The Salton Sea's Vanishing Shoreline and the Dust That Remains

The shoreline you are looking at is not where the shoreline was. The Salton Sea has been shrinking for decades, as the agricultural runoff that once sustained it has been reduced by water-sharing agreements and conservation programs. Every year, the water line retreats a little further, and what it leaves behind is not beach.

The exposed lakebed is a sediment record of everything the Imperial Valley farms have discharged into the water over the past century: pesticides, fertilizer runoff, selenium, salt, heavy metals. When the lakebed dries, it becomes dust. Fine particulate matter, smaller than a human hair, that can travel long distances on desert winds. The communities directly downwind are the agricultural towns of the Imperial Valley.

Childhood asthma rates in those communities are among the highest in California. The residents are primarily Latino farmworkers, many of them from indigenous Oaxacan communities in southern Mexico, people who speak Mixtec or Zapotec as a first language. They came to this valley to do the agricultural work that the resort economy and the Imperial Valley economy require. The decisions about how much Colorado River water reaches the farms that drain into the sea, decisions made by federal agencies and state water boards and interstate compacts, are not decisions they are in the room for.

The state and federal agencies responsible for Salton Sea restoration have been debating plans since the early two-thousands. Funding has been partial. Progress has been slow. The sea continues to shrink. The dust continues to blow.

There is a National Wildlife Refuge on the sea's southern shore that still supports significant populations of migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. What remains of the sea is not nothing. What has been lost, and who bears the cost of that loss, is where the accounting gets complicated.