The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles

Author:Traci Brynne Voyles [Voyles, Traci Brynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ut, nature, Ca, Co, Ecosystems & Habitats, HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, State & Local, Mt, Nv, history, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), Wy), Id, NAT025000 Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Oceans & Seas, Hi, United States, Oceans & Seas
ISBN: 9781496216731
Google: vxVDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2021-11-15T23:49:46.766812+00:00

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Imagine a map of perchlorate’s meandering journey: moving with groundwater from the Henderson factories into the Las Vegas Wash and down through the Colorado River’s lower basin, seeping into the soil of riverbanks and farms, being sprayed on crops, absorbing into human and animal bodies, flowing from Los Angeles taps, pouring into glasses from gallons of supermarket milk—and of course draining into the Salton Sea. Such a map would make a serviceable illustration of the Colorado River’s reach and power after a century of being bent to settlers’ purposes in the West. It might offer a better way to visualize the long reach of Colorado River water than geophysical maps of its early-twenty-first century riverbed—a sobering reality, given that it would be a map of a toxin illuminating the reach of a waterway.

A perchlorate map would also reflect the larger ecological consequences of military industries—and their afterlives—in the West. Few of the toxic contaminants produced by industrial development spurred by World War II stayed where companies or the government put them. Rather, they moved downwind, downriver, and downhill, tracing the contours of the physical landscape in ways that created vast and often poorly understood environmental health risks for humans and nonhumans.

This became clear in the late 1990s, when federal regulators discovered that the local water source perhaps most directly affected by perchlorate ran through the taps of the Torres Martinez and Agua Caliente bands of the Cahuilla Nation and their neighbors in the Coachella Valley. The Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), facing water shortages and ongoing depletion of groundwater by increased settlement since the completion of the Coachella branch of the All-American Canal in 1948, had begun to try to mitigate groundwater shortfalls by pumping in more water from the Colorado River. They did this at four “recharge stations,” effectively replacing high-quality, drinkable aquifer water with untreated river water containing dissolved solids, pesticides, nitrates, and perchlorate. From 1996 to 2015 the Agua Caliente band demanded that the CVWD stop replenishing their groundwater with water that “failed to satisfy the EPA’s recommended secondary standards for contaminants.”45 At the very least, the tribe argued, the water should be treated first. The water district ignored them for nearly a decade, until the Agua Caliente Cahuillas won a landmark federal lawsuit acknowledging that tribes had a sovereign right to drinkable groundwater underneath their reservations.

On the Torres Martinez Reservation, at the south end of the Coachella aquifer, the tribal EPA found that the groundwater, replenished by CVWD, contained dangerous levels of perchlorate.46 They advised the reservation’s residents not to drink their tap water and provided bottled water to elders. The Torres Martinez Cahuillas faced greater risks, it turned out, because of their proximity to the CVWD’s recharge stations, one of which sat directly along the ancient shoreline of Lake Cahuilla, a sacred site for this Native group.47 A spokesperson for the water district suggested that perchlorate should not worry the tribe; all they had to do was take iodine tablets—a dangerous and misguided recommendation that contributed to an atmosphere already rife with confusion and mistrust.

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