Forgetting what John Muir said, Earth Island Institute president Bob Wilkinson has asked about the relevance of the Salton Sea to our major restoration goal in Glen Canyon. Why should Bob forget Muir's great thought that when we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it linked to the universe.
Of course, John didn't use "linked" because we had not yet got in the habit of denying linkage if a particular link gets in our way.
Bob, who is about half my age, is excused for not seeing the Glen-Salton link. I ignored it for eighty-seven years. I see it now. They are kissing cousins, or rather more: siblings with a single parent, the Colorado River. The two other siblings are the Grand Canyon and the Sea of Cortez, the latter born long before the canyons. The Salton Sea hasn't revealed its true age yet. Also linked, quite recently, are the Wicked Step-sisters of the Sun Belt.
It's fun to wonder why the Salton Sea exists, no fun at all to watch what is happening to it, and exciting to get busy on what we can do about it, rescuing Glen Canyon as a by-product, extending the Sun Belt sisters' lease on life, and helping all people who like the Earth to see what rivers are good for and what are not good for rivers.
To help link all these things, let's look into the mysterious beginnings of the Salton Sea.
The present existence of the Sea was caused by a human error. Engineers made it, trying to control the Colorado River their way. It went, instead, to where it had been before - perhaps often - the Salton Sea, where the river found its floor in the Imperial Valley was a couple of hundred feet below sea level.
The concept of sea level never entered the river's head. Sea level is a figment of human imagination. When was the sea ever level? When the ice was six thousand feet higher than the summit of Mount Washington? When you could walk across the Bering Sea? When the current global warming stops? When a new ice age comes? Sea LEVEL? Ridiculous. The sea rises and falls when it damn pleases.
Let's not contemplate whether the Earth is flat or not. Science has told us water seeks it own level. How can it when it doesn't know what level is and has as much use for a level playing field as a mountain does. If you were water, how would you seek your own level on a basketball, much less a big globe, like a planet? We know that the Earth is round because we watch television. But remember the scientific "evidence" that it's flat, and there is a sea level.
Realizing that there is no scientific evidence that the sea is level, we can easily understand why the Salton Sea floor is where it is now, because it wasn't there--below sea level--when it first arrived. Sea levelled it.
Give your imagination free reign and you can figure out when, how, why, and whether the Salton Sea is for yourself. This will lead you quickly to its link with Glen Canyon. Or maybe not all that quickly.
You can safely conclude that if the present Salton Sea is the result only of an engineer's stupid mistake, the Colorado River could have let it reappear often, as often as there were very wet years. Long droughts dry it up again like raindrops on hot pavement.
Rename it the Evanescent Sea, or the Ephemeral Sea (or the Intermittent Sea, if that is easier to spell), and don't get excited about when it was or wasn't, but feel free to get upset about what it is now.
It was most recently filled by harmless water. No one had scattered uranium around in its watershed, radiating living things in ways they couldn't handle. There was no Lake Powell in which boaters could dump, among other things, the equivalent of several Exxon Valdez oil spills already. Human-caused erosion was negligible. Human dispersed not-natural chemicals were not. Rain and snow had been able to make their way overground in streams and underground in aquifers without any help from the audience, and there was ozone where we needed it and not where we didn't. Not-so-great ships were sailing out to sea, silently, and the Earth hadn't lost so much serenity. Wall Street moved more calmly between panic and orgasm, and there were brief periods of peace.
Excuse me. We were talking about the Salton Sea. Well, things I just mentioned, or things like them, began to happen, as things do happen, on our recent watch. Somehow what agriculture, et al., did to Kesterson, a once-innocent reclamation project in the Central Valley of California, found its way to the Imperial Valley, and people began describing it as a sewer. And like Kesterson, it killed its wildlife. Some people worried.
They wanted it stopped. But others had got used to getting free water from the Colorado River. It kept them prospering at minimal expense, and they were averse to change, even change for the better, which is an ailment seen too frequently among humans, and which is why a friend of mine, Bernadette Cozart, says we must be the youngest species on Earth because everything else seems to know what to do.
So various unsanitary Imperial practices have turned the Salton Sea into a sewer.
It takes no genius to suggest a solution.
Stop wasting water (a million acre-feet a year already) at Lake Powell, drain it as soon as possible, preferably a little sooner, send enough of that water to the Imperial Valley to help dilute the sewer, buy a pump to begin lifting that water up to where it can reach where sea level now is, slowly enough to cause Mexico less trouble than we now do, improve the water now going to Arizona, Nevada, southern California, and Mexico by reducing pollution, water waste, erosion, energy waste, and addiction to pernicious growth, especially in the Sun Belt, where we water our well-groomed skin cancer in ways we can't deal with, using water from wherever at whatever the cost.
Wouldn't it be fun to learn again what we once knew to do? We could deal with that. And the Imperial Valley can regain what it was. So can Glen Canyon. The Grand Canyon will be happier. So will everybody else. Sooner, unlike bigger, is better.
We can afford this, but not denying it.