Life and Death at the Salton Sea: The Impossibilities of American Environmentalism in the Borderlands

This paper is an environmental and cultural history of southern California’s Salton Sea, the state’s largest body of water. The Salton Sea makes a fascinating study of the complex politics of environmental and human health in the West. Its history is a rich of palette of human relationships to nature, and vice versa. This history, moreover, is deeply imbricated in the social logics of race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and ability; the sea has long been a place where 20th century notions of social, as well as environmental, borders and belonging are negotiated. The Salton Sea makes an ideal site for the study of this question because it is, quite clearly, neither human- nor nature-made, due to the complexities of its formation in 1905, when overflow from the Colorado River combined with a poorly constructed irrigation system to cause the whole river to flow into the desert and create the sea. Its origins and current existence are a tangle of technology and environment that we cannot (and, as I argue, should not) unknot. Environmentalism at the sea, as a result, has been fraught, defying our hegemonic notions of landscapes that are worthy of our protection—namely, the idealization of untouched wilderness at the center of the American environmental imaginary