Inland Sea

The Salton Sea is a bizarre and captivating inland sea; it is also a cautionary tale about human-made environmental disasters and unintended consequences. In this way, it has always felt like an avatar for something much larger (maybe even for all of the world’s oceans and seas) than its actual physical footprint.

The Sea has come and gone over the long stretches of geological time. It had been dry for some 400 years when, in 1905, the basin was accidentally filled when an irrigation levee broke, and for two years water spilt from the Colorado River into the terminal lake. Thus began the chain of actions and reactions that would ultimately create the toxic, highly saline, shrinking (and stinking) body of water it is today. Because the lake has no natural outlet, and the Colorado River water is saltier than most rivers, as time passed, and agricultural runoff flowed into the sea, the combination of high salinity and pesticide pollution poisoned the basin. Before that series of relationships was fully understood, and before the fixes that ironically made it worse took effect, for a short time, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the area became something of a utopian holiday getaway and people were able to ignore the oncoming calamity.

Today, the sea has experienced mass die-offs and diseases of fish and birds, the beaches are covered with bones of fish that can no longer survive in the water, and the people who live near the sea have higher rates of childhood asthma from breathing the agricultural dust exposed as the sea dries up (a process sped up by climate change).

We’ve been taking photographs at the Salton Sea over the years, trying to capture what it is that brings us back to a place that is the site of such poignant anxieties and imminent environmental catastrophe. It is still a beautiful and compelling place, and people and wildlife still live there and make lives there. In short, we can’t just write it off as a series of unfortunate mistakes - perhaps while we get to know the details of the Salton Sea itself, we can also learn “something much larger” from its story.

Jessica Haye & Clark Hsiao are part of »Guest Room: Boaz Levin & Sophia Greiff«.