Author uses Salton Sea to illustrate man’s relationship with the environment
“The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it’s a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it’s a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it’s simply home.”
So describes a new book about the Salton
Sea that traces the human and non-human history of the large body of water shimmering in the desert of Imperial and Riverside counties in Southern California.
In her book, “The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism,” author Traci Brynne Voyles argues that this place has defied people’s expectations and attempts at control for hundreds of years and that the key to understanding the Salton Sea (and indeed, all environments) is to recognize that they never just mean one thing. Part environmental history, part work of environmental justice studies, “The Settler Sea” traces the long complex history of the indigenous peoples who originally called the area home and lived in harmony with the ever-changing dynamic of flooding and evaporation to the 20th century settlers who brought productive farms, dams, prosperity and pollution. It ranges from the lake as a wetland in the desert that draws millions of migratory birds and dreams of a resort to an ecosystem at risk with a receding shoreline, ruins of old trailers and a sometimes-rotten egg odor that can drift for miles.
The book was published in November 2021 by the University of Nebraska Press and is available through various retailers and online. A paperback version is scheduled to become available in September. Its 366 pages include photographs, illustrations, maps, graphs and charts to illustrate the story it tells.
The author is an associate professor and chair of women’s and gender studies and the director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma. She works in the fields of environmental history, environmental justice, indigenous studies, feminist theory and critical race studies. Voyles specializes in working across disciplinary boundaries and has been a featured speaker in a range of multidisciplinary venues and research initiatives. In addition to “The Settler Sea,” she has published “Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). She is the author of several journal articles and essays, and the co-editor of the forthcoming collection, “Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History,” with Mary E. Mendoza.
In “The Settler Sea,” Voyles provides an innovative exploration of the Salton Sea, looking to the ways the sea, its origins and its role in human life have been vital to the people who call this region home. It has been said that the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when an irrigation canal bank failed and the Colorado River flowed into the desert, creating a human-caused and maintained inland lake. The lake acquired the name Salton Sea when railroad engineer William Phipps Blake in 1909 declared that would be its name, based on a nearby settlement named Salton.
Voyles, however, maintains the 20th century lake is but the latest version for a body of water that goes back to prehistoric times. She likens the Colorado River to a rattlesnake whose undulating tail carved out a giant bowl in the desert floor that is some 200 feet below sea level. Over thousands of years, the bowl would hold a sea subject to cycles of flooding and drying out many times as weather brought periods of rain and drought. The native people called that sea Lake Cahiulla and their culture flourished as they adapted to the changing body of water.
That all changed in the 1800s with the arrival of white settlers who established farms in the area and sought to harness the Colorado River, in the meantime introducing pesticides and other pollution. During World War II, the military used the area as a base, training area and target and test site, militarization of the Southwest that continues today. With a more lasting body of water came birds, millions of them representing some 400 species that rely on the Salton Sea as a wetland source in the middle of the desert.
The modern-day version of the Salton Sea depicts the strong influences of colonialism brought by the settlers not only on the ecological fate of the sea but also on the lives of the people whose ancestors had established a sustaining relationship with the lake as well as the workers who today toil in the agriculture fields, according to Voyles.
Starting with her introduction, “A World on the Brink,” Voyles lays out the current state of the disaster she sees the Salton Sea is in with its neglected need for an environmental cleaning and righting of social justice wrongdoings.
Part 1, Desert and Flood, tells the stories of the ancient Lake Cahuilla and the altered way of life for the desert people. Part 2, Birds, Concrete, Bodies, Bombs, Chains and Toxins, lays out in succession how the Salton Sea has been altered over the last 100 years from a place of environmental beauty to a disaster created by a series of what Voyles calls damaging colonization activities.
It’s like a kaleidoscope, she said of the sea. Turn one way and see the wetlands and a diverse array of birds. Tilt it and see an intensely polluted area. A clockwise twist reveals a place of poverty and destitution. Turn the other way and see a quirky counter-culture that celebrates the sea’s paradoxical strangeness.
A full rotation lays bare a sacred indigenous world maintained since time immortal.
The final chapter in “The Settler Sea” focuses on how to save the Salton Sea through “a better understanding of our world, each other and where we go from here.”
In 2020, the Torres Martinez tribal council sponsored a poster project to honor the sea and its role in Cahuilla life. They chose the theme, “the past, present and future of the Salton Sea.” The contest came about as part of a workshop designed to increase awareness about the sea’s various environmental problems and to share plans for its future.