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2020 was a rough year in the West.

The region was several years into a mega drought.

So many of the environmental challenges were already unfolding.

And then this new crisis emerged that year.

The Great Salt Lake crashed, reached its lowest point in recorded history.

And scientists started talking about how long before the lake became too salty or too dry to sustain life.

And how that could then set off this wave of cascading disasters, including clouds of toxic dust from the exposed lake bed.

The filmmaker Abby Ellis told us it was an environmental disaster that was coming, but it hadn't happened yet.

And so she was really drawn to that possibility, the idea that she could capture this moment before it struck.

My son was two, and it was the year that the drought was really obvious.

All the reservoirs were very, very low.

And we had ash falling from the sky, both from the fires in Northern California and the fire in Parley's Canyon.

It was really scary and bleak.

And at that same time, my husband and I were kind of just looking at each other thinking,

when you have a kid, you're looking at a place not just 10 years into the future or 20 years into the future, you're looking longer than that.

But around that time, we started hearing about Great Salt Lake.

And that seemed like the nail in the coffin for this place.

Is it a place that we want to raise a young child?

You know, I've showed up a lot in my work when the thing has already happened.

When government has failed or systems have failed and people are really sick,

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