Like all OA trips, our goals and intentions included creating an experience that allowed people to connect with the natural beauty of the outdoors and to connect with each other through meaningful dialogue and forming relationships. This trip was unique, however, because we also sought to make this trip specifically focused on learning about environmental justice by directly engaging with the environment and community of the Salton Sea, a perfect case study of how complex environmental justice and water policy in California can be.
We arrived at our Mecca Beach campsite on the Salton Sea as the sun was setting. For most people, if they have heard of the Salton Sea, the common perception is a stinking, polluted, environmental disaster with a beach littered with the bones of dead fish. There are plenty of dead fish to be found on the beach, and it’s true that the shoreline of the Salton Sea has started to recede more rapidly in recent years, becoming more and more saline (so that now only a single species of tilapia is supported by the lake). Still, one didn’t have to look long or far to find plovers, sandpipers dotting the shores and wading in the puddles along the shore, and the lake’s reflection of the pure blue sky was still stunningly beautiful.
On Saturday morning, we had the opportunity to hear from Jose, a park ranger for the Salton Sea State Recreation Area, at the Salton Sea SRA Visitor’s Center just up the road from our campsite. As someone who worked for the state park and knew the environment intimately, and lives nearby the Salton Sea, Jose had a lot of knowledge and a valuable perspective to share, and listening to his view of the Salton Sea was probably the highlight of the trip for me.
Jose helped fill in any of the gaps in the research we did as facilitators to explain the history of how the Salton Sea came to be where and how it is. I am really intrigued by the way the identity of the Salton Sea has changed dramatically over time, shifting through distinct phases. For some background, the Salton Sea occupies an ancient lake bed that became filled again when a dam for irrigation from the Colorado River burst in 1905, and the full flow of the Colorado flowed into the lowland expanse of the Salton Sink for a year and a half.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Salton Sea was a glamorous vacation destination that drew more tourists than Yosemite. In the 1970s, two back to back hurricanes hit the Salton Sea, causing massive floods and devastation throughout the region, and suddenly the Salton Sea was a place of tragedy rather than luxury. In the more recent years of the Salton Sea, it . In 2003, several stakeholders agreed to the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA), agreeing to conserve water and reduce California’s over dependence on the Colorado River by using less water for agriculture in the Imperial Valley. However, because the agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley is the only source of water for the Salton Sea, the consequence of these agricultural-to-urban water transfers has been to cause the lake to recede at a faster rate.