So, after watching “Plagues and pleasures on the Salton sea” (available on YouTube for free), I decided to look into what was happening to it.
Looks like we actually may help with restoration. But what does that mean, where are we getting the water for it? Will that money actually get to us?
Salton Sea: Manmade, polluted by agriculture, exploited for water rights by less than 20 farming families with unlimited water rights and used as a tool for greed.
Let the Salton Sea DIE, clean it up properly and quit fucking farming in the goddamned desert.
Source: Family lives in Niland, CA on the northern shores of the Salton Sea.
https://www.propublica.org/article/california-farm-families-gained-control-colorado-river
They talked about Niland in that movie a little bit. I agree with you, except for the lack of alternative wetlands problem.
I’d like it if existing shoreline wetlands could be expanded, let the aberration that is the Salton sink go back to being the sleepy desert it always was.
Issue with creating a wetland in that area is that the cleanwater act [1] would be enacted by the state and would require FAR more resources to keep clean considering the farming in the area and I highly doubt the State will do it. If Berkshire Hathaway with its idea to convert the area into a Lithium Mining town [2] has thus far failed. Coupled between the falling prices of lithium and the cleanup, which is akin to the whole Owens Lake problem [3] is too expensive to take on without State help.
The whole thing is a nightmare and no one seems dedicated enough to resolve it.
Ideally, we should redirect part of the CO river back town towards Mexico where it belongs, which would recreate the natural salton sink wetlands which runoff into the Sea of Cortez, but the loss of precious water is too great currently to consider.
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/california-owens-mono-lake-comebacks-rcna86908
One link for those interested in reading about this topic: https://resources.ca.gov/Newsroom/Page-Content/News-List/Blog-Salton-Sea-Federal-Funding
Ooof, sorry about that, I’m still getting used to voyager’s interface. Tried putting in both a link and a photo, but it looks like only the photo went up.
Thank you. It is clear what we’d’ “get”: habitat restoration and dust mitigation.
Edit, desert adapted plants found in the native habitats surrounding the sea do not need extra water. They evolved to live there.
That was hard.
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