Caroline Tracey’s debut book, a blend of environmental reportage and memoir titled Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, is forthcoming in March 2026 from W.W. Norton.
Originally from Colorado, Caroline holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025, she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest. She has also taught writing as a visiting professor at Deep Springs College.
As a journalist and critic, Caroline’s work focuses on the environment, migration, and the arts in the US Southwest, Mexico, and their borderlands. Her reporting appears in the New Yorker, n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, and elsewhere, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art. Read more here.
Caroline lives with her wife, Mexican architect Mariana GJP, between Tucson, Arizona and Mexico City.
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So, the show is upcoming, Dec. 10. She’s the kind of writer we need covering climate, envirogees, the nuances of the Borderlands, finding the unusual in the world, and normalizing what it means to be a protector of land, culture, ecology, and the web of life.
These amazing salt lakes, which are basins for larger lakes draining and evaporating over thousands of years.
LISTEN here to our talk, prerecorded for my Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge radio program.
The good old days, into NOW:
These books are valuable, man, as they pile up in my office, and I hope to get Caroline’s new book; she’ll be at the Tucson Book Festival in March 2026, and alas, we hope to see her up here in the Pacific Northwest:
A gem: Learn about this amazing Madagascar as that real Island Biogeography!
I’ve had folk on about the Sky Islands and US-Mexico borderlands.
It will be well worth the journey to find her pieces outside or behind paywalls:
The state of journalism was discussed. The state of immigration predicated on economic conditions and environmental pressure were discussed.
Ironically, many of the environmental crusaders in the Southwest are parachutists, coming to the area from other areas of US and Canada. White people, in a land of cultures, indigenes, and here we are, the irony of so many good-intentioned people moving in and putting pressure on ecosystems in and around Tucson, and farther out, where that lovely lifestyle of the Sonoran Desert is their nirvana.
I brought up, briefly, Andre Vltchek‘s
Stop Millions of Western Immigrants!
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Western migrants are charging like bulls and the ground is shaking under their feet; they are fleeing Europe and North America in hordes. Deep down they cannot stand their own lifestyle, their own societies, but you would hardly hear them pronounce it. They are too proud and too arrogant! But, after recognizing innumerable areas of the world as suitable for their personal needs – as safe, attractive and cheap – they simply pack and go!
We are told that some few hundred thousand African and Asian exiles are now causing a great “refugee crises” all over Europe! Governments and media are spreading panic, borders are being re-erected and armed forces are interrupting the free movement of people. But the number of foreigners illegally entering Europe is incomparably smaller than the number of Western migrants that are inundating, often illegally, virtually all corners of the world.
No “secret paradise” can be hidden any longer and no country can maintain its reasonable price structure. Potential European, North American and Australian immigrants are determined to enrich themselves by any means, at the expense of local populations. They are constantly searching for bargains: monitoring prices everywhere, ready to move at the spur of the moment, as long as the place offers some great bargains, has lax immigration laws, and a weak legal framework.
Everything pure and untapped gets corrupted. With lightning speed, Western immigrants are snatching reasonably priced real estate and land. Then, they impose their lifestyle on all those “newly conquered territories”. As a result, entire cultures are collapsing or changing beyond recognition.
Overall, Western immigrants are arrogant and stubborn; they feel no pity for the countries they are inundating. What surrounds them is only some colorful background to their precious lives. They are unable and unwilling to “adopt” local customs, because they are used to the fact that theirs is the “leading culture” – the culture that controls the world.
They come, they demand, and they take whatever they can – often by force. If unchecked, they take everything. After, when there is almost nothing left to loot, they simply move on. After them, “no grass can grow”; everything is burned, ruined and corrupted. Like Bali, Phuket, Southern Sri Lanka, great parts of the Caribbean, Mexico and East African coast, just to name a few places.
Caroline is bright, quick-witted, and a real journalist’s journalist. Listen to the interview.
This Is How Northern Mexico Became a Climate Migration Destination
Great writers before Caroline’s emergence:
[The Rio Grande flows in a rugged and scenic part of northern New Mexico in May 2011. BobWick]
Here, behind a paywall: “The Indefensible Job of Policing the Border . . .”
Against the Wall, a former border officer’s memoir, argues that when it comes to protecting the border, cruelty is the point.
In the summer of 2021, I sat in on a presentation given by two members of the US Border Patrol’s Missing Migrants Program—a small initiative of the agency to devote resources to identifying the recovered remains of deceased migrants—to a group of college students on a trip to learn more about the US-Mexico border.
The presentation took place at the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, a town of 5,000 long considered the epicenter of migrant death in the state, despite being 75 miles north of the border. The reason for the deaths is that the town is the site of a major Border Patrol checkpoint that migrants must circumvent on foot; many lose their lives in the hot, immense shrubland of the local ranches.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.