"Blossoming as the Rose": The Interplay of Climate and Culture in the History of the Wasatch Oasis

The Wasatch Front is an environmentally complex region, this area of northern Utah is mountainous and fertile enough to support a varied ecology. It has also supported healthy human populations. The marshy lands surrounding the gigantic lake antecedent to Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake provided food and resources for early peoples. Then, as the climate warmed and drought set in, the early Fremont culture was apparently unable to adapt. Now, the Wasatch Front is home to the majority of Utah’s population, putting this sensitive environment under considerable strain. When early Mormon settlers arrived to colonize the area in the mid nineteenth century, they set to work making the Wasatch Front into their idea of paradise. They borrowed language from the Hebrew Bible to describe the changes they had made, claiming they had made the desert “blossom as the rose.” The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the origins and manifestations of this complex ethos of “blossoming,” how Mormon culture has conceived and reconceived it, and how climatic realities have shaped and are shaping it. On one hand, “blossoming” entails a form of stewardship that encourages conservation and temperance. On the other hand, Mormons have continually sought to incorporate American ideals of abundance and mastery over the natural elements. Today, population pressure combined with the prospect of megadrought makes these tensions even more salient and threatens to recapitulate the maladaptations of earlier cultures in a pattern of withering rather than blossoming. This dissertation illustrates how the ill consequences of “blossoming” have repeatedly forced a pattern of return to the ethos of stewardship and might do so again.