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9780826321268 Academic Inspection Copy

Salt Dreams

Land and Water in Low-Down California
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In low places consequences collect, and in all North America you cannot get much lower than the Imperial Valley of southern California, where one town, 186 feet below sea level, calls itself the Lowest Down City in the Western Hemisphere, and where the waters of the Colorado River sustain a billion-dollar agricultural industry. The consequences of that industry drain from the valley into the accidentally man-made Salton Sea, California's largest lake and a vital stopping place for migratory waterfowl. Today the Salton Sea is in desperate environmental trouble. Beginning with the Yuman-speaking tribes encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, deBuys traces the exploration and development of the region through the Gold Rush of 1849, the government-sponsored surveys that followed, and the inept tinkering with the river by an assortment of irrigation and development interests that resulted in the floods that formed the Salton Sea nearly a century ago. He introduces us to a gallery of rogues and dreamers who saw a great future for this arid wilderness but could never refrain from interference with the forces of nature.
Wiliam de Buys and Joan Myers
""Salt Dreams" is as vivid in its imagery as it is penetrating in its analysis. . . . [it] is incandescent, brilliantly illuminating the pasts of this complicated place and shedding considerable light on its possible futures." ""Salt Dreams" is as vivid in its imagery as it is penetrating in its analysis. . . . Yit? is incandescent, brilliantly illuminating the pasts of this complicated place and shedding considerable light on its possible futures." "An absorbing record of the ideas and people that tamed the Colorado River and transformed southeastern California from a desert into one of the continent's great agricultural regions. . . . a notable exploration of how the American dream has played out."
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