The Settler Sea

Tracy Brynne Voyles has written an environmental and social history of Southern California's Salton Sea and its adjacent agricultural empire that contributes significantly to studies of “settler colonialism.” It is no secret that, throughout the American West, white settlers overwhelmed Indigenous peoples and their cultures, took their lands, introduced unfamiliar land uses, and, in the process, exploited Natives and other nonwhites while degrading the very environment they depended upon. In her recounting of the Salton Sea's origin, development, and past and present uses, Voyles convincingly establishes that social injustices based on racism, sexism, dispossession, and capitalism created momentous environmental degradation, turning on its head a common maxim that poverty and deprivation follow environmental ruin. In Voyles's interesting and well-written treatise, settler colonialism is a web of relationships bolstering white supremacy while simultaneously degrading the environment.The Settler Sea begins with a prehistory of the region and its Indigenous tribes, followed by a recounting of the sea's origin and subsequent development as an irrigation wastewater sink for California's Imperial and Coachella Valleys, the source of much of America's table vegetables. In less than a century, these valleys became home to white settlers and farmers, resort owners, military bombing ranges, defense contractors and others. Throughout the book, Voyles addresses the plight of Indigenous peoples. They were dispossessed of their land and consistently mistreated. Farmers also brought in other nonwhites to work the farms. They were treated no better. Cheap labor was the objective.What makes the Salton Sea unique is both its geologic setting and the sea's origin. The sea occupies a major geological depression, the Salton Sink, which has no external drainage. What flows in either remains or evaporates. The sea was created in 1905 when a canal to bring irrigation water from the Colorado River to dryland farms in the Salton Sink failed, thus allowing the Colorado River to flow uncontrolled into the sink for months. Voyles's chapter on this engineering debacle is riveting. Developers eventually reconstructed the canal, and Colorado River water was subsequently diverted for valley irrigation.Irrigation return flows from Imperial Valley farms have always drained to the Salton Sea. Existing as it does in a desert, high evaporation rates have gradually, inexorably, increased the concentration of salts, pesticides, and other synthetic contaminants found in the water. The lake has become saline. By the 1960s, researchers questioned whether humans should consume Salton Sea fish. And in the 1970s the New River, a tributary to the Salton Sea from the south, was named the “most polluted waterway in the United States” (248). Because of high evaporation rates native to deserts, maintaining the status quo will inevitably increase the concentrations in the sea. Voyles describes in detail the various sources of this pollution. The Salton Sea has become a repository for human, agricultural, and industrial waste; the sea's presence in the Salton Sink means these wastes are stagnant.In recent decades, some Colorado River water has been diverted to the San Diego area, reducing the amount that drains to the sea. Consequently, the sea has begun to shrink, exposing its lake bed to the wind and creating dust storms. These dust storms contain contaminants from the lake and continue to plague local inhabitants with health problems. Voyles details all of these occurrences, drawing upon numerous and wide-ranging sources. Whether focusing on the sea or Indigenous peoples and others affected by the sea's agricultural use, the story is not pretty.If Voyles's assessment has a weakness, it is the inference that all contaminants in the sea are toxic, including bacteria, heavy metals, 2,4-D, PCBs, TCE, and ammonium perchlorate (115, 238). They can, indeed, be toxic. But their presence does not mean certain death for life forms living in or near the sea, the reason being that they are not present in toxic concentrations. Throughout the United States' agricultural heartland, fertilizer byproducts and pesticides can be found in irrigation return flows and in underlying groundwaters. Typically, they are not present in toxic concentrations, and regulatory intervention is not required. While certainly undesirable, contaminants of one type or another are ubiquitous in surface and groundwaters, just not in toxic concentrations. Voyles is a historian, not a water quality specialist, and expecting a detailed description of this interplay of concentrations and toxicity would not be fair. Yet it would not have required a major addition to the text to address this important qualifying point. All the same, having read Voyles's contribution, I have no intention of ever swimming in the Salton Sea

Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Racism · Subsistence agriculture · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecology · History · Law

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