Commentary: How the Salton Sea Came to Be Viewed as a 'Lost Cause'
The Salton Sea is a place of stunning contradictions. For decades, Californians have tried to figure out what to make of it. Often described as a "man-made" or "accidental," the Salton Sea formed between 1905 and 1907 when the Colorado River overflowed from an irrigation project into a deep bowl in the desert floor in present-day Imperial County.
Settlers described this flooding as an unprecedented disaster, but soon found a purpose for the sea as a receptacle for runoff from Imperial Valley farms. During the 50s and 60s, the sea became a popular tourist attraction, but rising water from increased irrigation flooded its hotels and resorts, driving the tourists away. Rumors about the health effects of swimming and angling in the pesticide-contaminated water also influenced the decline of the resorts.
In 2003, the Imperial Valley transferred its Colorado River water rights to San Diego, and the Salton Sea, which had been sustained by runoff from the valley for most of the twentieth century, lost much of its inflow. As the sea started to shrink, it released pesticides and other toxins leading to massive fish and bird die-offs over the course of two decades.
My recent book explores how, at different times viewed as a disaster, a sump, and a health resort, the Salton Sea came to be commonly viewed as a wasteland. Policymakers struggled to raise funds—and popular support—for the sea’s conservation. The area around it, subsequently, has been used for the kinds of industrial projects reserved for places held in low regard: mines, prisons, and military bases.
The Salton Sea wasn’t just an accident, despite its reputation as the result of engineering mistakes made by early settlers. In fact, it is the most recent example of a natural cycle of Colorado River overflows that have filled this part of the desert for thousands of years. Floods from the Colorado River have been big and small—vast inundations that resulted in water bodies like Lake Cahuilla and relatively small overflow pools that evaporated within months.
Still, the sea is often talked about as a waste of state resources or a lost cause—not worth conserving for fish and birds and, perhaps more troubling, not worth the water it would take to sustain its current shoreline. As the Salton Sea evaporates more rapidly, with no new inflows and rising temperatures, more of the dusty lakebed is exposed, causing disastrous, urgent respiratory problems for nearby human communities. Yet in the context of an epic region-wide drought, the political will to spare fresh water to this often-maligned place has been difficult to muster.
In 2015, I wrote a book that explored how and why some places come to be regarded as wastelands, not worth environmental protection or conservation. I found that these attitudes tend to have something to do with how people perceive the value of the environments themselves. Generally speaking, Americans think of green, forested mountains and sparkling natural rivers as worthy of conservation but are less fond of deserts, for example. Many Americans are also compelled by what historians call the "wilderness ethic," which elevates seemingly pristine landscapes, untouched by human hands, as places most deserving of protection (even though these pure wilderness places really only exist in our imaginations).
The Salton Sea, lying in a desert and seen most often as a man-made mistake, fails on both counts as a conservation priority. Few people think of the Salton Sea, often associated with rotting, water-logged debris and shorelines choked with dead fish, as a place worthy of environmental protection.
But there’s more to it. In a startling number of instances, I found that the esteem in which we hold non-human places is often shaped by more troubling social concerns: how we regard the people who inhabit a place.
Environmental justice (EJ) activists and scholars have long recognized that communities of color and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately targeted for environmental harm; in the 1990s activists coined the term environmental racism and outlined the Principles of Environmental Justice, which went on to influence federal policy. Scholars published a slate of studies showing the extent of the problem and how the tendency to disregard the health of people of color can be seen in the country’s history of racism in housing, zoning, legislation, and other areas (see, for example, important works by Robert Bullard, David Pellow, Laura Pulido, Julie Sze, Carl Zimring and Dina Gilio-Whitaker).
Lack of regard for ecological conditions, I found, could be linked to lack of regard for human health in areas primarily populated by people of color.
My findings added to these decades of work on environmental justice by showing that, just as race and class play a role in whether humans in an area are seen as deserving of protection, these measures of social worth also extend to how dominant society tends to view the non-human landscapes and ecosystems around them.
Lack of regard for ecological conditions, I found, could be linked to lack of regard for human health in areas primarily populated by people of color and Indigenous people or communities experiencing poverty and homelessness. In other words, racism and classism could be keeping us from important conservation work, as well as perpetuating social injustices. Depictions of places as unworthy of our care—whether that care is social, environmental or both—often carry racist overtones (see, for a prime example, Donald Trump’s description of Global South countries).
This is an important factor in understanding the ambivalence with which Californians tend to regard conservation work at the Salton Sea. Measuring by what the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls EJ indexes—combinations of demographic and environmental data—the communities around the sea experience stark rates of vulnerability. On the sea’s southeastern shore, for example, residents are in the state’s 95th percentile for poverty, 88th percentile for asthma, 99th percentile for unemployment, and 83rd percentile for low birth weight. At the same time, proximity to impaired water sources, chemical waste sites, and unhealthy levels of ozone and particulate matter are sky-high. (To explore these kinds of datasets in this and other parts of the state, use the state EPA’s CalEnviroScreen mapping tool.)
The Salton Sea is a difficult place to understand. Is it a crucial resource for wildlife? A century-old engineering mistake? A wasteland? A wetland? Its history and its current conditions are too complex for any point of view to be the right one. Given this complexity, it is easy for outsiders to dismiss the sea as too far gone for mitigation measures, despite the dire consequences for people, fish and birds should it dry up entirely.
Policy solutions must take a wide range of challenges into account, some of them highly contradictory. Fresh water could be diverted here, but California continues to grapple with drought conditions that make this difficult to imagine. Some have proposed projects such as desalination plants, which are prohibitively costly in terms of dollars and energy resources. Calls for local residents to pick up and abandon this place to its fate do not consider the area’s unstable housing conditions, the lack of housing options in other parts of the state, and the fact that it is part of a beloved homeland for Indigenous nations of the desert.
Most recently, policymakers and energy companies have proposed mining the rich reserves of lithium underneath the Salton Sea—not so much a plan for mitigating the sea’s dust and water problems as a way to supply non-carbon energy to the nation, while profiting off the sea’s reputation as a wasteland. Outcomes of lithium extraction are hard to know, but some, like destruction of sacred Indigenous sites, are likely.
This complexity, and the lack of clear solutions, have led some to describe the evaporating Salton Sea as a "wicked problem," a term coined by scholars to describe problems that are so complex as to defy simple or straightforward solutions for all of their diverse stakeholders. Among these various challenges, the Salton Sea faces a deep and abiding problem of perception: people simply do not think of it as worthy of environmental protection, which makes it much more difficult to imagine solutions for the fish, birds, and people who call this place home.
If there’s anything we’ve learned from the history of mistakes at the Salton Sea, it's that the way we collectively perceive a place can often matter almost as much as its physical conditions. Any conversation about the area’s future must start with a tenacious defense of the sea and its surroundings, including the human communities who live here, as inherently valuable, worthy of protection and of investments of time, money and resources. The Salton Sea, despite its complexity and its challenges, is a place we should care about and care for.
