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Marriage rates in the US have declined dramatically — they’re the focus of recent books like The Two-Parent Privilege by economist Melissa Kearney and Get Married by Brad Wilcox, of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, fertility has hit record lows, prompting growing concern about demographic decline and spawning an emerging “pronatalist” movement that sees shrinking birth rates as an existential threat. But conversations about these trends have largely remained separate. Marriage researchers tend to focus on relationship formation, family stability, and child outcomes. Pronatalists concentrate on the reasons for delaying or forgoing child birth, and the consequences that may bring. Lately though, more conservatives have argued that marriage penalties in the tax code connect these two issues — and fixing these penalties could help boost the population.  The argument has particular appeal on the right: Fiscal conservatives generally favor reforming existing policies over creating costly new programs, while social conservatives view ending marriage penalties as supporting both wedlock and childbearing. But like the welfare debates of the past, it raises empirical questions about whether benefits actually influence family formation decisions, as well as broader ethical considerations about the government’s role in shaping personal choices. The math on marriage The statistical case for connecting marriage and fertility appears relatively straightforward at first. Married women have significantly higher birth rates than unmarried women, and while both groups have had fewer children in recent decades, married birth rates have declined much less. Ergo, marriage penalty critics argue that policies discouraging marriage — by pushing families above subsidy thresholds or into higher tax brackets — may indirectly suppress birth rates. Take the Earned Income Tax Credit, designed to help low-income workers. When two working people marry, their combined income can push them above eligibility thresholds or reduce their benefits. Similar marriage penalties exist in other means-tested programs like Medicaid and housing assistance.  These penalties were not intentionally designed to disadvantage married couples, but emerged from efforts to target benefits to the neediest while treating similar households fairly. Still, as a result, “if the typical single mom marries a typical working man, they will lose their means-tested government benefits,” Hall explained. Some policies, like the child tax credit, largely avoid this problem by setting income thresholds high enough that most married couples keep their benefits. Food stamps take a different approach — treating all households the same whether couples are married or just living together. While research is mixed on how well people understand these various penalties, there is some evidence they influence behavior. An American Family Survey from 2015 reported that 31 percent of Americans said they know someone who did not marry for welfare-related reasons. A more recent survey from the Sutherland Institute in Utah found that 10 percent of safety net program recipients reported deciding not to marry to avoid losing benefits. A 2022 analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that, without marriage penalties, 13.7 percent more low-income single mothers would marry each year, and 7.5 percent more would be married by age 35. The study suggests these women typically do marry, but penalties might delay tying the knot. Testing the theory Some of the strongest evidence for the marriage-fertility connection comes from European programs in the 1970s and 1980s. Studies of policy experiments in Austria that involved cash payments to married couples and in Sweden with broader access to widow pensions revealed how government incentives could influence marriage rates and subsequent fertility patterns. The subsidies proved successful at getting couples who might otherwise have postponed or forgone marriage to make it official. Importantly, these “incentivized” marriages were roughly as stable as unsubsidized ones, suggesting that policy was able to influence timing for couples already oriented toward commitment. As Lyman Stone, a conservative pronatalist demographer, put it, “Turns out people just need a nudge to say ‘yes’ to the person they’re probably gonna marry anyway.” The fertility effects were nuanced. While marriages influenced by government subsidies had lower fertility rates than traditional, unsubsidized marriages, they still saw significantly higher birth rates than unmarried couples.   But these European examples stand in contrast to American experience, where US programs aimed at promoting marriage have historically shown little success. And even if policymakers could effectively encourage more marriage, the relationship between marriage and fertility isn’t straightforward everywhere. India has maintained nearly universal marriage rates, even as fertility rates have sharply declined. Dean Spears, the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, notes that India’s marriage age has also remained relatively stable, with birth rates shrinking even among women who marry before age 25. Spears is far more skeptical that we can “nudge” people into getting married, and suggests we might be confusing cause and effect entirely. In an interview with Vox, he compared it to mistaking reduced exercise as a cause rather than a symptom of poor health. Both declining marriage and fertility rates might instead be responding to deeper social and economic shifts — from rising opportunity costs for mothers to shifting beliefs about family life. Alice Evans, a gender inequality scholar at King’s College London, studies how economic independence and reduced stigma around being single have transformed modern relationships. Her research shows people have become more selective about romantic partners, with some choosing to stay uncoupled if compatible partners prove elusive.  Evans believes we need better research not only on how modern life — such as social media and video games — affects relationship formation, but also on how marriage and marriage-related policies affect decisions to have children. The price of reform Conservatives see marriage penalty reform as a practical path forward, even though there isn’t decisive research showing that it would significantly affect marriage rates, let alone fertility. The proposal appeals partly because it could advance multiple goals at once. For those already wanting to see more marriage and childbearing on cultural and religious grounds, fixing the penalties offers a way to promote both. That it appears less expensive than creating new programs like universal child care makes it doubly attractive. The political challenges, however, are still substantial. Conservative economist Robert Cherry, who has worked on marriage penalty proposals for two decades, told Vox that truly eliminating these penalties could cost between $100 billion to $150 billion. More modest reforms to reduce but not entirely eliminate marriage penalties might still cost upward of $40 billion, he said.  Some progressive policy experts see a solution that lies in deprioritizing traditional family structure. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, argues the technical fix is to just tax everyone on their personal income rather than using household income. While he supports eliminating marriage penalties to keep things fair for everyone, he’s skeptical they play a major role in declining birth rates. Perhaps more fundamentally, there’s been little evidence of political will to address these penalties. When Republican lawmakers first considered proposals for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), they explored eliminating the head of household filing status, another benefit that carries significant penalties for married couples. But the prospect of making some single mothers worse off proved too unpalatable for lawmakers to move forward with the idea. The political landscape may shift as lawmakers prepare to revisit the expiring TCJA next year. Donald Trump ran for president on boosting birth rates, and has already elevated prominent pronatalists like Elon Musk into his new administration. His incoming vice president, JD Vance, has also placed falling fertility rates high on the conservative agenda. Pronatalism gaining influence in conservative politics could lead not only to removing existing marriage penalties but also to actively incentivizing marriage through new subsidies, as Hungary did. Any policy response will need to address not only billion-dollar price tags but also deeper questions about whether the government should, or even can, try to steer such personal decisions in modern America.

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Inside a farm that raises turkeys for Jennie-O, the second largest US turkey producer. | Photo courtesy of Kecia Doolittle Editor’s note: This story was originally published on November 22, 2023, and reflects events that took place that year. We’re republishing it in its original form this week in advance of Thanksgiving. Late into the night on November 2, a few animal rights activists opened an unlocked barn door and stepped foot into a sea of turkeys living in gruesome conditions. It was one of several barns at a sprawling factory farming operation in Owatonna, Minnesota, that raises turkeys for Jennie-O, the country’s second-largest turkey producer and this year’s supplier to the annual White House turkey pardon ceremony.  “We documented a lot of really horrific health issues,” activist Kecia Doolittle, one of the investigators, told Vox. “It was about as bad as you can imagine.”  They found numerous turkeys who were dead and rotting, Doolittle said, and many who had trouble walking. There were also live birds pecking at dead birds, and dozens of birds with visible wounds — each a sign of cannibalism, a persistent problem in turkey farming. Doolittle also alleges there were a number of turkeys who were immobilized and unable to access food and water. In a letter to Steele County’s attorney and local law enforcement, Bonnie Klapper — a former assistant US attorney advising Doolittle — said the conditions are a violation of Minnesota’s animal cruelty law, which stipulates that “No person shall deprive any animal over which the person has charge or control of necessary food, water, or shelter.” (Minnesota is one of the few states that don’t exempt agricultural practices from their animal cruelty statute.)   “It smelled terrible,” Doolittle said. The air made her throat burn, likely due to high ammonia levels from the turkeys’ waste, which gives the birds eye and respiratory issues.  The activists found a sign on the property that read, “Jennie-O Turkey Store cares about turkeys — you should, too!” “Jennie-O Turkey Store takes the welfare of the animals under our care seriously and has robust animal care standards throughout our supply chain,” a spokesperson from Hormel Foods, Jennie-O’s parent company, told Vox via email. “We conduct routine audits at our facilities to ensure that our standards are being met with animal-handling practices and policies set forth by the National Turkey Federation and the American Veterinary Medical Association.” Doolittle rescued two of the birds — whom she later named Gabriel and Gilbert — and took them to veterinarians in Wisconsin, who urged her to euthanize Gilbert. “They both had really severe infections, they both had parasites,” Doolittle said, but Gilbert was in especially bad shape, with a wound under his wing, an infection on his face, and pecking wounds on part of his genitalia.  But Doolittle wanted to give him a chance to recover. Both birds were treated and given a combination of antibiotic, pain relief, and antiparasitic drugs; Gabriel is on the mend, while Gilbert’s condition remains touch and go.  Sherstin Rosenberg, a veterinarian in California and executive director of a sanctuary for rescued poultry birds, wrote in a veterinary opinion that Gabriel and Gilbert’s condition “suggests serious animal welfare problems” in Jennie-O’s facility. The findings, while disturbing, are common across the turkey industry. Numerous animal welfare groups have found similar conditions at operations run by Jennie-O’s competitors — even the ones that brand themselves as more humane. That’s because turkey farming is incredibly uniform, with companies using generally the same practices and the same breed — the Broad Breasted White turkey — that’s been bred without regard for their suffering. How the poultry industry broke the turkey Like everything else in the US — cars, homes, cruise ships — the turkey has become supersized.  The poultry industry has made turkeys so big primarily through selective breeding. The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk. Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially. Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor. Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote. In stressful, crowded environments, turkeys can be aggressive and peck one another, and even commit cannibalism. Instead of giving turkeys more space and better conditions, producers mutilate them to minimize the damage. They cut off a quarter to a third of their beaks, part of their toes, and their snoods — those fleshy protuberances that hang over their beaks — all without pain relief. Turkeys are excluded from federal laws meant to reduce animal suffering during transport to the slaughterhouse and during slaughter itself, so you can imagine — or see for yourself — how terribly they’re treated in their final hours. According to the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, the Jennie-O slaughter plant near the farm Doolittle investigated was cited nine times in 2018 by the US Department of Agriculture for turkeys who’d been mutilated by malfunctioning equipment. Strangely, despite the horrific reality of turkey farming, we still use the animal as a symbol of giving thanks. Nowhere does the song and dance of celebrating turkeys while we torture them feel more disconcerting than at the White House’s annual turkey pardon.  The mixed message of the White House turkey pardon Every Thanksgiving, the US president “pardons” a turkey or two in what is essentially a PR stunt for the turkey industry, as the birds are selected by the chair of the National Turkey Federation, an industry trade association. This year, that was Steve Lykken, president of Jennie-O. The two turkeys selected for this year’s pardon — named Liberty and Bell — could have ended up among the 46 million or so birds on Thanksgiving tables this year. Instead, they were transported from Minnesota, the country’s top turkey-producing state, to Washington, DC, in a stretch black Cadillac Escalade. “They’re on their way in a pretty lavish coach,” Lykken told Minnesota Public Radio. The annual story makes for feel-good if hammy coverage by the nation’s largest news organizations, but it papers over the darkness of American factory farming — including not just the animal cruelty but also the dangerous working conditions at slaughterhouses, environmental pollution, and unfair treatment of turkey contract farmers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Jennie-O investigation video. This year, industry is especially looking forward to the pardon amid the devastating bird flu. The disease, which has been resurging this fall, has resulted in the killing of 11.5 million potentially infected turkeys since early 2022. Increasingly, producers are killing the birds in the most brutal fashion imaginable, deploying a method called “ventilation shutdown plus” that uses industrial heaters to kill them via heatstroke over the course of hours.  “To have something that’s fun, that can draw positive attention to our industry, is very welcomed” in light of the outbreak, Ashley Kohls, executive director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, told Minnesota Public Radio about this year’s pardon. This week, Liberty and Bell will be moved to the University of Minnesota to live out the rest of their lives. If the turkeys knew what went on there, they might not want to go: The university helped build the state’s turkey industry and still conducts research on turkeys to ensure the industry’s success. The university’s interim president formerly served as the president of Jennie-O and the CEO of Hormel, its parent company.  Meanwhile, Doolittle’s pardoned turkeys, Gabriel and Gilbert, assuming both survive, will spend the rest of their lives at an animal sanctuary, showing humans what these birds can be like when allowed to live on their own terms. “They’re just the most curious, loving, intelligent guys,” Doolittle said. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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This story is the final feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. On a freezing January morning in 1863, American soldiers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone camp along the Bear River in what is now Idaho and slaughtered hundreds of Shoshone people in what is most likely the largest massacre of Native people in the US on a single day. The massacre was horrifically brutal. “[The soldiers] would grab the small children by their braids and crush their heads and bodies into the frozen ground,” Rios Pacheco, a Shoshone tribal elder, said. Pacheco told me that, for generations, Shoshone people passed down stories about some parents being forced to let their babies float down the river that day so that their crying would not alert the soldiers to where a group was hiding along the riverbank.  After losing their territory over the course of decades to Western expansion and violence, the tribe went generations without collectively owned land.  But in 2018, more than 150 years later, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought back over 500 acres of land at the site of the Bear River Massacre.  Since European colonization, Indigenous nations across North America have lost nearly 99 percent of their land. That seizure of Native territory and the development of American industry led to a devastating loss of life, culture, and community. It also set humanity on a course that was harmful to the environment. Western development has led to habitat and biodiversity loss and fueled climate change, spurring more extreme weather, such as drought, wildfire, and floods that have grown worse and more frequent.  The Bear River land purchase was part of a growing movement, generally referred to as Land Back, that’s empowering Native people to address generational trauma and restore landscape health. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of acres of ancestral territories have been returned to tribes. The movement is part of a larger reckoning, too: Last year, the US government concluded its Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, a decade-long effort to acknowledge historical wrongs and return land to tribal ownership. Over the course of the program, nearly 3 million acres in 15 states were consolidated and restored to tribal trust ownership.  Land Back success stories often come with splashy announcements, but what tribes do afterward isn’t as well-publicized. And it’s in these often overlooked stories that tribes are doing work that doesn’t just help heal the injustice they suffered, but creates meaningful steps to adapt to climate change and build a more resilient environment.   The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation plans to embark on an ambitious restoration project at the massacre site, which they call Wuda Ogwa. The project will help make the area more climate resilient through the planting of native trees and the restoration of a wetland complex, which will add an estimated 10,000 acre-feet of water or more to the Great Salt Lake, which is disappearing because of extreme heat and drought. After the Shoshone were displaced from the land, the massacre site was looted, and in the following years, the site was used by settlers for everything from cattle grazing and farming to a railroad and a failed resort. During the Great Depression, Russian olive trees were planted to help reduce soil erosion, but those trees are now considered an invasive species that sucks up water.  Over the years, this all took its toll on the land. It also reduced one of the key water sources that feeds the Great Salt Lake. Now, drought is making the situation worse.  As they work to overcome years of oppression and violence, the Northwestern Shoshone are also focused on healing the land. “We’re going to start to use that land as a place to regenerate not just the Earth, but also the people,” Pacheco said.    For Indigenous communities, land has never been about simple ownership, but instead is about building a deep, complex relationship with the land. Now, as they begin to reclaim more and more ancestral territory, tribes are demonstrating that Indigenous communities can lead the way on climate adaptation through creative partnerships and ambitious restoration projects.  All of this means that Land Back is not only an important cultural story, it could also prove to be a key part in the fight to build climate resilience.  What is the Land Back movement?  Although Indigenous people have been fighting for and regaining their seized land for hundreds of years, the modern concept of Land Back, sometimes backed by social media campaigns and well-heeled nonprofit groups, has only emerged more recently. The #LandBack hashtag, in particular, has found its own cultural niche thanks to moments like the viral social media posts shared by groups like the NDN Collective or influencers like Blackfoot meme creator Arnell Tailfeathers from Manitoba.   Throughout the 20th century, many tribes steadily built up the funds to buy back their land. In the 21st century alone, dozens of tribes and Indigenous organizations have reclaimed tracts of land that total hundreds of thousands of acres across the country.  Increasingly, tribes are finding new allies in conservation and environmental spaces, who recognize the positive impact that tribal land stewardship can have on the environment.  Land Back can come about in different ways. Sometimes, tribes are able to directly buy back land with their own funds, as the Winnebago Tribe in Nebraska did. A nonprofit group can buy land for a tribe before donating it back to them, as the Trust for Public Land is doing with 30,000 acres it is returning to the Penobscot Nation in Maine. In 2018, an individual gave a couple acres of land back to the Ute Tribe just a few years after buying it.  Then there are more nuanced co-management situations, such as Canyon de Chelly, which is a National Monument under the purview of the federal government, with the Navajo Nation maintaining some land and mineral rights. Most tribes, however, say that full ownership with no strings attached is the best way to uphold tribal sovereignty.  Jan Michael Looking Wolf Reibach is the tribal lands department manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “I think the most complete answer for a tribe is when they can recover the lands and have sovereignty over their lands and exercise our sovereignty,” he said. “The strongest and most powerful way for the tribe to restore our connection and bring healing to the land is when it comes back into tribal ownership.” Anne Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Indian Tribe, whose ancestral territory is located in what is now Eastern Virginia. Richardson, who can remember her father and grandfather fighting with the state for recognition of their sovereign rights, believes that tribes are proving across the country that everyone else should have been listening to them all along. Traditional knowledge, passed down through generations, was once derided as primitive by Western scientists, but Richardson believes acceptance of that type of knowledge is finally beginning to happen. “Scientists are amazed that we had this knowledge and we never had a degree in science,” she said. “They need that traditional knowledge because our people flourished on these lands for thousands of years.” Land Back projects are a chance for the tribes to build stronger relationships with each other and the land. Along the way, water is getting cleaner and land is becoming more climate resilient, even as the political outlook in the United States looks grim for the climate.  President-elect Donald Trump has promised to withdraw (again) from the Paris climate agreement, among other actions that experts say could prove disastrous for the environment. These include opening public lands for oil drilling and resource extraction, as well as rolling back environmental regulations and undoing climate-friendly federal programs like tax credits for home energy improvements.  Under these circumstances, any climate adaptation projects could prove to be invaluable mitigation against an administration that could add an estimated 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.  Jason Brough, a Shoshone PhD student in anthropology and environmental policy at the University of Maine who has helped to map the Wuda Ogwa site, said that tribal Land Back projects could serve as a kind of safety net against potentially harmful federal climate policies. “If Indigenous communities and their partners can have these little niches where animals and plants are safe, that could be really important to get us through these next few years [under Trump]” Brough said.  Of course, tribal sovereignty also means that tribes could decide to use the land they regain for something other than climate projects, per se, including for housing or economic development. But although there are many different Land Back projects with a variety of goals and processes, Reibach says that the ultimate goal is the same: rebuilding a healthy relationship with the land and each other based on reciprocity rather than extraction.  “Regardless of the project or the reason to acquire land back into tribal ownership, the process is very healing for us because it restores our connection to the land,” he said. “We view these lands as being part of us.” Why Land Back can be a climate solution  Across the country, tribal Land Back projects are proving, acre by acre and tree by tree, that their work is benefiting the climate.  In Virginia, the member tribes of the Indigenous Conservation Council for the Chesapeake Bay are engaged in Land Back and restoration projects to help blunt the impact of climate change on the Chesapeake Bay, which could see more than 5 feet of sea level rise in the next century. In 2022, for example, the Rappahannock Tribe reclaimed 465 acres of land on what is called Fones Cliffs in Eastern Virginia. The tribe’s work on the land includes herring restoration, oyster restoration, and native tree planting. Much of the land was previously a large cornfield, and chemicals like phosphorus from fertilizer have degraded the water quality in the river.  Read more from Vox’s Changing With Our Climate series Indigenous communities are leading the way in climate adaptations — from living alongside rapidly melting ice to confronting rising seas and creating community support networks. In a new Vox series, we explore a myriad of solutions. You can read them all here, and we recommend you start with these great stories: This coastal tribe has a radical vision for fighting sea-level rise in the HamptonsNext to some of the priciest real estate in the world, the Shinnecock Nation refuses to merely retreat from its vulnerable shoreline. The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate changeWetlands absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The Coeur d’Alene’s restoration would do more than just that. Colonial solutions to climate change aren’t workingWhat Indigenous knowledge could mean in the fight to curb global warming. Two hours south, the Nansemond Indian Nation is working to reduce invasive species, protect against erosion, and restore water quality on a piece of land they acquired earlier this year that was once the site of a cement factory. Cameron Bruce, the Environmental Program Coordinator for the Nansemond Indian Nation, says he has noticed more birds and larger herds of deer on the property since the tribe began restoring it.  In Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde is working to restore the Willamette Falls area, which was recently the site of a paper mill. Lindsay McClary, restoration ecologist for the tribe, is working with her team to restore stream flow, replace culverts to create fish habitats, remove invasive species, and bring back fire to the landscape. Last year, the tribe conducted a prescribed burn on one piece of land for the first time in 100 years. McClary says that the impact of Indigenous land management is particularly clear in places like the Willamette Falls site, which was previously home to a Blue Heron Paper Company mill. “We’re helping restore some areas that were flooded by someone else’s maybe less than thoughtful decisions,” she said.  “We see time and time again, those places become productive ecologically,” Jason Brough said of Indigenous projects on reclaimed land — meaning those lands “start having benefits for not just our own communities, but for everybody.”  For Brough, Wuda Ogwa carries extra personal significance. One of Brough’s ancestors was shot in the chest at the Bear River Massacre but survived. Rios Pacheco says that only one or two people from most family groups survived, but the fact that those people now have many descendants is a mark of the tribe’s resilience. Despite the pain and trauma that Brough still says exists at the site, he and the tribe are looking toward making it better for the future. Brian Andrew, the project engineer, said their approach to restoration is not simply returning the site to the way it was before the massacre. “We don’t want to put exactly what was there because we want things to flourish and can survive in today’s climate and future climate scenarios,” Andrew said. In some ways, it is remarkable that just a few years after regaining such a culturally significant piece of land, the tribe is already working on a project that could benefit the entire region by adding desperately needed water to the Great Salt Lake. “That’s what’s beautiful about it,” said Maria Moncur, the tribe’s communications and public relations director. “We did it for our people, and it just so happens to help the watershed.” “I know it’s a struggle,” Brough said. “I know we’ve been trying for over 500 years. But we’re at a junction right now where they get to make that choice again … between a path of living with Earth or a path of living against Earth.” In early November, the Northwestern Shoshone organized a community planting event at the Wuda Ogwa site. Over two days, hundreds of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous volunteers came to plant thousands of new trees. Tribal leaders say that this work strengthens the tribal community and the environment, but also works to improve their ties with non-Native neighbors and community members.  “What we’re doing at that massacre site is we’re paying tribute back to those victims,” George Gover, the executive director of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said. “We’re honoring them by putting water and life back into the Great Salt Lake. That’s what this project is all about: life.”