Who killed the Salton Sea?: Settler infrastructures and ecological violence in the Southern Californian Desert

Abstract

The Salton Sea, Southern California's largest inland lake, is dying. This article moves environmental justice analysis beyond siting and distribution models to show how racialized capitalism is materially inscribed in landscapes over time. I argue that the Sea's ecological crisis was produced by water infrastructures that encoded white supremacy and racialized capitalism into the landscape, concentrating harm in the Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and Cocopah nations whose territories preceded the modern Sea and the Mexican American communities whose labor made the region's agriculture profitable. Two analytical concepts trace this history. Embeddedness reveals how seemingly technical decisions about water allocation and land use were structured by racial and class hierarchies that determined who bore the costs of development. Sedimented violence traces how those costs accumulated across generations, depositing a stratigraphic record of regulatory choices and industrial activities in the Sea's sediments, local ecologies, and human bodies. Following these processes from the construction of irrigation infrastructures in the early 1900s to contemporary efforts to extract lithium, I demonstrate that each layer of development reproduced the same racial and class logics: invoking a greater public good to justify poisoning the Sea and the communities that surround it.

Introduction

In 2022, California governor Gavin Newsom declared the Salton Sea as “the Saudi Arabia of lithium” (Skelton, 2022). Prior to this rebranding campaign, the Sea was most often portrayed as a dystopian wasteland: a sun-scorched expanse where the air reeks of hydrogen sulfide, and the waters churn with dead fish and bird remains. This image of the Sea as an ecological death zone contrasts sharply with its past as a thriving ecosystem and popular desert resort. In the mid-20th century, it was a recreational haven for visitors, its shores dotted with fishing boats and vacationers seeking respite from Southern California's urban sprawl. Celebrities like Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were regular visitors and helped establish the Palm Springs region's reputation as a leisure destination. Today, the despoiled Salton Sea is California's largest inland lake, spanning 344 square miles in the Colorado Desert, situated between Palm Springs and the Mexican border, roughly 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The Imperial and Coachella Valleys that flank the Sea are home to approximately 625,000 residents, the majority of whom are Mexican and Mexican American, and include members of the Cahuilla, Cocopah, and Kumeyaay nations whose territories long preceded the modern Sea's existence (Figure 1). ¹

Figure 1.

Salton Sea region.

The dramatic shift from the Sea's celebrated past to its degraded present raises a critical question: What caused this transformation? And more urgently, who, and what, is killing the Salton Sea? The answers lie not in natural processes or inevitable decay, but in more than a century of federal and state decisions that consistently treated the Sea and its surrounding communities as expendable, prioritizing the interests of a white landowning elite over the region's social and ecological well-being. The Sea's decline is a paradigmatic case of ecological violence where settler colonialism, racialized capitalism, and state policy converged to produce an ecological death zone: a space where political and ecological forces mediate a struggle between “life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life” (Juskus, 2023: 1).

These same logics of expendability persist in contemporary efforts to extract lithium from beneath the Salton Sea. The social and ecological history I trace here reveals how lithium development embodies the same paradox that has defined the region since the early 1900s, where the invocation of a greater public good has been used to justify the sacrifice of the Sea and the communities that surround it. Boosters claim that lithium has the potential to alleviate the global climate crisis but fail to see how, as Diné scholar Andrew Curley (2023: 5) has noted, energy transitions have routinely led to “the expansion of unsustainable cities, and the slow violence of toxic spaces.” This article reveals how those rushing to mine what boosters call “The Lithium Valley” (Benner, 2024) represent the latest protagonists in a much longer history of extraction that has systematically plundered the region's human and natural resources while externalizing environmental and economic costs onto its Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican American communities, who make up the majority of the population.

To understand the stakes of this latest speculative round, we must dig through the multiple layers of development that have shaped the Sea and the desert, revealing how lithium development extends rather than breaks from established patterns of racialized ecological violence. This excavation begins with and centers on how white settler water infrastructures shaped the ecological, economic, and social lives of Mexican and Mexican American people in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys. I argue that these infrastructures were the modality through which white supremacy established itself in the desert. When irrigation enabled large-scale agriculture in the early 1900s, growers recruited Mexican workers to the region as a source of low-wage labor. They were meant to replace the Cahuilla, Quechan, Cocopah, and Kumeyaay people who were among the first to serve as racialized labor during the early years of the region's economic expansion. By the 1920s, Mexican and Mexican American workers constituted the majority of agricultural laborers in both valleys (Andrés, 2016). Farmworkers were confined to unincorporated communities with poor housing conditions, and pushed to the margins of the agricultural land their labor made productive. Within towns like Mecca and Thermal in the Eastern Coachella Valley, and Calexico, El Centro, and Brawley in the Imperial Valley, segregated areas became centers of Mexican American life. These communities were incorporated into the region's economy in ways that maximized their labor value while minimizing their access to political power, land ownership, and the water resources that made the land valuable.

To understand how patterns like these took shape and persisted, I examine each layer of the Sea—past, present, and future—through the concepts of embeddedness and sedimented violence. Embeddedness reveals how markets and technologies are structured by racial and class power relations. These hierarchies determine whose land is appropriated, whose labor is exploited, and whose environments are poisoned. An embeddedness framework enables me to examine how the Salton Sea's demise was not a case of market failure but rather a predictable outcome of capital's need to externalize the harmful costs of production. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's (1944) argument that markets are always embedded within broader social forces and institutions, I examine how seemingly technical decisions about infrastructure, water allocation, and land use are actually shaped by power relations that determine which communities will bear the costs of environmental degradation. Polanyi argued that the process of dis-embedding (or treating the economy as separate from social relationships) served to commodify nature, labor, and money in ways that proved disastrous to people and places that lacked power (Kaup, 2015). ² Within this context, my use of embeddedness as a methodological framework pushes past the limits of traditional economic and political economy models that artificially separate the economic from nature and society, obscuring how markets are embedded within distinct power hierarchies. ³ By re-embedding the Salton Sea into the social relations that produced it, this analysis reveals how environmental crisis operates through sociotechnical systems that systematically channel harm toward racialized and working-class communities.

Where embeddedness reveals how racial and class hierarchies structure decisions in any given moment, sedimented violence captures how these hierarchies accumulate across time and space through both material and institutional processes. Sedimented violence describes how environmental toxicity, like geological sediments, accumulates in layers to inflict inter-generational harm. Each layer of contamination corresponds to harmful regulatory choices and industrial activities embedded in the social relations of racialized capitalism and white supremacy that shaped the desert. This framework builds on Rob Nixon's (2011) concept of slow violence, which he defines as “dispersed across time and space” and driven by the “unseen” mechanisms of neoliberal policy. However, while Nixon emphasizes how these forces cause violence to disperse and fade from view, sedimented violence reveals how they cause harm to accumulate and solidify.

By extending Nixon’s critique of the racialized logics of extraction that protect white bodies and normalize the disposability of others, sedimented violence provides a structural map of how these valuations become physically inscribed in the landscape. It does this through three processes: material persistence, reactivation potential, and pathway mutation. Material persistence describes how toxins are not merely dispersed but remain trapped in sediments, soil, and bodies, producing a stratigraphic record of white supremacy. Reactivation potential captures how this buried record reemerges through periodic disturbance, drawing on Nixon's attention to recurring exposure while reframing it as the resurfacing of historically accumulated layers rather than isolated or cyclical events. Pathway mutation traces how contaminants move through shifting exposure routes, solidifying a legacy of harm that remains historically present in the landscape.

Together, embeddedness and sedimented violence reveal the Salton Sea's decline as the predictable outcome of decisions that encoded racial and class hierarchies into the landscape. They enable me to show how the Sea's current crisis was produced as a planned concentration of ecological harm that is now subjecting human and other forms of life to premature death (Gilmore, 2008). In doing so, they offer a critical methodological approach for environmental justice (EJ) scholarship that moves beyond typical siting and distributional models to account for multiple categories of social difference, multiscalar spatial and temporal analysis, embedded power relations, and the entanglement of human and nonhuman life (Pellow, 2018).

Tracing these processes requires historical and interdisciplinary methods capable of tracking power across institutions, landscapes, and time. I draw on interdisciplinary frameworks from geography, political ecology, political economy, and ethnic studies, alongside primary government documents, newspapers, and archival sources spanning from the 1890s to the present. My methodological approach is also informed by EJ scholars who have expressed the need for frameworks that examine how environmental racism operates through dominant institutions and relations of power (Pellow, 2018; Pulido, 2015). Attempts to document how environmental pollution subjects poor and racially marginalized communities to harm have often focused on intentionality and equitable distribution. Such approaches have shown where toxic facilities are placed and who bears disproportionate burdens, but struggle to explain how environmental harm is produced in the landscape through the dominant institutions and social relations of white supremacy and racial capitalism (Pulido, 2016). My analysis also moves beyond the site-specific scope of most EJ studies by using a multi-scalar approach that connects how environmental harm is experienced at the scale of the human body, particularly agricultural workers and their kin; at particular sites, including the Sea; and at the regional scale of the Imperial and Coachella Valleys.

In the following sections, I develop sedimented violence and embeddedness as analytical frameworks for examining the Salton Sea's history, from the speculative water infrastructures that created the Sea in the early 1900s through contemporary lithium extraction proposals. The canals, drainage networks, and distribution systems that transformed the Colorado Desert reveal how embeddedness and sedimented violence operate in practice. These infrastructures allocated more than water. They determined whose lives mattered, whose labor could be exploited, and which communities would bear the ecological and social costs of development. By inscribing racial and class hierarchies into the landscape, irrigation infrastructures became the materialization of power relations that continue to shape exposure and vulnerability.

Embeddedness and the making of the Salton Sea

In the late 1800s, land speculators gazed across the hot expanse of the Colorado Desert and envisioned fields of green where only sand and scrub existed. This vision did political work by rendering the desert disposable and embedding its infrastructural transformation, including the creation of the modern Salton Sea, within the logics of white settler colonialism and agricultural capitalism. The California Development Company (CDC), established in 1896 by Charles Robinson Rockwood, translated this development vision into a blueprint for the desert's transformation. Rockwood planned an intricate web of canals and pipelines that would channel the Colorado River's waters across hundreds of miles of arid terrain. Building these infrastructures would require a combination of private speculative investment and state intervention. This alliance between state power, white agricultural settlement, and new commodity-based economies established the material and political conditions that created the modern Salton Sea. It also inaugurated a pattern of speculative infrastructure, racial dispossession, and externalized environmental harm that continues to shape the region.

Rockwood's business model was simple and indicative of development in the arid West: he sold water, with land serving as a means to generate customers. To transform the desert and deliver on his promise, Rockwood needed to transport water from the Colorado River, roughly 60 miles east, to the Imperial Valley. This plan required the CDC to build a transnational infrastructure system that carried water from the Colorado River in Arizona, west through Mexico, and then back north to the Imperial Valley.

A transnational design placed Rockwood's project within a longer history of U.S. imperial expansion in the region. The Imperial Valley had been incorporated into the United States through the 1848 war with Mexico; the irrigation infrastructure and settlement that followed continued this imperial land grab and nation-building project. For example, Rockwood's effort to claim water for the Imperial Valley unfolded alongside broader U.S. imperial ambitions, including Congressional calls to annex Baja California in order to secure greater control over Mexico's natural resources and access to the Colorado River. His scheme enabled U.S. agricultural interests to take the water and the labor, but leave the land.

Rockwood's approach to desert development illustrates a recurring logic in speculative infrastructure projects, one in which the pursuit of profit depended on the systematic externalization of environmental risk. Problems with this approach appeared almost as soon as construction began. Colorado River water carried high sediment concentrations that repeatedly blocked CDC canals, while a lack of capital and a sense of urgency drove Rockwood to construct new diversions without the safety gates needed to control water flow. ⁴ These decisions, like many others that have defined development in the desert, prioritized speed and financial return over safety, transferring foreseeable risks onto the landscape and nearby communities.

The consequences were immediate and catastrophic. Heavy rains in May 1905 overwhelmed the canal system and diverted the full force of the Colorado River into the empty basin that had once formed the bottom of ancient Lake Cahuilla. The river cascaded toward the salton sink, flooding the valley and producing an environmental disaster that was not accidental but structured by Rockwood's development strategy. Stopping the flood required federal and private intervention, and when the river was finally brought under control in February 1907, it had deposited nearly 16 million acre-feet of water into the newly formed Salton Sea (Jenke, 1974). This episode established a pattern in which speculative development generated profit for white settlers while environmental damage and long-term risk were displaced onto adjacent land and communities, a logic that would recur in subsequent phases of regional development.

Federal intervention extended rather than interrupted this process. Agencies used the flood as an opportunity to supplant Rockwood by assuming control of the desert's irrigation infrastructure. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began taking steps that ultimately led to the construction of the All-American Canal (1928) and Coachella Canal (1949). Both projects transformed the desert into a viable space for white settlement and capitalist agriculture by harnessing the water of the Colorado River and were celebrated as a vindication of American engineering prowess. A contained river that enabled white settler agriculture exemplified late 19th-century frontier development patterns, where capital and technology combined to overcome perceived environmental constraints to American ideas of progress (Worster, 1992). Infrastructure and engineering were the tools that enabled white settlers to transform what they considered unproductive desert terrain into large-scale agricultural production systems. ⁵

What settlers celebrated as progress was built on destruction. These infrastructure projects ultimately transformed the Colorado Desert by creating sites of capitalist exchange where none had existed, prioritizing white settlement and agricultural capitalism over existing Indigenous relationships with the land. The Cahuilla, Quechan, Cocopah, and Kumeyaay peoples who had inhabited this region for centuries had developed sophisticated water management systems adapted to the Colorado River's seasonal flows and the desert's limited groundwater resources. White settlers destroyed these systems through infrastructure and engineering, transforming what they considered unvaluable desert into profitable territory. This transformation replaced reciprocal relationships with extraction and could only proceed by rendering Indigenous ecological practices invisible and Indigenous people themselves disposable.

The contemporary crisis of the Salton Sea began here, with the consolidation of an agricultural industry dependent on racialized labor markets and harmful ecological models. The pattern of racialized labor recruitment that had drawn Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous workers to canal construction expanded dramatically as irrigation enabled large-scale agriculture. Mexican workers, recruited first for infrastructure construction and later for agricultural labor, were incorporated into the region's economy in ways that maximized their exploitation while minimizing their claims to the land and water their labor made valuable (Andrés, 2016; Paiz, 2016; Weber, 1994). Private farmers used that infrastructure to extract value from racialized labor, accumulating wealth while exposing Mexican and Indigenous workers to toxic working conditions. These water systems created the pathways through which environmental violence would accumulate in the Sea's sediments, local wildlife, and in the bodies of local residents. Hierarchies that determined who would build the canals, who would work in the fields, and who would own the land also determined who would eventually bear the burden of the toxic legacy these systems produced.

Reclamation as ideology and world-making

The transformation of the Colorado Desert into agricultural land required more than engineering expertise and financial investment; it depended fundamentally on a cognitive remapping that convinced potential settlers and investors that remaking the desert constituted an economic, moral, and civic duty. This cognitive work produced the desert as empty and unproductive, enabling settlers to claim it. Such ideological production reveals how embeddedness and sedimented violence operate not only through material infrastructures but also through frameworks that naturalize white settler spatial arrangements as inevitable or desirable. This ideological dimension emerged through the discourse of reclamation, which the U.S. Department of the Interior systematically deployed to expand white settlement into the Western frontier (Black, 2018). F.H. Newell, chief engineer of the United States Reclamation Service, captured this logic in 1906: “if we can do no more than one percent, of what is to be done in reclaiming the desert, we shall have provided new lands for millions of people” (Calexico Chronicle, 1906). Newell envisioned using irrigation to transform the American West into a population center rivaling the East Coast. His vision embodied reclamation's promise to make the desert bloom, transforming what settlers perceived as wasteland into wealth through white settler epistemologies, culture, and capital.

Reclamation's cognitive remapping of the desert as a space for white settlement required both the physical and ideological displacement of Indigenous people and ecologies from the landscape. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018: 138) describes ideological displacement through his concept of “vicious sedimentation,” which traces how “environmental changes compound over time to reinvent or reinforce and strengthen settler ignorance against Indigenous peoples.” For Whyte, the negation of Indigenous knowledge by settler societies results in the production of ecological systems that bury reciprocal and sustainable relations with the land, making those relations increasingly invisible and therefore easier to violate. This obfuscation reproduces harm by foreclosing Indigenous ecologies that may stand in the way of extractive and commodified settler natures. My use of sedimented violence extends this insight by tracing how the same processes that bury Indigenous knowledge also produce the built environments that deposit toxins in the landscape.

In the Colorado Desert, physical and ideological violence took historical shape through interwoven mechanisms. Physical displacement involved clearing the land of its Indigenous inhabitants through spatial ideologies, legal doctrines, and armed violence. The U.S. government's 1887 Dawes Act exemplified how ideological frameworks became embedded within legal and policy structures (Royster, 2019). This law dismantled Indigenous land sovereignty by imposing private property relations, fragmenting communally held territories into individual allotments that could be, and were, sold to white settlers. In the Colorado Desert region, the Dawes Act and subsequent policies confined Cahuilla communities to small reservations while opening surrounding lands to white agricultural development. The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, whose reservation now borders the Salton Sea, saw their lands reduced to a fraction of their original territory, with much of their remaining land later flooded by the Sea itself. The Dawes Act enacted both material and ideological displacement by commodifying land and negating Indigenous epistemologies grounded in reciprocal relationships rather than ownership. It imposed a settler ontology that recognized value only in land made productive, allowing settlers to reframe dispossession as improvement rather than theft. Through reclamation, settlers converted violence into virtue, binding moral obligation to economic necessity. This settler logic mobilized science, capital, and white control to legitimize Indigenous displacement and transform desert ecosystems into a bounty of extractable commodities.

To enable this transformation, reclamation's ideological project involved characterizing the desert as a barren wasteland. This representation enabled white settlers to position themselves as rightful stewards of untapped land while erasing Indigenous histories and relationships with the environment. Reclamation as a concept was rooted in the belief that white settlers could save the desert from the barren waste it had become (Davis, 2016; Luna-Pena, 2015). Department of Reclamation engineers consistently deployed this wasteland narrative, describing the Imperial Valley as a desolate landscape entirely devoid of human residents (Clark and Pugh, 1939). Such non-seeing, the deliberate refusal to recognize Indigenous presence, knowledge, and claims to the land, was more than oversight; it represented the ideological devaluation of Indigenous people and their ecological practices. This practice of non-seeing was essential to reclamation's ideological work, creating the conceptual preconditions for treating the desert as available for transformation without accounting for the communities already there. Non-seeing thus operated as a form of spatial hegemony, producing the desert as a landscape without history or inhabitants, even as Indigenous communities continued to live on and tend the land.

Barren desert narratives exemplify how government engineers and settlers discarded not only Indigenous water systems but also the knowledge those systems embodied. The Quechan people, whose territory straddled the Colorado River near present-day Yuma, Arizona, had developed floodplain agriculture that worked with the river's natural cycles rather than against them. The Cahuilla had constructed extensive systems of acequias (irrigation channels) and had developed deep knowledge of groundwater sources throughout the desert. Destruction of these systems through settler canal construction and river diversions not only dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land, but also eliminated alternative models of water stewardship that might have prevented the ecological violence that followed. ⁶ Such disruptions attacked Indigenous epistemologies and the fundamental ways these communities related to their environment. As Curley (2023: 14) argues, these attacks exemplify how colonialism operates as “a series of events that structures the possibilities and limitations of Indigenous life and lifeways.” Attacking Indigenous epistemologies was therefore not only a material act but also a cultural one, reshaping how space itself could be imagined and engaged with.

Settlers imposed a new ecological vision on the landscape through culture, using narrative and ideology to bury Indigenous epistemologies. Where Indigenous peoples understood the desert as a living ecosystem requiring careful stewardship, settlers recast it as a wasteland in need of redemption. This shift illustrates the role that culture plays in the production of space—what Soja (1989: 84) describes as the dialectical production of space through the interaction of culture and nature. Reclamation ideology gave this dialectic a new frame by producing nature as capital and rendering Indigenous spatial practices illegible. Dispossession was reimagined through a heroic narrative that drew on a pioneer ethos to position white settlers as civilizing agents locked in righteous struggle against a hostile nature. Figures like Rockwood embodied this culture–nature dialectic, combining technological expertise with pioneer rhetoric to portray the desert as wasteland awaiting transformation. Local press outlets amplified this worldview, proclaiming that the “pioneers of this Valley are going forward with undaunted spirit in the conquest of the desert and its conversion into prosperous homes” (The Imperial Press, 1905). The language of conquest and conversion served as the narrative foundation for reclamation ideology, merging territorial expansion with moral imperative and casting Indigenous knowledge systems not merely as irrelevant but as immoral obstacles to progress.

The ideological displacement described above found institutional expression through religious and academic authorities, who cast white settlers as divinely appointed agents destined to domesticate the desert. This ideological framing operated through a moral hierarchy that made agricultural settlement more sacred than other forms of western expansion. Reverend David Beaton, a University of California lecturer, exemplified this logic in his address to the Imperial Valley Christian Workers Union, where he articulated a development philosophy that merged religious conviction with agriculture. Beaton espoused a pioneer narrative that attached greater moral authority to agriculture over the rough individualism of gold mining and cattle ranching, enterprises typically associated with the American West's reputation for vice and violence. He characterized early agricultural settlements as providing the “Christian foundations for the swiftly growing institutions of civilization now being born in this newest field of missionary enterprise and civic interest” (San Diego Union Tribune, 1907). This moral dimension drew legitimacy from established colonial political discourse, particularly Thomas Jefferson's arguments about the democratic virtues of gentleman farmers and their role in building American civilization (Bissett, 1999). Reclamation extended this Jeffersonian vision as a nation-building project, creating white agrarian citizens and productive landscapes that would anchor American democracy in the West.

Beneath Beaton's moral rhetoric lay material calculations. While the moral imperative to settle the desert operated within cultural and religious frameworks, it was capital that made development possible. Settlers understood the profits a domesticated desert could generate. Early investors were driven by the Imperial Valley's potential to create significant competitive advantages within national and international agricultural markets. Beaton's (San Diego Union Tribune, 1907) religious fervor was matched by distinct capitalist savvy, evident when he noted that, “this valley not only grows everything of the subtropical kind, but they ripen so much earlier here than in any other place that there will be no competition.” This seasonal advantage translated into extraordinary profit margins.

The convergence of moral justification and profit motive found institutional expression when federal agencies committed their resources and expertise to several reclamation projects in the Colorado Desert. The Army Corps of Engineers, in particular, was mobilized as the technical arm of state power, deploying scientific expertise to bring nature to heel in the name of profit and national expansion. This was evident during the flood that formed the current Salton Sea when the Corps established partnerships with the Southern Pacific Railroad to undertake what agents characterized as “the sternest battle against the elemental forces of nature on behalf of the settlers” of the Imperial Valley (San Diego Union Tribune, 1907). According to federal engineers, reclamation represented “the new place of man's age-long struggle with destructive forces of nature, which he is determined to transform into ministering servants of his higher human uses” (San Diego Union Tribune, 1907). What federal agents regarded as higher human uses were deeply embedded in settler ideas about race, nature, and profit. Reclamation thus functioned as a comprehensive settler tool designed to capture natural resources for white settlers and the profit-driven economic system they sought to establish.

Reclamation ideology gained material force through the physical infrastructure that settlers built to transform the landscape. The irrigation systems that followed would inscribe racial and class hierarchies into the region's water regimes, creating pathways that delivered water to fields while channeling environmental violence toward the Mexican and Mexican American communities whose labor made that agricultural system profitable through a dual logic of extraction. Ultimately, the ideological construction of the desert as wasteland, the deliberate displacement of Indigenous water management practices, and the moral justification of settler development through scientific progress demonstrate how social embeddedness operates through cultural and epistemological frameworks that extend far beyond simple economic relationships. By prioritizing industrial agriculture and recreational development over ecological stability, these projects inscribed a specific ecological model onto the land, cementing capitalist natures enshrined by white supremacy.

Reading the sea's toxic sediments

Less than 20 years after the Colorado River breach that created it, the Salton Sea became an official dumping ground for agricultural waste. Farmers in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys relied on the Sea as an outlet for pesticide-laden, saline wastewater, to the extent that agricultural development would have stalled without the ability to discharge into it (Tetra Tech, 2004: 5). This dependence was not incidental but engineered into the region's irrigation system. The same ditches and pipes that delivered water to agricultural fields also carried waste to the Sea, making the production of toxic sediments structurally inseparable from agricultural development.

Farmers used their irrigation systems to dump billions of gallons of contaminated water into the Salton Sea, treating it as an integral component of agricultural production rather than a separate ecological system. Federal and state policy enabled this practice. In 1924, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge formally codified the Sea's role as a drainage sump for agricultural waste, a designation California later endorsed and expanded in 1968 when it declared that the Sea existed explicitly to provide drainage for agricultural runoff (Tetra Tech, 2004). In practice, these policies sanctioned the systematic transfer of environmental costs from agricultural producers to the Sea. Rather than being dispersed or mitigated, those costs accumulated over time in the water itself. That accumulation is visible in the Sea's changing chemistry. Agricultural runoff steadily increased concentrations of nitrates and other harmful chemicals (Schroeder et al., 2002), with nitrate levels rising from 4 to 45 mg/L between the 1930s and the 1970s (Ringel, 2005).

Over time, agricultural discharge created a stratigraphic archive of environmental harm. State actors were complicit in both creating this archive and allowing it to fester. Each year's runoff added new layers to the sediments accumulating at the bottom of the Sea. Like geological strata that preserve records of past epochs, the Sea's sediments preserve a material archive of regulatory choices and agricultural practices. These sediments can be read to reveal how white supremacy and racialized capitalism have been written into the landscape (Brand, 2022; Bruno, 2021).

The Sea exemplifies what Ureta and Flores (2022: 40) describe as an “archive of structural violence” that operates as the afterlife of economic development. Such archives become spaces of “structural forgetfulness” that obscure environmental impacts and enable willful ignorance about ongoing harm (Ureta and Flores, 2022: 41). Structural forgetfulness extends the practice of non-seeing that characterized reclamation ideology. The same logic that enabled settlers to deny Indigenous presence allowed policymakers to ignore the ecological harm accumulating in the Sea and the poisoning of the Mexican communities surrounding it. California's Little Hoover Commission acknowledged that policymakers consistently failed to address the Salton Sea precisely because it affected an impoverished, politically marginalized area, labeling it a “public health catastrophe” (Little Hoover Commission, 2015: 1). Systematic non-seeing and forgetting underwrote continued profit extraction by the agricultural industry even as health impacts became evident.

Toxic sediments that persisted in the lakebed are now being reactivated because decades of institutional negligence allowed the Sea's water levels to drop. Frequent dust storms transport these chemical residues from the exposed lake playa into the surrounding air (Frie et al., 2019). Chemicals in the water can also aerosolize and contribute to air pollution even without dust storms (Biddle et al., 2021). These shifting exposure pathways have turned institutional negligence into a public health crisis borne through human bodies. The same chemicals that now travel through the air once entered farmworkers’ bodies through direct dermal contact and inhalation as they labored in the desert's agricultural fields. Decades later, as the Sea declines, their children and grandchildren, most of whom have never worked as farmworkers, must bear the costs of this toxic legacy. Ambient dust carries contaminated particulates into the respiratory systems of the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American residents who live in northern Imperial County and the eastern Coachella Valley (Biddle et al., 2023; Farzan et al., 2019). According to the California Department of Public Health, children between the ages of 5 and 17 in Imperial County visit emergency rooms for asthma at a rate of 163 per 10,000—more than double the statewide rate of 72.4 per 10,000 (California Department of Public Health, 2016). For seniors, asthma-related emergency visits are also more than twice the state average.

This intergenerational transmission of toxins exemplifies what Vanessa Agard-Jones (2016) terms “chemical kinship,” in which chemical exposures create relationships and dependencies that bind people together through shared conditions of contamination. Farmworkers, their children, and their grandchildren are bound not only through family ties but also through the embedded legacies of shared toxins. The literal accumulation of toxins is one way sedimented violence operates. But this shared kinship is also reflected in the erosion of cultural practices, economic opportunities, and political agency that reproduces vulnerability through embedded power imbalances across generations. Communities now exposed to toxic dust are the same communities that were incorporated into the region's economy as exploitable labor, settled in neighborhoods without adequate infrastructure, and excluded from political power. Their vulnerability to reactivated environmental harm is not incidental but the product of the same embedded hierarchies that channeled toxins to the Sea in the first place.

Water policy and the reactivation of buried harm

The policy decisions that reactivated this buried harm began with a new round of speculation. In the early 1990s, speculators began purchasing agricultural land in the Imperial Valley, reprising the speculative model that had first lured white settlers to the desert. Rather than farming, these investors sought to profit by selling the water rights attached to the land on the private market. The Bass brothers, billionaires from Texas, exemplified this renewed interest in desert land (DeBuys and Myers, 1999). They purchased roughly 45,000 acres in the Imperial Valley and offered water to urban agencies outside the region, including the Southern California Metropolitan Water District. Water they had acquired at $12.50 per acre-foot was offered for resale at prices ranging from $400 to $600 per acre-foot (Brackman and Erie, 1999). Policymakers implemented the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) as a preemptive response to this speculative threat, intervening to prevent private landowners from controlling access to Colorado River water. By asserting state authority over water transfers, policymakers sought both to block speculative resale and to consolidate control over the region's water supply. Beyond regulating speculation, the agreement also signaled a broader shift in development priorities. Water from the Colorado River, once explicitly allocated to sustain an agricultural reclamation regime in the Imperial Valley, was now redirected toward urban growth and other economic sectors, a reallocation that aligned with the interests of regional political and economic leaders seeking to diversify the economy away from agriculture.

Policymakers approved the QSA with full knowledge that its adoption would have profound environmental consequences. Switching water away from agriculture would funnel water away from the Sea. A final environmental impact report showed that the QSA would shrink the Sea, exposing buried toxic sediments that had collected on the lakebed. Planning studies projected sea level declines of up to 20 feet by 2035. As the Sea shrank, the concentration of salt and chemicals would increase. Salinity levels were projected to reach 50 parts per thousand by 2005, a threshold that would kill most fish in the Sea. Birds, one of the communities that make up the Sea's ecosystem, would be devastated (Jones, 2019). Involved parties rationalized these outcomes by arguing that the QSA would merely accelerate, rather than cause, the Sea's inevitable decline.

The consequences of this decision have unfolded as predicted. Since implementation, the QSA's water diversions have increased toxic dust exposure in economically disadvantaged and socially vulnerable communities near the Sea (Abman et al., 2024). These policy choices, which prioritized urban water supply over the health of rural, predominantly Mexican American communities, reactivated buried harm as a direct and foreseeable consequence, not a side effect. This reactivation demonstrates how the same embedded hierarchies that determined who would build the canals, work in the fields, and bear the burden of agricultural contamination now determine who will breathe the dust as the Sea recedes.

QSA proponents framed the water transfer program as a rational market solution that would enable policymakers to manage the region's water supply while supporting the need for new development. By framing the QSA as a sound economic tool, officials deflected accountability for the social and environmental consequences of their choices. The language of rational market choices obscures what an embeddedness framework reveals: that these are political decisions about whose lives matter and whose health can be sacrificed. By deploying market principles to obscure these political choices, the QSA's intentional diversion of water from the Sea added another layer to the long sedimentation of environmental harm that has shaped the current crisis. The QSA's pivot away from agriculture signaled what would come next: an embrace of lithium extraction as an alternative, ostensibly greener and more sustainable economic model.

Lithium and the reproduction of embedded harm

Even before the modern Sea existed, speculators en route to Northern California's Gold Rush were convinced that the desert near ancient Lake Cahuilla contained gold, with more than one reporting discoveries near what would become the Salton Sea (Riverside Enterprise, 1907). While water, rather than gold, would ultimately enable settlers to strike it rich in the desert, speculation about potential riches beneath the Sea never ended. Current efforts to establish the Salton Sea as a global leader in lithium extraction (what politicians and speculators have termed “white gold”) constitute the latest chapter in this ongoing story. Yet examined through the frameworks of embeddedness and sedimented violence, lithium extraction appears not as a break from the region's toxic history but as its continuation: a new iteration of the same logic that has consistently harmed the Sea and its communities in the name of a greater national interest.

Mineral speculators and public agencies alike now promote the briny geothermal waters beneath the Salton Sea as a source of lithium capable of meeting growing demand for electric vehicle batteries, with proposed extraction projects promising to establish one of the largest lithium zones in the world (Benner, 2024). This lithium rush extends a much longer history of speculative energy development in the region, reproducing earlier extractive logics under new technological conditions. The Salton Sea first emerged as a site of energy speculation in the 1960s, when the Bureau of Land Management explored leasing submerged lands to companies seeking to drill for oil and gas beneath the Sea. ⁷ Although these efforts did not yield oil, geothermal energy production soon gained a foothold along the Sea's southern shores as firms tapped hot brines circulating through fault-zone reservoirs to generate electricity. The lithium-rich composition of this geothermal brine has been known since the late 1960s, but extraction remained economically unviable under prevailing market conditions until recent technological advances converged with surging demand for electric vehicle batteries to render the resource profitable. While estimates vary and remain contingent on favorable assumptions, the California Energy Commission has projected that approximately 600,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate could be extracted annually from the Salton Sea. If realized, proponents claim this scale of production would position California as the largest lithium producer in the world, a projection that has intensified both state and private interest in accelerating development.

Lithium extraction gained political momentum in 2017 when President Donald Trump signed Executive Order No. 13817, officially designating lithium as essential to national and economic security. The executive order demonstrated how the state actively intervenes to facilitate private capital's access to public resources. Grants from federal and state agencies helped create viable mechanisms to extract lithium from the geothermal brine and convert it into forms suitable for battery production. State officials cast this intervention as an investment meant to generate public benefits through the production of new green energy jobs.

Yet for many residents living near the Salton Sea, these promises rang hollow, echoing a long history of development projects that enriched outside investors while harming local communities. Residents raised fundamental concerns about the potential health, social, and ecological consequences of large-scale lithium extraction. They questioned whether lithium represented another case in which policymakers enabled the transfer of public resources to private companies without ensuring tangible benefits for local residents. Community members framed lithium extraction not as inevitable progress but as a political choice that reproduced historical inequities.

Luis Olmedo, an EJ leader in the region, has argued that lithium extraction would add another layer of social, environmental, and economic harm. For Olmedo, lithium represents the latest iteration in a long-standing pattern of extractive violence. As he explained, the same communities have repeatedly been forced to “clean up the mess” left behind by economic development projects that burdened “low income and impoverished communities” in the Imperial Valley. The region's history, he argued, has been marked by promises of growth and development in which “the next best thing” has only resulted in outsiders “coming in to over extract our water, pollute our community. We’ve had over 100 years of trials” (Why Locals Are Cautious About California's Lithium Boom - Luis Olmedo, 2025). The community, he concluded, “can no longer afford it.” EJ activists like Olmedo have therefore demanded to know how the state intends to prevent public health problems expected to worsen as the Sea continues to decline. For local residents, it appears that national attention has turned toward the Salton Sea as a lucrative solution to lithium shortages while averting its collective gaze away from the harms already inflicted on their communities.

In response to these concerns, political leaders and lithium investors introduced plans they claim will mitigate potential environmental harms while ensuring that local communities also benefit from the extraction of lithium through the creation of new jobs. California established a Lithium Valley Commission to study how extraction might benefit local communities, and some proposals include community benefit agreements and local hiring requirements for the industry's build-out. Yet such plans have proven inadequate for community leaders who have continued to fight for healthier outcomes in both the political and legal spheres. They argue that technical fixes and benefit-sharing arrangements do not address the embedded hierarchies that structure who benefits and who pays the costs. Without transforming those underlying power relations, new industries will reproduce the same patterns of harm that previous industries have wrought.

The question facing the Salton Sea region is whether lithium extraction will reproduce the patterns of the past or offer a genuine break from them. Historical experience suggests that residents like Olmedo are right to be skeptical. Even if extraction itself proves environmentally benign, the industrial ecosystem it anchors will not. Battery manufacturing, logistics operations, and the broader transformation of the region into an expanded industrial zone will each produce environmental impacts that local communities will once again be forced to absorb. Industrial emissions will join agricultural dust, compounding existing burdens rather than displacing them. The push for lithium extraction, therefore, reveals how these embedded patterns persist and evolve as the logical continuation of the Salton Sea's transformation into a concentrated zone of ecological harm, threatening to embed new cycles of damage within the same structural inequalities that have long governed the region's development.

Conclusion

By 2036, some scientific studies warn that the Salton Sea may become “a dense green, orange, or red algal/bacterial soup,” far from dead but radically transformed into a hypereutrophic system that robs fish and other sea life of oxygen (Cohen and Hyun, 2006: iii). This microbial future represents not death but a fundamental shift toward extreme salinity and toxicity that will render the Sea uninhabitable for most of the creatures that call it home. Some environmentalists, policymakers, and community activists have rallied to save the Sea from its impending collapse. This study argues that meaningful remediation must begin by confronting the ecological, economic, and social relations that produced it as a space of ecological violence.

As this analysis has demonstrated, the Sea's transformation into an ecological death zone was a predictable outcome of systems embedded within colonial, capitalist, and racialized relations of power. Such systems have persisted in the landscape for more than a century. In the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, current residents have inherited legacy infrastructures forged through a nation-building project meant to sustain white life and capitalist development. These systems prioritized resource extraction and profit, disregarding social and ecological harm because the costs were borne by others. Over time, these choices have slowly choked the Sea of oxygen, just as they have choked local communities who struggle to breathe amid the region's ambient pollution, made worse by a declining Sea (Cohen and Halama, 2025).

Taken together, embeddedness and sedimented violence frameworks offer a lens for understanding how environmental racism operates across time and space. Environmental racism operates not through simple exclusion or neglect, but through the deliberate construction of infrastructures that systematically burden marginalized communities with environmental harm. Liberal notions that such harms can be remedied by increased community participation in planning decisions will do little to resolve the crisis. Meaningful intervention requires addressing the hierarchies and market mechanisms that continue to prioritize economic interests over the environmental health of local communities. In this context, state-sanctioned lithium extraction efforts and restoration projects merely perpetuate the epistemic logics of white supremacy and class domination that have shaped the region for more than a century. The promises of lithium development echo the promises of reclamation ideology, invoking a greater public good to justify harming local communities and ecologies.

At a deeper level, repairing harm cannot succeed without recognizing a more fundamental truth: extractive racialized capitalism is unviable. As Mignolo (2012: IX) has argued, the “system of knowledge, beliefs, expectations, dreams, and fantasies upon which the modern/colonial world was built is showing its unviability.” What if we treat the current ecological crisis as evidence that settler fantasies and ways of life have failed? This reframing suggests learning from the “tensions between settler failure and Indigenous futures” and recognizing that decolonization must involve strategies that undo settler logics and their enabling infrastructures (Voyles, 2021: 8).

Against this backdrop, the organization of resistance by affected communities, grounded in historical experience, demonstrates how sedimented violence operates not only as an archive of harm but also as an archive of knowledge. The same processes of accumulation that bind communities together through chemical kinship also preserve collective memory and political insight for contesting ongoing exploitation. Communities that have endured a century of extraction and contamination have developed critical perspectives forged through intergenerational exposure, enabling them to recognize the limits of development promises and technocratic solutions. Their skepticism toward lithium extraction reflects not ignorance but a form of wisdom produced through accumulated harm—an inheritance of knowledge that accompanies an inheritance of toxicity. Such knowledge offers pathways toward more just relations that recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. In this sense, community-led resistance reclaims the sedimented record of harm as a resource for struggle, gesturing toward transformative possibilities that honor both historical experience and future flourishing.

The crisis unfolding at the Salton Sea is not unique. Across the globe, communities confront similar patterns of embedded harm and sedimented violence. In such contexts, infrastructures that were built to serve capital have, for generations, systematically channeled environmental costs toward marginalized populations. The frameworks developed here offer tools not only for diagnosing these patterns but also for imagining alternatives. Yet analytical clarity alone is insufficient. The question is whether analysis of how this crisis came to be can be mobilized to inform action capable of transforming the conditions that produced it, or whether the Salton Sea will stand as yet another monument to the violence inscribed by settler colonialism and racialized capitalism.