s voice, onto something. But I felt that if there is indeed a spirit to a river these daysthat it would have to be a spirit that would try and point out to human beings who interact with it that I’m upset with what’s happening. And that I provide you guidance, but you’re not listening. And, I think that the whole notion of human, or excuse me, of a river having a spirit, if it’s cast in the form of a human spirit that has to use language, and has to have perspective and a point of view, I just simply felt that’s probably what the river’s point of view would be. There is a certain amount of complexity in the sense that it’s not just angry. I do nurture you. I’'m willing to do so. But you have to understand the limits that I provide of you and you’re not, and you’re not listening and if you don’t pay attention, I will dry up, I will go elsewhere, but I won’t be able to any longer do what you have asked me to do, because I will be gone. Gone, not 15 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 only in a physical presence, but I will be so divorced from your imagination and your ability to conceive of yourself as within environment, that there’s no point in me existing anymore, anyway. RD: I like your inclusion of... I like the way you just ended by discussing the way in which the river could become divorced from the imagination, and how that harkens back to what you were talking about earlier with the internalization of wildness, and the importance of that, so maybe that’s a point in which we can go back to our initial discussion—maybe not to the initial discussion of wildness, but to those earlier times in your life when you were discovering the role of nature and wildness in your own imagination. So, I’'m wondering if you can remember any of your first hikes in the foothills, or maybe not the first, but some of the more important, or did you have anything really life changing hikes? CD: Yeah, well, I think that it was not something I experienced in my family, because my family, while my dad grew up in the outdoors—he grew up in Magna and he would go out with his father periodically—but as a family, we didn’t spend a lot of time outdoors. We didn’t camp, for instance. And when we went on family vacations it was more, you know, we’ll rent a cabin for a week, or we’ll go to Disneyland, or that kind of thing. So, I didn’t... it wasn’t a kind of a passing on from my parents to me, an appreciation for the outdoors. I got a glimmering of it, like I say, when we used to go play in this, what we called the gully, around Emigration Creek. But I think for me the more pivotal and life changing moments was when I went fishing for the first time. And that was through another family—a friend of mine on my block. His dad was a fisherman and they would go out every opening day, and they invited me to go along and join them 16 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 on one particular opening day. And I can’t remember... I was probably, maybe about twelve years old—eleven, twelve, thirteen—around in there. And um, but that was magic to me. That uh, I really... I fell in love with rivers, at least as a way... because they provided a way for me to satisfy this passion of fishing. And so I became attached to rivers that way. And so fishing has been a very large part of my attachment to a rivering environment. And I reached the point that... Well, the next stage in that was probably in high school, because I had a group of friends that I’'m still very close to. And our whole lives were built around the outdoors and trying to get away. And of course, we were constantly hounding our parents to let us take the car for the weekend so we can go camping. And usually that meant camping and fishing, because we were all just in love with that sport. And so fishing and getting away became part of that youthful exuberance that we all go through. And a way to separate ourselves from our families, okay, that’s the way people grow up. And in my case, it took me out of the family sphere and allowed me to appreciate something else, because my family didn’t do that. We didn’t go fishing and camping together, so this was a way to help me create my own identity outside the family. It necessarily got caught up in maturization and seeking self-identity as a teenager. So I went through that process as a high school kid, and even then into college, and after college. But what inevitably happened is that, while it was really important for me at one point early on in my life in my fishing career to capture fish, catch fish, and I"d get very disappointed and upset if I didn’t catch fish. But as I’ve evolved, I don’t care too much whether or not I catch fish anymore. Rarely is the time I go that I don’t catch fish because of practice, I’m just a lot better at it, you know. So I’'m a pretty good fisherman. But I don’t care anymore, because what fishing opened up to me is a way to learn about 17 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 your environment, because you can’t be a good fisher without understanding your environment and seeing what’s going on. You have to understand how weather, how the day, how water flow is affecting the behavior of fish, or where they might be at certain points of the year or certain times of the day, given what the environment, the water flow, sedimentation provides for them. Then you have to look around and you have to understand, okay, what is the larger environment of flora and fauna providing for fish? What kinds of insects are present now? It’s not just a... So you learn to see what’s going on. You look very closely at what’s on the water. You turn over rocks to see what’s underneath the water. You look at bird activity to see whether or not there is something that becomes a sign that indicates that there is a certain kind of insect activity that the birds are keen on that fish might be keen on also. So fishing just simply becomes a conduit of sensitivity to seeing what’s going on in your environment. And so that just tapped into those earlier feelings of being attracted to the space called the gulley or river someplace. It’s just part of a larger process of becoming sensitized to wildness. Fishing became a way to do that. RD: Where were you going fishing around here? CD: Well, I don’t go fishing around in Utah as much. Partly because we want to get out of Utah. It becomes a cultural thing (chuckle). You get tired of this place, and so you want to go elsewhere. But practically speaking, when I was growing up, that the fishing was better, let’s say in Wyoming, or Montana, or Idaho. So that’s typically where we would travel to. And we still like to go to those places, although the same sorts of urban, suburban, and exurban pressures are limiting opportunities and access to rivers there too, just as they are in Utah. 18 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 RD: Yeah. So if we could discuss for a moment longer about. ... You mentioned when you were first with these friends from high school and beginning to go outside and build your own identity outside that of your family, what other things were you doing, or in what other ways was the environment around you helping to sculpt that identity? Also I’m interested in what you may have been reading at the time? Were you interested in environmental literature, or something that could be termed as...? CD: No, no, during high school... no I really wasn’t involved in that kind of literature. It really wasn’t popularized at that point, either. It really... environmental literature became more popularized in the early 70s, or, in coincidence with Earth Day, okay, and the whole “greening” of America, so it was more... I mean I went through a reading process where I first became sensitized, like most of us do, in college, okay, so we read Thoreau, or we read Emerson and learn about transcendentalism, and we read poets, whether or not they are Walt Whitman and, or Robinson Jeffers. It’s more when we enter a college curriculum, you know, where these classics are introduced to us, so from those I discovered, well, there’s a way to think about and write about nature and the environment. And from there then [ started to, because of those interests and because of my interest in the *70s, centered around Earth Day and my greater appreciation for the environment and pressures on the environment, that then I started to, you know, work my way to those kinds of literatures that are more pragmatic and outreach kinds of environmental literatures like Rachel Carson, okay, or an Aldo Leopold, or rediscovering John Muir, where they take more of a pragmatic and political tack rather than a philosophical tack that of Thoreau or an Emerson or a Whitman would take, so being an American Civilization major, that was kind of a natural growth for me in the kinds of 19 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 literatures that I would start to read, starting off with the classics, then moving to more the political, environmental writers, and about the same time, then I started to discover photography. And so that was a wonderful time in my life in the early *70s where I started to pick up photography, and I was just absolutely bowled over by the work of Ansel Adams or Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde... the classic landscape photographers who wound up working for the Sierra Club. And their careers got bound up with the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club books and calendars. And so environmental photography, landscape photography became then, not only with literature, I recognized another way to... for me to become involved with the environment, but also for me to allow an additional form of creative exploration and a kind of a language that I could fuse and integrate with writing and perhaps do something with as a career. So I was looking for... I had always been interested in writing. [ have always been a good writer, all the way through, [ mean that was my track in high school. But then I found photography, basically when I started a graduate program, and I realized that I loved doing this, and I had a talent for it. It wasn’t as well developed. I wasn’t as good a photographer for a long time as I was a writer, because I simply wasn’t as practiced in it as I was with writing. But eventually with enough practice I have gotten pretty good at that too. And now I have been able to fuse those two in a way that allows me to do some things creatively that a lot of other people can’t do because there are a lot of good writers and a lot of good photographers, but there aren’t a lot of people who do both and integrate them. RD: Can you tell me a little bit about Salt Lake? You mentioned Earth Day and the greening of America occurring in the 1970s. I'm wondering, what kind of changes were taking place in Salt Lake City at the time? What kind of greening was going on? 20 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: Well, that was a period of time though that I wasn’t in Salt Lake City, okay, so in the late *60s when we first start to see the inkling of an environmental movement, starting to develop that really kind of flowered in 1970, I was in college and wasn’t living in Utah. And then I was promptly drafted and then spent another two-and-a-half years in the early *70s in the army. And then I spent a period of time of kind of wander lust after that where I wandered in Europe, so to be honest with you, I wasn’t in Utah in the early *70s. RD: Okay, well then perhaps not specific to Utah then, but can you tell me how... what you noticed, what kind of things were actually changing? What was occurring? CD: My perceptions of the environmental movement weren’t centered on Utah. They were centered more nationally. Okay. And my fancy was captured by photography, okay. And the degree to which some of those photographers were looking at Utah, okay, for instance like Eliot Porter and his work in Glen Canyon, going in there and surveying and his book 7he Place No One Knew. That directed me towards Utah as a site for the environmental movement, but it was really through the eyes of somebody else from the outside looking at it. It wasn’t my own eyes. I kind of had to discover it in a round about indirect fashion, and about that same time, then I became aware of Utah’s red rock country, which is so magical and so captivating and so hypnotic. And I found that as a place that had a lot of resonance for me, but I was also discovering it through photographers, other photographers and the ways that they saw the desert and photographed it, and I learned from them. And that... so it’s kind of an indirect way of learning about, let’s say, southern Utah. RD: Yeah, Okay. So can we talk about... what other books have you published that have been in this same vein? 21 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: Yeah, okay, probably I said even... we’re going to have to back up at some point to the first project that I ever did that has... that would be classified as having an environmental or an environmental humanities theme. And this was in the early 1980s and my first three years in the Department of Communication were spent as a visiting instructor. And it was just a three year appointment, a three year contract appointment. The department had some... I was finishing up my master’s degree here, and it was a creative project and the department needed somebody to fill in for a faculty member who left, went to the University of Tennessee, George Everett. And George Everett taught the design courses and the course in magazine publishing and editing. And that was my background. That was my professional background at the time, and I was also doing that with my creative project, so I was a natural to fill in that spot. And, the university was also trying to put moneys at the time into a... more full-time instructors rather than parttime adjunct faculty and graduate students because it was a complaint that there was not enough full-time instruction, it was more being handled by adjuncts. And so the university was encouraging this and the department put together this three-year appointment as a visiting instructor, and I fit the bill for it. So, during that three-year period it was good for me because I got a chance to see whether or not I enjoyed teaching, and the department was also, as it turns out looking at me, I don’t think they probably thought of it as this person who might become a permanent part of the faculty. But so at the end of the three-year period, the department... something had to happen, the department either had to go some other direction and say well, it’s been great having you around for three years and we’re going to do something else now, or if they wanted to keep me they would have to convert this visiting-instructor position into a tenure-track 22 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 position. And then the question became, well, geez, I think we want to keep him, so what do we do? Well, if you follow a traditional track at the university, which is a research institution, then we ought to be encouraging this guy to get his PhD. And then I had just purchased a house at that point, and so I was going through these things in my mind, well, okay, do I really want to make this leap? Do I want to be a full-time faculty member? If so, do I want to follow that traditional track and get a PhD? And, so I thought about it and I weighed what I wanted to do in life, and I thought no, I really like doing things of a creative nature. Just exactly what I had been doing, but I really wanted to do more of it. I wanted to photograph and I wanted to write. And if I had to stop and go and get a PhD, likely someplace else, simply to get a union card to do what I had already been doing, I thought well, I would have to sell my house. I’d have to take out loans to do something that I really don’t want to do. So I said, well, no, I really don’t want to do that. I appreciate your particular needs and perspective, but I don’t want to get a PhD. So, I... the department then took that and decided, well, okay, I guess we want to keep the guy. We’ve got to let him do what he wants to do. So they wrote a position that fit my interests and background, and it was advertised nationally, and I competed for the position, and so I came in as a brand new assistant professor in a tenure-track position. But as soon as you enter that, then I had to do something of a nature where I would have a track of publishing that would allow me to be tenured and promoted. And my publishing would be different from the traditional research scholasticism. I would be asked to do creative scholarship. And so the department said, “Go for it.” And that is one of the more remarkable things that people don’t understand about higher education. Is that there... Depending on how you define entrepreneurialism. We are, in some ways, the 28 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 consummate entrepreneurs, because we are asked to go out and carve an area of expertise where you become one of the primary exemplars of how to do that work, or you become a specialist in the content of that work that other people then come to you as the specialist and as the authority. In my case, I decided that I wanted to develop myself as a documentarian and bring together these interests in photography and writing that I really enjoyed doing. And I that I thought I had some talent doing and really could make something of it. So, recognizing now that I was in a different status at the university, I needed to look for things that I could get published. And, again because of my interest in the environment and the outdoors, I thought what better way to do that is to define myself in a way that I create... do this creative scholarship that’s of an environmental nature that keeps me outdoors, which is really what I love doing in my life. So why not try and make it work—Xkill two birds with one stone. So I was looking for a project idea, and at that time in the late *70s into the early ’80s, there was the MX intercontinental missile... intercontinental ballistic missile staging scheme that was proposedduring the Carter administration. This had been based on quite a few years of research, but this new generation of ICBMs were going to be placed on railroad tracks. I don’t know whether or not you have talked about this. RD: Yeah, but I would love to hear more about it. CD: Yeah, okay. So, in this scheme, the siting area for this new generation of ICBMs would be in western Utah. The old relict area of what turns out to be Lake Bonneville. And that in this scheme there would be these series of missiles on railroad cars that would go in and out of these mountain ranges in the west desert, which is peculiarly adaptable to that because we have these series of basin and range valleys that’s so peculiar to the 24 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 Great Basin. And that at times a particular set of missiles on railroad cars would be inside a mountain. Sometimes they would come out into the open and there would be a series of these kind of railroad tracks with missiles on them all throughout western Utah and eastern Nevada. And the idea was that because this was so-called wasteland, that land was good for nothing anyway. It was just barren desert. We heard the terms “desolate”, “barren” an awful lot, “wasteland.” Those were the terms that the Defense Department of the federal government used. And the idea was that this area would become what was called a nuclear sponge. That we would have so many missiles that would be on these constant tracks that the Soviet Union... there would be no way that they could possibly launch enough missiles to take out all the missiles in this scheme, that there would always be some left in these mountains, in these tunnels that would supposedly be available to come out, I guess the railroad tracks would still be operable (chuckle), and they would come out and the Soviet Union would have wasted its wad and then we wind up sending the rest of our ICBMs over, wipe them out and we win. That was the rationale for this scheme. And a lot of people started to ask, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” especially people in western Utah, who were the ranchers and the miners who knew a lot about the land. And say, well this isn’t going to work because the land, the soils won’t allow this kind of sighting done. And then eventually the Mormon Church came out in opposition to it because they didn’t want (chuckle) this area about eighty miles west of Salt Lake City to become a nuclear sponge. That’s not really good for missionary purposes, I guess, you know. So, with the opposition of the Mormon Church especially, but a growing opposition from a very powerful coalition of ranchers and environmentalists who opposed it, eventually the MX missile system was killed. But what it pointed out to me at 25 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 the time is that, here was an area of Utah, western Utah that even I knew nothing about. had never been there. I mean, I had just kind of been on the periphery of it. And my dad’s family had kind of grown up in that area, but I really didn’t know much about it. I had never visited it. I was like most Utahns. It was just underneath the level of my consciousness. At most we drive through it as we drive to Wendover, you know, on I-80. And I thought well, here, as a community we were about ready to sacrifice this area because of the language that was being fed to us about desolation, wasteland, good-fornothing that I thought, well, and there were a lot of other public works projects that were being proposed for the West Desert at that time. One of the biggest ones was going to be a super-conducting super-collider. This was going to be another massive public works project that would create, I guess what it’s called is, well, it’s a super-conductor underneath the ground in one of these valleys. And that it would accelerate atomic particles and bombard them together to learn more about not only different kinds energy, but also about the origins of the universe. That was another big thing that was being promoted for the West Desert, so all of a sudden it’s being recognized as an area, because there’s a lot of area with no people that you can have a lot... any number of different public works projects from missile basing schemes to super-conducting super-colliders to environmental art projects like Spiral Jetty, or what have you. So it was just starting to be on the periphera of public consciousness. And I said to myself, here’s an area that needs public visibility, because I rationalized that through my experience with seeing what happened with the Sierra Club and calendars that if we can’t visit a place, we can come to know about it through visual images, and visual representations. So I thought I’m going to do a landscape documentary on this area that was the relict area of old Lake 26 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 Bonneville. And so I set upon myself a systematic way of starting to look at that area. And I also wanted to teach myself a kind of photography that landscape photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter were using, and that was large-format field camera work. That classical approach where you take a large camera that allows you perspective controls and you shoot individual sheets of film and you get underneath a hood. And it’s really a deliberative, contemplative process that you have to think a lot about. And so I wanted to teach myself at the same time and this would become a way to do that also. At the same time I was thinking about developing my career at the university. So I decided to do this landscape documentary on this area and I coined a term—West Desert—to describe this area of Utah. I hadn’t seen the phrase used before, but I thought, well, that’s a good way to characterize this area, West Desert. And it... to me it was that area of eastern Nevada, portions of where Lake Bonneville extended into eastern Nevada around Baker, Nevada, but mostly western Utah. And so, I did this landscape documentary and I started to systematically find out areas that [ wanted to visit by talking to people at the Bureau of Land Management, the Nature Conservancy, any kind of people who would have some sort of experience with this area. | wanted to learn about it from their perspective, but also to find out where to go, what was valuable to look at. What should be protected? What would be representative areas? And the other thing that motivated me was that there were areas in this West Desert that I called it, there were areas that were being promoted to become wilderness areas under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management, so that you’ve got the Forest Service charged with designating wilderness study areas within its jurisdiction. The same thing was charged for the Bureau of Land Management. They were asked to do an inventory of potential wilderness study areas. So 2 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 the BLM had crafted out these areas of wilderness study areas. And I thought those are definitely ones that I want to look at, because here’s a government agency that’s identified these as really having wilderness potential, okay, and wilderness designation. So I keyed a lot of my looking around that and the other thing is, that you are always as a documentarian if you are trying to think about getting things published you want to have a topical edge to things. And so you are looking at ways of how, well what can I do that is more likely that other people will want to publish my stuff because it has some sort of interest? And I thought, well, BLM wilderness study areas are certainly something that is topical and that might get me an edge to get this stuff published or at least exhibited. So I used that as one of the ways to organize my looking. And there was a certain sense of urgency. | had better do this really quickly. I’'m afraid that if [ don’t capture these images quickly, that, geez, the process will all be over, you know. These places will be designated wilderness and then all my work will go for naught. Now here it is some twenty-five years later, and we still have made no progress on these BLM wilderness study areas, and I was concerned at the time that... I mean talk about my naiveté. I learned a lot about environmental politics. So, but anyway, it gave me a way to see these wonderful areas in the West Desert that are being still promoted as wilderness study areas and a lot of them are in the so-called Red Rock Wilderness Bill. We conceptualize that as being more about southeastern and southwestern Utah, and to a large degree most of the acreage is in that area, but all of the wilderness study areas in the West Desert are also a part of that proposal. And a few of them... I mean one area in the Cedar Range in the West Desert has wound up being designated as a wilderness area. The only reason is because it became a way for the state of Utah to help thwart the idea of putting a nuclear 28 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 waste repository on the Skull Valley Indian Reservation. If we declare this little area wilderness area then we can prevent the railroad or the highway from coming through it. It was just simply a political tactic to further the state’s other end. There would be no wilderness area there if it weren’t for that, so we’re still wrestling with that. But, the sum was that I came up with this landscape documentary. I had titled it West Desert: Photographs of Lake Bonneville Basin, and it was an exhibit at the Utah Museum of Natural History in 1987. And after that exhibit I tried to find somebody who would publish it as a book, and I didn’t find anybody who would be willing to take that on. It’s a very expensive proposition to publish a book that would require a lot of the images to be printed in color, and the only people who were getting that kind of offer were those people like Eliot Porter or Philip Hyde who had these national and international reputations that were bankable and can allow a publisher to take on a certain amount of risk. I didn’t have a name like that. So I didn’t have much luck in getting that published, but one thing I did learn upon doing that work... Of course, I didn’t even conceive of the fact that there were people who lived out there, you know. I saw this as a land where nobody lived. That’s why it was going to be sacrificed. But what happened is that as I started to do this particular landscape documentary, [ started to meet the people who lived in this environment. And they were a marvelously diverse group of people. Not a monolithic culture at all. They represented every segment... of every microcosmic segment of larger populations in the urban West. Everything from your traditional ranchers and hard-rock miners, which you associate with that Old West, but also New Age people, Fundamentalists, people practicing United Order economic plans like Mormons did when they first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Polygamists, polygamy is 29 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 probably the most dominant social feature that’s practiced. A very wonderfully, rich, complex matrix of people and cultures, and I thought well, geez, here’s my next documentary. I’ve captured the landscape in which they live. Now it’s time to tell the stories of the people who live in this landscape, and how this landscape, this place provides them self-definition, not only in the way that they make their livings off the land or make their livings in concert with the land, in harmony with the land but also how it shapes their personal psyches. So that was one of the themes. I said, okay, here’s my next documentary project and then I started to conceive of this as possibly a book, okay. Because now I was doing interviewing and I was also photographing these people and I started to see this as a book possibility. And the other thing that motivated me was that I was doing this in the late 1990s. And so from my understanding and my undergraduate major in American Civilization, of course I was acquainted with the Turner thesis and the notion that the closing of the American frontier happened in what, 1896, I think, that demographers were saying that the West had been urbanized to such a point that there no longer was enough space between these urban populations that could be designated “frontier” any more so the frontier was closing. And Turner had created... what will happen to American democracy, especially the political ideology that was a part of Jeffersonianism. That Jefferson said that the genius of the American democracy was essentially agrarian. And as long as people had a place to go to and because of the fundamental virtues of the American farmer, that in turn became the virtues of American democracy, that there were concerns that what would happen when there was no longer any frontier, no place for people to go to, even at the end of the 1800s. So another theme that I followed was that, okay, this was one hundred years after the closing of the frontier, 30 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 and certainly if there was a frontier left in the United States, it was this area of western Utah and eastern Nevada because the population density was still less than any other place in the United States, except for parts of Alaska. But in the continental United States, this was the last frontier, or if there was anything left of it. So that was the other theme that I followed as I started to do my interviewing and my photographic documentation. I asked, well, what does this last vestige of the American frontier look like at the one hundred years later and on the brink of the millennium going from the end of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century? What does that look like? How has it changed? Is it still alive in the personalities and the outlooks and in the ways that these people in the West Desert practice democracy? Do they practice a democracy that’s still based upon an agrarianism that Jefferson envisioned? It was possible because they lived in small towns. And yet they felt pressures from the New West that was encroaching because of the dramatic growth in places like Salt Lake or Phoenix or Reno and Las Vegas. Areas that started to surround and isolate and encircle this area. So that was another theme that I followed in my interviews. And I used, uh, oh, and I was very fascinated by the work of Studs Terkel and how he used in his book Work or Working, I can’t remember the title now, but he had these common sets of questions he would ask people, and so I learned from him how to come up with a common set of questions that you could ask people, so I would ask them these questions, like “What*s your interpretation of the American dream?” I got some really remarkable responses to it, and I would ask them as a follow up question, well, “Have you found it? Do you expect to find it? What’s your definition of wilderness? What do you think about government?”—these kinds of questions. And I would pose these to all these various 3 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 groups and I got a dramatic and complex and differentiated set of replies that showed to me that this area of western Utah, which is very, very sparse in population, but was incredibly rich in complexity, not monolithic, how we often times look at areas of small population, at least from our urban perspective, say well, all these people are the same. And they’re not. And, I tried... the gist of what became that book, People of the West Desert was, what is the common ground that they share? Not only as a culture that has to live in this place, and that was my subtitle for the book. It was People of the West Desert: Finding Common Ground. And that’s what I ultimately thought was going to be the contribution of this book. What is it that they find in common that grows out of their relationships, not only as individuals but as cultures to the land. The land identified each and every one of these cultures and left its imprint or its landmark. So then the next question was, well, if they are able to find common ground and yet are very complex cultures, are there lessons that can be taken from that and applied to this larger and growing urban civilization in the New West, because we live in the same area. Can we practice some commonalities? Where are the points of commonalities that might allow us to constructively move forward as we live in this area—this wonderful environment that we’re all attracted to. That’s why we’re here, and yet because of the growth of numbers we’re in danger of destroying or spoiling. So that was the thrust of that book. And then from that book, the Bear River book, and an exhibit grew out of that. RD: [ would like to hear more about, uh, more about all of them but... for instance what were those points of commonality that you were people having and then how do you think would have changed in the past ten or fifteen years since you worked on the book, and with the great increase of population occurring in the last fifteen years also? 32 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 CD: One of the... probably the greatest lessons of Common Ground, that came out of that book had to do with the fact that people knew each other as people, as individuals and more important, they physically came in contact with each other, typically through schools. As all of them were interested in schools, and they all were very much interested in the success of schools in population where there is just low numbers, so the schools became kind of social focal points. They were also ironically brought together by the MX. There were groups of people who really hadn’t talked to each before, but because they showed... they had a common interest in this public works scheme that was being thrust down their throats, it brought them together. They started to talk about things and they learned about how they had common feelings regarding appreciation for their environment, whether or not it was extractive or whether or not it was protectionist. They all were in a sense conservationists because they wanted to protect that land, because they all had particular interest in it. But the virtue was in a small population, and the realization that they came together periodically and they knew one another, and so that was the virtue. And that’s how democracy that Jefferson envisioned it was practiced in that people came together, they knew one another and that they could govern themselves because of these kinds of relationships based upon physical proximity. Now the question is, how do you take that smallness, that element of smallness and the way democracy can be practiced on that elemental level of proximity, how do you take that into an urban environment? That’s very difficult, because what we do is we create proxies for us in the urban environment that they become our representatives, and so our representative government is in a sense one of the obstacles to a fully articulated Jeffersonian democracy because, again, population suggests that we have to behave in other ways, but 38 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 even in politics the changes that we’ve had to adapt because of population growth have distorted or taken us away from certainly the viewpoint that Jefferson had in terms of democracy and how it should be practiced or could be practiced in this “new world” called the United States of America. RD: If you were to go back to some of those people now in West Desert and ask them questions, what kinds of questions would you be asking? CD: Well, I have toyed with the idea of going back and doing it over again, in fact I've been invited to do so. One of the people who was involved in the opposition of the MX missile, a woman by the name of Abbey Johnson who I met early on through another person, JoAnne Garrett, who lives in Baker, Nevada, who is another activist... she called me some months ago and wondered whether or not I would be interested in coming back and doing a revisit of the West Desert. But she’s now involved in the so-called opposition to the Las Vegas water grab. This scheme of Las Vegas for trans-basin transfer of this ground water, this essentially would probably suck the area dry and the lifeblood and livelihoods of these people who want to remain in that area attached to the land. And they are fighting it, but it’s an uphill battle when you’ve got all the weight of Las Vegas on the other end. But she thought that I could be an effective person to help create a public document that would identify to a larger public their issues and their concerns and how it’s important that they be protected in their lives and lifestyles. I said, well, Abbey, the problem is right now that I’m just about ready to break this Bear River documentary, and it’s going to be a book and exhibit and all my attention is going to be focused on that quite frankly. I said, it’s helpful to you in that it’s about water issues, you know, and that I have when given the opportunity to, I make comparisons between the Bear River and 34 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 those water issues. I say... and similarly to the problems the people have in Snake Valley, Utah, who are seeing their water at risk, at danger of losing it because of the growth of the population of Las Vegas. We have the same issues along the Wasatch Front. So in some ways, I said, I can draw public reference to your work, but quite frankly my work right now is going to have to be about the Bear River, because that’s what’s... I’'m trying to make an issue of public consciousness. The other problem I have is that, and it’s the problem that sometimes I’m always faced with in this kind of work, is that groups want you to become their publicists. And, I can’t be a documentarian and maintain a kind of independence if I am simply working for a particular group to further their message. I always have to, as a documentarian you have to find a larger context in which you place these things. And, you can have a point of view, that’s not the problem. But that’s not to say that I wouldn’t go back and work with them to tell them their story, but I wouldn’t be able to do it as a documentarian. It would be the kind of documentarian that is more explicit and more politically motivated and overtly political, more like a Michael Moore, as a documentarian. And that’s the stance I would have to take if I were going to go back and do a story about what their lives and lifestyles would be like if they lost their water. That would be just from one particular point of view. And in my People of the West Desert work and what I have tried to do in the Bear River work is that I've tried to capture multiple points of views of a particular common interest because I think in the long run, thé narrative is best and there is more likely to be effective public progress made on an issue if all voices are heard, and everybody has their say and that the truth, whatever that is, winds up percolating out of all these voices that tell their stories. That’s the approach that I take in a documentary. 35 CRAIG DENTON 28 MARCH 2008 RD: I know we don’t have a lot of time left... CD: Yeah, we’ve got a... they’re coming in here at eleven o’clock. RD: Perhaps this would be a good time to end then. Could we perhaps meet for another hour or so? CD: Yeah, if you think there is enough more to talk about. RD: I would like to if that’s okay. CD: Okay, we’ll reschedule it. END OF INTERVIEW 36