NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I returned Sunday from a three-day trip to Brawley and the Salton Sea. He was leading a birding field trip for Sea and Sage Audubon. I tagged along to photograph the birds and agricultural sights in Imperial Valley.

I brought along a library book I’m reading, “Coming Home To Eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods,” by Gary Paul Nabhan. The book is a series of delightful essays that chronicle Nabhan’s experiences while attempting to subsist on local foods for a year. Nabhan defined local as within a 250-mile radius of his home in Phoenix, which allowed him to have seafood from the Gulf of California and produce from California’s Imperial Valley.

Nabhan raised his own turkeys and bought duck and goose eggs from neighboring farmers. He also grew a large variety of native squashes, chiles, beans and corn in his garden. However, his main focus was on foods local Native Americans ate historically. He gathered wild greens by the roadside. He ground amaranth seeds and mesquite beans to make flour for tortillas. He hunted quail, gathered cholla cactus buds, roasted agaves, and collected caterpillars and grubs. He took advantage of roadkilled rattlesnakes and deer as well, plus the occasional bird that flew fatally into his windows.

Frankly, his diet had very little in it that Vic or I would have relished. We’re really not into eating roadkill, cactus and grubs. It isn’t for Nabhan’s food choices that I recommend this book, but rather his insightful look at modern agriculture. For instance, he wrote about the history of modern chemical fertilizers. The U.S. government produced and stockpiled nitrates for munitions manufactured during World War II. At the end of the war, there were huge amounts of nitrates left over.

To get rid of this chemical stockpile, the government promoted its use as fertilizer. Because of chemical fertilizers, American farmers grew far more corn than Americans could eat. So to get rid of the excess corn, ranchers began feeding it to cattle, which had previously been grass-fed. There is nothing wrong with grass-fed beef. It is lean and tasty. But Americans preferred the well-marbled look and juicy taste of corn-fed beef.

Unfortunately, that corn-fed beef has a lot more fat and cholesterol in it, which isn’t good for our health. Fatter cows may be part of the reason for the current epidemic of obesity in America.

There are other problems with fatter cattle. The meatpacking industry produced an excess of fat and tallow from these overfed cows. To get rid of the excess fat, the industry began putting it into chicken feed. That upped the cholesterol content of eggs. This is one reason why I look for “vegetarian hens” on the label of egg cartons. Organically fed and free-range chickens are no longer enough for Vic and me. We also want hens that haven’t been fed animal by-products.

I couldn’t have found a more appropriate book for this trip. Our daylight hours last weekend were spent cruising rutted dirt roads past flat, irrigated agricultural fields throughout the Imperial Valley. Vic was thrilled with enormous flocks of snow geese feeding on mowed fields, skeins of white-faced ibis streaming through the sky and rafts of white pelicans floating on the salty waters of Salton Sea.

I was thrilled with orderly rows of carrots, bright red and green patches of mesclun lettuces, and pungent fields of onions. As we drove by the fields, Vic and I provided a running commentary on walkie-talkies to the passengers in the nine other cars in our caravan.

The area around Brawley is a terrific breadbasket, providing beef, lamb and produce for America’s dinner tables. It has stayed pretty much the same for the 25 years Vic and I have been going there. But in just the last two years, we’ve seen a huge change. More and more fields are being left idle, or “fallowed,” as the farmers say.

The main reason is an outrageous water deal. The Department of Interior during the current Bush administration forced the Imperial Water District to give up a good portion of its Colorado River water allotment so San Diego residents could have it. As a result, farmers don’t have enough water to irrigate all of their fields.

Not only is America losing a lot of agricultural land, but the Salton Sea is drying up. Its water input is largely the used agricultural water that runs off the fields. With less farming, there is less runoff. With less runoff, there is less water flowing into the Salton Sea, and the water gets saltier. As the sea gets smaller and saltier, it can support less wildlife. And in a few years, so much of its shallow sea bed could be exposed that a vast surface of dry, powdery salt would be exposed to the desert winds, exactly as happened at Owens Lake when it dried in the 1970s.

To prevent this man-made catastrophe, the state of California is planning to spend billions of dollars to keep the sea floor damp, just as the city of Los Angeles is doing at Owens Lake now. The future of the Salton Sea looks bleak for both wildlife and taxpayers.

But it may not be too late. The Imperial Water District is fighting back. The district filed a lawsuit in federal court last Friday, asking a federal judge to block reallocation of water from the river.

According to an article in Monday’s New York Times, Lloyd Allen, the new board president of the Imperial Water District, wrote to Gale A. Norton, secretary of the interior, saying “Simply stated, the action of your department is misguided, unjustified, unsupported by the law or the facts and is an example of heavy-handed and unwarranted federal interference with intrastate water allocation matters.”

The gauntlet has been thrown, and yet another fight over Colorado River water is on. According to Allen, the Bush administration used threats and intimidation to force the water transfer from the Imperial Valley to San Diego.

This act was an especially egregious example of the Bush administration interfering in local issues.

We’re rooting for the Imperial Valley to get its water back.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.