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.
"With informed passion and biting irony, historian deBuys chronicles the improbable transformation of Southern California"s Imperial Valley from a desert wasteland to an agricultural Eden. Joan Myers" haunting black-and-white photographs expose the stark remnants of failed dreams along with the faces of men and women who still cling to their desert visions."-Bruce Dinges, Arizona Daily Star Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California (William deBuys, Joan Myers)