"The Dying Sea"

"There is just one catch. Between the needs of the city and the farmers sits the Salton Sea, which conservation will destroy. “The sea is the linchpin between Colorado River water and urban Southern California,” Michael Cohen, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, a water-policy think tank, says. Without the inflows, the sea, already shrinking, will recede dramatically, exposing miles of lake bed loaded with a hundred years’ worth of contaminants. Much of the wildlife will disappear—poisoned, starved, or driven off. The consequences for people around the region could be dire, too. Before irrigation, the valley was plagued by violent dust storms. With the water gone, the lake bed could emit as much as a hundred tons of fine, caustic dust a day, leading to respiratory illness in the healthy and representing an acute hazard for people with compromised immune systems. No one knows how far that dust can travel on the wind. Mary Nichols, the state’s top air-quality official, says, “The nightmare scenario is the pictures we’ve all seen of the Dust Bowl that contributed to the formation of California in the first place.”...

Looking at the sea can turn the mind poetical. This is the landscape after people, you think. This is the landscape toward the end of the fish, in the last years of the birds, at the beginning of the dust."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-dying-sea

This is fascinating - the history of the accidentally artificially-created lake and the way that humans and natural ecosystems have been built around it. And the asthma and lung diseases happening now.

FB: "Driving through the farmland of the Imperial Valley inspires awe and indignation. Like a jungle, it seethes: yellow-green Sudan grass; rough, inky sugar beets; alfalfa as bright as a banker’s shade; mixed lettuces that grade from light green to violet. “You could not paint a picture that is a better color,” Kay Pricola, the executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, says. “We are dependent on the water. We exist because of the water.” The unplanted land is grayish, crusted, flocked with crystalline white salt, like a Christmas attraction in a Southern California mall.

There are four hundred and fifty farmers in the Imperial Valley, some of them descendants of the pioneers and many of them quite prosperous. In addition to the forage crops, they grow much of the winter produce eaten in this country. It is hot in the valley, up to a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer months. The farmers tend to travel. Their wives may prefer to spend summers in La Jolla. Half the land is tenant-farmed; in some cases, the owners live elsewhere. “It functions as a plantation,” a local activist told me. Larry Cox, a prominent valley farmer who is the president of the Imperial County Farm Bureau, disputes the characterization. He says that treating farmland as an investment is more like owning an office building in San Diego and hiring someone else to run it."