Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2002

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Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs (Cont.)

HOW MANY RÍO NUEVOS, how many Salton Seas on this planet already lay poisoned—if they were poisoned—for the long term? The Aral Sea? Love Canal? Lake Baikal? Would their new normality become normative for the rest of us? How bad off is the Salton Sea, really?

"Stories of a polluted Salton Sea are greatly exaggerated," a recent brochure from the Coachella Valley Historical Society informed me. In 1994 the author of the pamphlet, "Salton Sea: Californiaís Overlooked Treasure," had taken a drive around the sea with her husband and experienced "a wonderful sense of what is right with the world." Five years later, the authors of an alarming and beautifully photographed volume titled Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream described that same idyllic sea as "a stinking, reddish-brown sump rapidly growing too rancid for even the hardiest ocean fish" and "a death trap for birds." The New River, in particular, "claims the distinction of being the filthiest stream in the nation," the authors wrote. And as Fred Cagle, head of the California Audubon Societyís Salton Sea Task Force, told me: "Nine million pounds of pesticides a year on Imperial Valley fields have got to go somewhere!"

There you have it, but according to that confederation of counties and water districts called the Salton Sea Authority, what you have is no more than "Myth #5: The Sea is a Toxic Dump Created by Agriculture." According to the SSA leaflet "Myths and Realities," "Pesticides are not found at any significant level in the Sea." Moreover, selenium levels are only one-fifth of the federal standard, and (if I may quote from the rebuttal to Myth #4), "Water carried by the New River from Mexico is not a major contributor to the Seaís problems." Still, the leaflet freely if euphemistically confesses the "bird disease outbreaks," "fluctuating surface levels" (which I take to be a tacit reference to the half-buried houses, or to the mostly submerged Torres-Martinez Indian Reservation on the northwest shore), and "nutrient-rich water, algal blooms, and fish kills" (symptoms of what ecologists call eutrophication, which occurs when too much sewage or detergent or fertilizer enters a body of warm water and algae rushes in to exploit, growing like crazy, sucking up all the oxygen, and suffocating the fish). The leaflet acknowledges only one cause for these problems, the one everybody agrees on: salinity. Needless to say, salinity cannot explain algal blooms. As the leaflet reminds us, "We do not know all there is to know about the Sea." There again you have it.

Not that we havenít tried: Is there an agency in the area—international, federal, state, tribal, or local—that has not dipped its sample vials in the waters of the Salton Sea and the New River, looking to discover its secrets? U.S. Fish & Wildlife, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Twentynine Palms Band of Luiseno Mission Indians, the Regional Water Quality Board, the University of CaliforniaÐDavis—all of them and more have monitored selenium levels and nutrient levels and oxygen levels, testing for this and for that. Did their data overlap? No one knows, there was no clearinghouse, they didnít have the funding, that person no longer works here. But in 1998, Congress passed the Salton Sea Reclamation Act, which provided for the Salton Sea Restoration Project, which will conduct more studies. That same year the University of Redlands created the Salton Sea Database Program, whose aim is to collate that lost information and map the environment of the sea. Then will we know?

As for the pelicans, the grebes, and the other birds, they continue their tragic dramas. Whether they get sick from eating the dead fish or from something else entirely nobody knows, but they keep dying—from avian cholera, botulism, and Newcastleís disease. No matter that scientists havenít pinpointed the cause: If you walk the crunching beaches of North Shore, you cannot help but have a feeling that something about the Salton Sea is causing these die-offs, with their increasing if unpredictable frequency.

"We seem to have far too many of these," admits Tom Kirk, the executive director of the Salton Sea Authority. "But keep this in mind, Bill. Twenty thousand birds died at the Salton Sea last year. Thatís less than 1 percent of the bird population."

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