HOME / dvd extras: Deleted scenes, commentary, and more.

Not-So-Great Salt LakeWhy have even the environmentalists given up on the Salton Sea?

By Rebecca OnionPosted Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2007, at 5:27 PM ET

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea.The documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea does not look or feel like a serious film about the environment. In place of sumptuous photos of killer whales or polar bears, the jacket of the recently released DVD features a kitschy collage of dead flies, cracked and sunken earth, and a large woman wearing a pink muumuu and holding a fish whose eyes have been cartoonishly x-ed out. In place of the usual concerned baritone, John Waters does the honors as narrator, tying the film to his classic body of cinematic work on American kookery. Instead of classy strings and haunting woodwinds, the melancholy Austin lounge band Friends of Dean Martinez provides the soundtrack. The closest thing you'll find to an earnest celebrity cameo is a brief appearance by the late Sonny Bono.

But Plagues and Pleasures has a different style for a reason: It's a movie about the environment that isn't content with the good-bad dynamic of your average gloomy enviropic. And its subject is hardly some pristine Alaskan wilderness. The Salton Sea was made by man, and it can be rather grotesque. To the extent it shows up in the news these days, it's when there's a development in the plan to use its water to quench the famously thirsty cities of Southern California. Directors Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, documentarians with a taste for the offbeat who spent four off-and-on years filming in the area, walk a fine line between reveling in post-apocalyptic images of a dying sea (piles of dead fish do make for dramatic images) and suggesting reasons why, despite its accidental origins and ongoing problems, we should consider the sea a place worth saving.

The Salton Sea was created when the Colorado River was diverted for irrigation purposes. In 1905, a flood breached the walls of a temporary diversion, spilling water into a valley called the Salton Sink. The breach was finally closed in 1907, but in the meantime, a 376-square mile sea—a body of water bigger than Lake Tahoe—was born. As John Waters puts it in his inimitable style, the sea was "an engineering screwup"—a byproduct of the grand schemes of those who would make the desert bloom.

Share this article on Digg
Share this article on Buzz

From the beginning, boosters tried to get sport fishermen to come to the sea, which, thanks to the natural salinity of the Colorado and the salty soil of the desert floor, is saltier even than the ocean. In the '50s and '60s, the sea enjoyed a major real estate boom, as waterfront property was hocked in kitschy promotional reels like "Miracle in the Desert," included as an extra on the Plagues and Pleasures DVD. A cheery narrator reminds his audience that in nearby Palm Springs, real estate was once worth almost nothing. "If anyone had told you three decades ago that this vast, nearly deserted land would be worth $2,000 to $3,000 a front foot, you would have probably laughed at such a fantastic idea," he says. The people of Palm Springs had faith in the human ability to make bad land into good. Why not believe the same is possible for the Salton Sea?

People took the bait in droves. Visitors came from the rapidly expanding Southern California metroplex to fish, swim, and (as the locals interviewed frequently remind us) drink cocktails at the yacht clubs that sprung up around the sea. The area even had its own golf course. Photographs from that era show crowded beaches and marinas, filled with postwar Californians living the good life. For a while, the sea saw more visitors than Yosemite National Park.

But Salton's golden age was short-lived. In 1976 and 1977, due to above-average rainfall, increased runoff from the surrounding agricultural fields, and two tropical storms, the sea flooded, swamping hotels, bars, and entire neighborhoods, now remembered only by the telephone poles that still poke out over the water. The sea never quite recovered. The runoff, laden with the Green Revolution's miraculous fertilizers, was heavy in nitrogen and phosphorus, and created water with very little oxygen. Algae flourishes under these conditions, but fish do not, and the sea's stocks—wildlife managers had successfully imported orange mouth corvina in the '50s—began dying off in huge numbers, their carcasses heaping up as far as the eye could see.

Print This ArticlePRINTEmail to a FriendE-MAILShare This ArticleRECOMMEND...Get Slate RSS FeedsRSS
Rebecca Onion is a writer living in Austin, Texas.
What did you think of this article?
Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
The places we live.TODAY'S PICTURES: The places we live.
Cartoonists' take on homosexuality.TODAY'S CARTOONS: Cartoonists' take on homosexuality.
How low she can go.TODAY'S DOONESBURY: How low she can go.
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Secretary Clinton?
Broder | It's not a good fit for her talents, or the next president.
Toles: A Layered ProblemEditorial: What Would Bill Do?