Exposing the Desert
Environmental justice in California's Desert Wetland
This story is about the Salton Sea and the people who use it, live by it, are affected by it and seek to heal it.
While grounded in a place, this narrative speaks to the entire region and the wide-ranging environmental health issues found in the southwestern US and northern Mexico. Drying lakes are becoming common environmental and public health concerns in the US, and the Salton Sea is just one example of what can happen when climate change and competing water demands collide to create an environment conducive to wind-blown dust events (Johnston et al. 2019). The Salton Sea is located in southeastern California, in a geologic depression called the Salton Basin which includes the Coachella Valley, the Imperial Valley, the Mexicali Valley, and the Colorado River Delta (Wood ed. 2008).
The Salton Sea is ecologically a part of the Colorado River watershed which comprises parts of southwestern US and northern Mexico (Vélez-Ibáñez and Heyman 2017). In an effort to colonize the southwest in the 19th century, the US Bureau of Land Reclamation and private investors sought to control the Colorado River watershed (Reisner 1986). From 1905-1907 the Salton Sea was formed when flood waters broke an irrigation canal constructed by the California Development Company. After the flood waters were controlled, the Sea was kept in order to maintain farming in the area and is officially designated as a sump, a dump for agroindustrial pollutants (De Buys 1999; Rudy 2005; Cantor and Knuth 2019). Today, the Colorado River’s waters flow through a series of dams, canals, and irrigation ditches passing through thousands of miles of farmland, crossing state and international borders, being used and reused, and collecting salts and pesticides until it reaches the deserts of the Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley (De Buys 1999; Reisner 1986). The agricultural runoff in these valleys and the Alamo and New Rivers then feed the Salton Sea (De Buys 1999; Rudy 2005).
For almost half a century, the ecological hazards caused by the desiccation of the Salton Sea in southwestern California have been well-documented. Beginning with problems of increasing salinity and unhealthy levels of selenium found in the 1970s and 80s, the continued ecological troubles related to this desert lake reach beyond the shores to affect the lives of the people, largely Native Americans and Latinx immigrants, living in communities located around the lake in both Imperial Valley and the Eastern Coachella Valley.
Now, the agricultural water that once fed the inland lake has stopped flowing, and as the Salton Sea shrinks, particulate clouds rise from the playa of a rapidly drying lake filling the air and the lungs of the people living nearby.
The shrinking of the Salton Sea is the intentional result of the Quantification Settlement Agreement—the historic water transfer which sold water from the Imperial Irrigation District to supply municipalities in Southern Californa. The waters that once fed the Salton Sea from agricultural run off now go to the surrounding urban areas, such as San Diego.
Signed in 2003, the QSA, a rural to urban water transfer agreement, kept the flow of mitigation water to the Salton Sea running until 2018 while plans to mitigate the environmental effects of this transfer were supposed to have be funded and implemented to prevent further environmental damage to the Salton Sea region. Today, the mitigation water has stopped flowing and the plans and funds to effectively save the Salton Sea from becoming an environmental hazard have not happened. The result is a rapidly shrinking lake exposing dried lake bed known as playa (Forsman 2014; Marshall 2017).
Research in various communities along the US-Mexico border have suggested a connection between place and higher rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses (Farzan et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019). Preliminary research and a small number of studies suggest this might be the case in the Eastern Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley as well. Even prior to the Quantification Settlement Agreement, researchers observed higher rates of childhood asthma than the US national average (Farzan et al.). Parents in these primarily low income regions are concerned over the higher rates of childhood asthma and other health conditions such as, wheezing, allergies, and dry coughs (Farzan et al. 2019).
This means, taking a breath, even miles downwind of the lake, means putting yourself at risk of exposure to playa dust.
How did the Salton Sea become both a home and a hazard?
In the first half of the 20th century, the Salton Sea was a marvel: California’s largest lake, located in a desert (Voyle 2017). However, beginning in the 1970s, tourism to the area began to decline due to increasing salinity, sulfuric smells and fish and waterfowl die offs (Wood ed. 2008). In the 1950s and 60s, real estate investors’ dreams became fantasies as they realized the area could not sustain resort cities (De Buys 1999).
Many solutions to control the salinity levels of the lake have been proposed over the years but none have broken much ground. Additionally, the municipal sewage that flows from Mexicali and the waste that comes from prisons and industries on the California side of the border remains a topic little discussed compared to the other ongoing environmental issues. The estimated cost to achieve ecological balance in the area ranges from the millions to the billions and the problems continue to grow (Rudy 2005).
While the area was abandoned by investors in the late 20th century, on the other side of this, are the people who’ve always been there, the people who stayed, and the people who have arrived since then. Although commonly referred to as a place of ghost towns by tourists, people still live in these communities around the saline lake. The area is in fact full of life, above and below the ground, as it has been throughout geologic and historical time into the present.
The Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley are the ancestral lands of many Indigenous communities and prior to colonization the region connected Native peoples across the Southwest through trade routes. The displacement of Indigenous communities by non-Native settlers paralleled environmental damage to the Southwest. As a result of the basin's leaders and government wanting to dam the Colorado River and to use the Salton Sea as a drainage site, approximately 40% of the Torres-Martinez Reservation remains underneath the Salton Sea (De Buys 1999; Torres-Martinez Tribal Council-History n.d.)
Histories of farming and railroad construction brought more people into the valleys and a majority Latinx population which today continues to thrive despite decades of economic and social discrimination (Cheney et al. 2018). While the communities of Imperial Valley and the Eastern Coachella Valley are the foundation for the success of the agriculture and tourism industries in the Salton Basin, a majority of the residents themselves live in impoverished conditions (Rudy 2005; London et al. 2013).
These communities, that directly surround the Salton Sea, look to the water with concern and seek environmental justice for themselves and the ecological systems the lake sustains.
Struggles for environmental justice have been top concerns for communities of color in the United States and abroad for a long time (Bullard 1993). The targeting of Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities for undesirable land use practices, such as industrial facilities, pollutes communities and puts the people at elevated risks of exposure. For a long time, agriculture was not considered as an unwanted land use in the same way as a landfill or chemical manufacturing facility. However, this changes if we look at the environmental narrative of agriculture in relation to pesticides and other practices like agricultural burnings. Additionally, when coupled with barriers to accessing healthcare, the health burdens for individuals and communities is further increases (Bullard 1993).
Environmental and health risks are not randomly distributed in society but are the results of decisions and policies that burden Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities (Bullard 1993). Like most people affected by environmental injustice, families in the Salton Basin do not have the ability to “vote with their feet” (to be able to move) (Bullard 1993), and perhaps they don’t want to either. They want action and environmental justice.
In addition to the physical marks on the land created by industry and economic policy, these valleys are affected by centuries-long history of systemic racism and labor unrest in agriculture.
The wounds left from colonization and later US frontier expansion, the practices of land exclusion and housing segregation, the racist attitudes that subjugated people of Mexican origin, and the Bracero Program, which supplied cheap non-citizen migratory labor, have not been addressed and until then healing is out of the question (Rudy 2005; Cheney 2018).
A century of exploitation and discriminatory immigration laws have created precarious employment and environments for farmworkers and their families in which pesticide use and industrial waste from the transboundary movement of the New and Alamo Rivers are daily reminders of the environmental inequities that jeopardize residents’ air, water, and soil quality.
The environmental and social justice issues observed around the Salton Sea are a result of the Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley's history.
It is within this context that environmental injustice and health disparities are being addressed by the communities who call the land home as well as by university researchers and governments who all seek a sustainable Salton Sea.
What follows this introduction is a multimedia, interactive, and multidisciplinary story about the complex problems of the Salton Sea and the people who are working to understand its health effects. This StoryMap is a living series documenting the narratives, experiences, and projects of those building a body of knowledge for environmental justice in the Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley of southeastern California. In this StoryMap series, we will create a visual representation of the networks of research which address the environmental problems of the Salton Sea and the surrounding communities. We attempt to take a holistic view of environmental justice in the Salton Basin by speaking with community members and researchers about economic, environmental, and social justice.
This StoryMap is funded by the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of California, Riverside (HDR@UCR), whose goal is to build a shared vision of health equity in the Inland Empire. To contribute to that goal, this StoryMap is an invitation to get involved in these concerns about pollution in and around the Salton Sea. It is also a source of information for those already involved and a recognition of the work that has already been done. This is a story about toxic exposure and how communities are working towards environmental accountability.
In our next StoryMap, we will feature the work being done by HDR@UCR under Dr. David Lo for the project titled Childhood Asthma and the Salton Sea.
Click on the link below for the Center for Health Disparities website for more information about HDR@UCR and to keep a look out for the next chapter in this unfolding story.
