The Salton Sea is an incongruous sight: a huge body of water in the middle of a desert.
And with good reason. California's largest lake was created purely by
accident in 1905 when floodwaters from the Colorado River burst past a
series of dams and settled in a naturally salty depression more than
228 feet below sea level.
– "California's Salton Sea Is Shrinking," LA Times
Well, "purely by accident" is one way to put it. "By stupidity and cupidity" might be another.
The Salton Sea's creation was abetted an early developer's vision to turn one of the most inhospitable places on earth, the Valley of the Dead, into the Imperial Valley. With irrigation from an unpredictable Colorado River brought back to its ancient delta, the Imperial Valley became one of America's most fertile agricultural areas. But not before an early snow melt took out temporary control gates and much of the early settlement.
The news report on the endangered Salton Sea, barely 100 years old, is far more than a tale of potential environmental loss. It is a preview of a much greater looming disaster — one that would make an al-Qaeda nuclear bomb inside the U.S. look puny in comparison.
That's because no nuke could devastate and depopulate the southwestern
United States the way reduced snow melt, combined with increased
settlement of the region would do. Our leaders see national security as
a narrow matter of guns against ideology, when our way of life is much
more threatened by a collapse of commerce and environment. And nowhere
are we more vulnerable than in the west.
The Colorado River cuts a green oxbow around the Goose Neck on its way to meet the Green River in Canyonlands National Park. But this comparatively lush strip is a tiny anomaly in an arid, uninhabited land that stretches for hundreds of miles in any direction.
The Mormons declared the area around Salt Lake the promised land because it was unclaimed, and to continue traveling on their route west probably would've meant their extinction.
I was born at an eastern outpost of one of the world's more arid regions, where we have wrested pockets of civilization entirely based on the precarious promise of the Colorado River. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and the Imperial Valley represent the western extreme.
As Marc Reisner wrote more than 20 years ago in the definitive Cadillac Desert:
If the Colorado River suddenly stopped flowing, you would have four years of carryover capacity in the reservoirs before you had to evacuate most of southern California and Arizona and a good portion of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming [...] [the Colorado] illuminates the neon city of Las Vegas, whose annual income is one-fourth the entire gross national product of Egypt — the only other place on earth where so many people are so helplessly dependent on one river's flow. The greater portion of the Nile, however, still manages, despite many diversions, to reach its delta at the Mediterranean Sea.
The news article talks about the shrinking Salton Sea as if it were going to be a disaster for fish and migratory birds. Proposals to address the problem so far have gone nowhere.
"If we dawdle around and don't go after this hard, we'll end up with a
dead sea before we can fix it," warned Rick Daniels, executive director
of the Salton Sea Authority, a coalition of local governments and
agencies. "The fish will be dead and the birds will be gone."
Just for starters.
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