“Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea” is a new documentary on an
infamous body of water in southern California that forces us to think
deeply about the environmental contradictions of capitalist society.
Additionally, it is a glimpse into the lives of the quirky population
that chooses to live on the shores of this looming ecological disaster.
Think of a mixture of a more sophisticated version of Al Gore’s “An
Inconvenient Truth” and Errol Morris’s study of eccentric characters in
“Vernon, Florida” and you’ll end up with “Plagues and Pleasures on the
Salton Sea.”
Directed by Christ Metzler and Jeff Springer, the film starts with some
fascinating history. Before there was a sea, there was something called
the Salton Sink that was a geological depression near Palm Springs in
Imperial Valley. Palm Springs is a famous golf resort area for the
wealthy, while the Imperial Valley is a site of some of the state’s
biggest agribusinesses. The only thing going on in the Salton Sink just
under a century ago was salt mining.
In a bit of history that evokes Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Imperial
Valley farmers used their clout to divert water from the Columbia River
to irrigate their fields. The canal that was used to transport the water
suffered a breach in 1905, just like New Orleans during Hurricane
Katrina, and water flowed downhill into the Salton Sink, converting it
into a thirty-five by fifteen mile wide sea. As a consequence of the
underlying mineral beds, the waters became saltier than the ocean.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/plagues-and-pleasures-on-the-salton-sea/
