Paradox in the American Desert: The Salton Sea

My project is set of three books that explore conflicting land use around the Salton Sea in California. Thirty-five miles long by fifteen miles wide, the Salton Sea is the largest inland lake in California. It was formed accidentally in 1905 when an extensive irrigation project went badly awry, causing the whole of the Colorado River to temporarily flow into the deep, arid Salton Sink. After much effort the river was re-routed, but what remained was a bizarre, artificial desert sea. Since then, the Salton Sea has been appropriated for a vast array of diverse and contradictory endeavors: wealthy vacation oases and the setting for Hollywood movies, cheap real estate and military bomb testing, state parks and wildlife refuges, religious retreats and artistic experiments, mining, agriculture and geothermal projects. I was immediately intrigued by the Salton Sea as a landscape of improbable contrasts—a place that seems at once pre-historic and post-apocalyptic, full of rare wildlife and toxic decay, RV oases adjoining impoverished communities, bomb testing grounds overlapping nature reserves. It is both a paradise and a wasteland, a place of bizarre, desolate beauty. I visited the Salton Sea in December 2010 before creating this set of three books. The books are a time line, a field guide, and a book of stories—broad, specific, and personal. I hope that these books help clarify some of the fascinating and paradoxical land use around the Salton Sea, and that they reflect to some extent the complex assortment of environmental, social, and political forces that determine a place.