The aesthetics of America’s Great Basin, a place so often described as banal, empty, static, wastelands, may explain its patterns of development as much as any logic based on the land’s utility. This is not to argue that aesthetics explain the presence of all land-uses of the Great Basin. Many local land-uses—salt farming, copper mining, potash production—are obvious outgrowths of the unique geologic and atmospheric make-up of the place. But others—nuclear waste burial, chemical production, weapons testing—may be borne of some combination of the unique landform aesthetics of this particular environment and conventional modes of human perception.
The terrain of the Great Basin has a long and volatile geologic history. Benches from the ancient pluvial lake that once saturated our present-day airspace are etched into the basaltic and rhyolitic peaks that articulate the Basin’s perimeter. A cataclysmic breach into the plains of Idaho some fifteen thousand years ago that remade lakebeds into playas remains visible in Red Rock Pass.
The tale of human habitation here is comparatively short; its vestigial traces less apparent – hidden or erased. From the absence of such anthropological landmarks we infer an emptiness. This ideological impression of emptiness is compounded by a visual one: the field-like regularity of vast areas within the Great Basin that dulls our innate perceptive abilities. This optic fatigue evokes a feeling of vastness and isolation that can belie the remoteness of one’s true geography, as with the area surrounding America’s largest Magnesium Chloride plant, a mere 45 miles upwind from central Salt Lake City.
Repetition makes it difficult to pick out a defining feature or landmark from the larger landscape. We see fields but no figures. The evenness of the terrain – its undifferentiated hues, lack of contrast, and unbroken horizontality – contradicts our tendency to structure the world in plain geometries. Absent the basest elements of our visual structure, foreground and background vibrate in overlapping planes. This is an environment that is a challenge to see, no less to conjure in one’s mind. This makes it difficult, then, to picture what has been lost, or ruined, by the advent of hazardous waste processing facilities, such as those in Aragonite, UT, west of the Cedar Mountain Range.
Further, this is a landscape perceived in pieces, its wholeness only sensed serially, over great distances and time. Our inability to grasp its magnitude is not unlike the cognitive barrier that prevents our comprehension of the infinitude of a hyper-object such as nuclear waste (a proposed import to this region) whose potency and longevity is heretofore unknown.
How we see and what we select to see is a reflection of what we value in a place. Adrift in the constant pulse of the desert we are blind to subtle changes disguised by broader patterns in the land. In this aesthetic sphere, we see little and value less.
