The information age in the twentieth century was a time of incredible scientific and technological progress. As the cold war fueled first the nuclear arms race and then the space race, innovation and invention in the sciences blossomed. For the first time in human history computers allowed the processing of information faster and more accurately than ever before. As our computational capabilities developed, we began to direct them, increasingly, toward the modeling, predicting, and ultimately control, of natural systems and processes – one of which was the weather. In the two decades following World War II scientists were optimistic about freeing human civilization from its dependence on the unpredictable variability of weather systems. Scientists such as the Soviet Union’s Boris Lyubimov were regularly making bold proclamations about the promise of weather control. Science, they claimed, would learn how to create rain, and how to stop it; geodesic “biodomes” would control crop production or maintain desired climates in cities.² 

These visions supported the first widespread attempts at planetary level geo-engineering. Not “Geoengineering” as it is most commonly defined today – “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change,” ³ – but rather geo-engineering as we must understand it in order to understand and ultimately reframe our relationship to this planet – that is, as any large-scale human endeavor aimed at leveraging technology to reshape existing natural processes and phenomena in order to fit human needs and desires.⁴ By such a definition, any means, no matter how powerful, of reclaiming “barren” deserts, subjugating the cosmos, changing the climate, or mastering the atom constitute geo-engineering.⁵ In fact, humans have been involved in this type of geo-engineering since the development of agriculture: the redistributing of natural water systems for irrigation, the management of land by fire, or the domestication and husbandry of once wild animals. The people of the Beni, in the pre-Colombian Amazon in what is now Bolivia, for example, had a fully constructed and well-maintained infrastructural system of roads, causeways, dikes and reservoirs. They built intricate social networks and mobilized efforts around fabricating trapping mechanisms and techniques for managing waterways.⁶ Their concentrated efforts, including large scale clearing by fire, transformed not only the land but the local plant species through geo-engineering. Geo-engineering therefore was clearly not a new idea in twentieth century western territories: it was only that scientific progress from the Industrial Revolution through the Information Age suddenly allowed us to operate faster and on a much larger scale.

While scientists such as Boris Lyubimov and his contemporaries were prophesying a new level of global human mastery over natural forces in the mid-twentieth century, a different, a contradictory idea was emerging, that of climate change denialism. The idea of global warming due to industrial carbon emissions was first posited in 1908 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in his book Worlds in the Making. And, in the hundred plus years since its publication, “global warming” has become a household term.⁷ Yet, in the face of scientific evidence of warming, and in spite of robust and enthusiastic claims to the contrary by popular scientists, came the contention that human action could not possibly be powerful enough to impact the climate on a planetary scale. Perhaps this was in the hopes of avoiding any negative consequences that might emerge as a result of human interference, whether through resource extraction, industrialization, or any other facet of so-called progress. 

At first it was because of the oceans. Arrhenius argued that the oceans acted as a carbon sink and would have the capacity to absorb excess emissions and thus keep the planet cool. This turned out not to be exactly true – the oceans do absorb some carbon emissions, temporarily, but these eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere. Then the issue became political. In the 1980s, when NASA scientist Jim Hansen publicly fixed the start of global warming a hundred years prior in 1880, the United States Department of Energy immediately cut his funding.⁸ Thirty-five years later, in February 2015, United States Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) carried a snowball into the halls of Congress as clear evidence against global warming, “In case we have forgotten because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, ‘do you know what this is? It is a snowball just from outside here.’ So, it is very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.” ⁹ Despite the snow, 2014 did set global heating records, so did the following eight years.

The past two years, 2023 and 2024 sequentially, have proven to be the hottest years on record yet again, and we are right back where we started: atmospheric control.¹⁰ Calls for large scale “Geoengineering,” designed specifically for mitigating global warming, are increasing. At the World Climate Research Programmes (WRCP) Open Science Conference in 2023 there were dozens of papers and speakers discussing Solar Radiation Management (SRM), the plan to inject aerosols, most commonly sulfur, but sometimes calcite, into the stratosphere to increase the earth’s albedo, reflect solar heat gain, and directly mitigate rising temperatures. By comparison, in 2011, almost no one at the WRCP conference was discussing SRM.¹¹ These calls for action are driven by a sense of urgency, a concern that we are running out of time. But they are widely palatable for another reason, they do not interrupt business as usual, “…many climate scientists until recently regarded such proposals as fringe, if not heretical, arguing that they undermine the case for urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A group of scientists writing in Nature as recently as April last year [2018], called solar geoengineering ‘outlandish and unsettling… redolent of science fiction.” ¹² There is a serious concern that these strategies, like that of cap-and-trade, create a fungible right to do harm, as they will allow some companies to earn billions of dollars spraying sulphates, which are also an ingredient in coal emissions, into the high atmosphere while. others continue to pollute down on the ground.¹³ While we absolutely must address issues of warming, air quality, water quality, and clean energy if we are to mitigate the effects of the ongoing climate crisis, it seems, time and again, that the only path we can see forward is to engineer ourselves out of disaster.

But perhaps there are other ways to address the climate crisis than through the eyes of a “Geoengineer.” Yes, the climate crisis is driven by the release of atmospheric carbon, and we know that the built environment is responsible for a significant portion of all carbon emissions. According to Architecture 2030 “building operations are responsible for approximately 27% annually, while the embodied carbon of just four building and infrastructure materials – cement, iron, steel, and aluminum – are responsible for an additional 15% annually,” so it is only appropriate that as architects we question our role and our position in the fight against further climate change.¹⁴ Perhaps that role is not through geo-engineering.

In Southern California, inland, nestled between the Chocolate Mountains and Joshua Tree National Park to the west and the Anzo-Borrega Desert State Park to the east, just north of the Mexico-United States border and south of Palm Springs is the desert paradise known as the Salton Sea: an eerie, inhospitable body of water polluted by a hundred years of agricultural run-off. The sea itself is one of the last remaining flyway resources for nearly 400 species of migrating birds, but because of the pollution, it brings death to those who feed on it. In 1992, 150,000 eared grebes died on the shores of the sea, and on August 12, 1999, 7.5 million fish died in a single day. Their corpses stretched along the waterfront in a band 10 mi. [16 km] long and 3 mi. [4.8 km] wide. Forget about swimming in it, residents are warned not to come too close.¹⁶ 

South of the Salton Sea lies the Imperial Valley – a verdant agricultural landscape that consumes a full 20% of Colorado river water annually and produces two-thirds of the United States’ winter vegetables. Despite the massive $2 billion a year agricultural production industry, it is also a food desert where 20% of residents are unable to access healthy food. It is home to an economically depressed, linguistically isolated community that suffers the highest unemployment and poverty rates in California and is host to among the highest rates of asthma in the country.¹⁷ As temperatures rise, the Salton Sea evaporates, each year exposing more and more toxified playa to desert winds and locals’ lungs. Meanwhile, north of the sea is home to Riverside County and Palm Springs Desert Resort, the self-proclaimed golf capital of the world with well over one hundred desert golf courses and a $6 billion dollar-a-year tourist industry.¹⁸ 

Below it all: the San Andreas Fault. This seismic division runs directly beneath the Salton Sea and Riverside and Imperial Counties and provides access to superheated geothermal brine deep beneath the earth’s surface. This brine feeds the Salton Sea Known Geothermal Resource Area located on the southeast shore of the sea and which, since the 1980s, has been home to eleven geothermal power plants. Not only is this area a generator of clean energy, but the geothermal brine it relies on is lithium rich, and it promises 3,747,858.5 tn [3,400 kt] of lithium, which, if it can be extracted, would become the world’s largest lithium resource.¹⁹ 

The government of California, backed by private investors, has hopes of transforming Imperial Valley into “Lithium Valley,” envisioning another economic powerhouse like Silicon Valley. A host of billionaires including Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have proposed investments in the project. In 2021, General Motors announced a partnership with Controlled Thermal Resources, an Australian mining company that already owns one geothermal plant near the Salton Sea, to build 7,000 acres [2,832.8 ha] of industrial buildings including power plants, lithium refineries, and battery manufactories.²⁰ Electric vehicle plants and other accessory services may follow. But many local residents are concerned that they will be forgotten or pushed out in the process. They are also concerned about the potential impact to the environment, their environment. And they are right to be concerned; back in the 1980’s when Silicon Valley first took off and was better known as a manufacturing hub for computer hardware than as a Mecca for software developers, the immense industrial activity produced a total of twenty-three EPA Superfund sites, many of which still exist today.²¹

Naturally, there is great interest in investment and harnessing of Lithium Valley’s clean geothermal energy with battery grade lithium as a by-product, but there seems to be almost none in addressing its existing environmental issues. Before Imperial Valley can become Lithium Valley, we need to take a closer look at the material and energy flows that lie behind lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle production. As we will see, this entire landscape is a result of geo-engineering, the good and the bad. Will transforming this region yet again into Lithium Valley, the fourth such Anthropocentric change this region has experienced, address the existing environmental problems, or contribute more? Is extracting lithium from geothermal brines, in mass and over a fault line, as safe as the energy companies claim? What other environmental risks might this industrial development bring to the area, and who will profit from all of this new economic activity, the local residents who are now suffering, or outside investors and politicians?

The studio was divided into three sequential phases. In the first, students were asked to develop a visual understanding of the phenomenal details described above at three scales: global, regional, and local (Fig. 1). Globally students looked at lithium production and exchange worldwide along with various means and locations of battery and electric vehicle production. Regionally, they explored Colorado River water usage including water use agreements, infrastructure plans, and drought statistics; geothermal power production, capacity, and distribution; and the regional impact of drying lakes and desert dust. And locally, they investigated agricultural production and water use in Imperial Valley; demographics in Imperial County (Brawley, El Centro, Calexico) and Riverside County (Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Palm Desert); and water and air quality throughout the region. The narrative critiques developed by each student were built on this detailed description of the phenomena in and around the Salton Sea. 

The second phase of the studio asked students to study both Magical Realist paintings and texts and then to experiment with various modes of visualization and representation derived from this study. Following Nicolas Mirzoeff’s argument that “power visualizes History to itself,” and “in so doing, it claims authority above and beyond its ability to impose its will,” ²⁵ along with Faris’ description of magical realism as inherently anti-bureaucratic, ²⁶ this exercise required students to explore the ways in which large energy companies, agricultural corporations, the state, and others, use visualization to entice us to look toward some things and away from others, and then in turn use these same practices to entice our audience to look not at what they are told to look at, but at what they otherwise might not, or might not want to see (Figs. 2, 3).

On the surface, Green Water appears as a proposal for a water treatment plant (Fig. 4). It starts with a critique of the Salton Sea’s purported origins in a failed infrastructure project that resulted in water currently twice as salty as the oceans (and predicted to be five times as salty by 2045) and which emits a rotten sulfuric smell that has reached as far away as Los Angeles.²⁷ To understand why the water is so toxic and in need of purification it is necessary to understand the history of this sea. 

The Salton Sea is not unique in its “accidental” environmental devastation, it is one of many such places. In the 1950’s, in his Virgin Lands program, Nikolai Khruschev had the Syr and Amu Rivers that fed into the Aral Sea – the fourth largest lake in the world – dammed and diverted to irrigate the steppes of Central Asia. Deprived of its replenishing waters, the Aral Sea, much like the Salton Sea, began to evaporate, and, again much like the Salton Sea, began to expose playa made toxic by decades of industrial farming runoff. Today, the Aral Sea has diminished to a tenth of its original size; ³² and desert winds spread its toxic sand for 500 mi. [805 km] in all directions.³³

To understand the lack of action in mitigating the air quality problems caused by wind driven dust at the Aral and Salton Seas, it is helpful to look at Owen’s Lake and the largest dust mitigation project in the world. The problems at Owen’s Lake began in a similar way to those at the Aral and Salton Seas. In 1913, water was diverted from the lake to supply the growing population of Los Angeles, 200 mi. [322 km] to the south, with drinking water.³⁴ Eventually the entire lakebed dried up, and winds began kicking up an astounding amount of dust. At its worst the lakebed emitted 75,000 tn [68 kt] of particulate matter per year, one hundred times more dust than is considered safe by the US government. At times residents were forced to stay in their homes, unable even to see the houses across the street. Finally, in 1997, eighty-four years later, Los Angeles agreed to fund a dust mitigation project. This involved subdividing the lakebed into smaller cells and employing different mitigation strategies in each cell – gravel beds, sprinklers to keep dust moist, hyper-saline brines. If the Owen’s Lake dust remediation project were to be stopped at any time, the lake would dry again, and the dust emissions would resume. These efforts cost the city more than $2 billion over twenty-five years for a lake that only covered 108 sq. mi. [280 km²] – the Salton Sea started at 600 sq. mi. [1,554 km²] in 1907, and the Aral Sea was originally 26,300 sq. mi. [68,117 km²] in area.³⁵

Green Air engages with the air quality problems created as a byproduct of such human geo-engineering of natural waterways. Standing tall above the Imperial Valley is a highly mechanized tower, more machine than building, equipped along its height with solar panels, wind turbines, carbon-capture and sequestration machines, and air filters (Fig. 5). Like Green Water it appears that this tower exists as a machine to purify the air and, if deployed throughout Imperial Valley, make it breathable once more. A closer inspection, however, reveals that the tower only cleans the air for it’s one apartment, and that the residents of the Imperial Valley, those who suffer poverty, unemployment, and asthma at rates far higher than the rest of the country, are housed in the basement below (Fig. 6). At the top of the tower sits John Dales, in his single penthouse, a private aerie high above the polluted valley.³⁶ In this hermetic bubble it is no longer necessary to concern oneself with the high rates of asthma, bronchitis, and aerosolized carcinogens endured by the workers down below, only their labor matters. They are allowed tight, dark quarters below, out-of-site and out-of-mind, unimportant except for the wealth they produce, which allows the tower to exist (Fig. 7). 

The name Lithium Valley comes from the superheated lithium-rich brine used to create geothermal power at the Salton Sea Known Geothermal Area. This mineral dense brine, at times up to 30% solid, promises to produce a significant amount of lithium if energy companies can figure out how to separate the lithium from the other elements in it. There are several major corporations currently working on this project – including previously mentioned Controlled Thermal Resources, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which already owns eleven geothermal plants at the Salton Sea, and Energy Source, a company invested in by Bill Gates. Previously, in 2015, a fourth company called Simbol Materials announced that they had discovered a way to extract lithium from the brine, and were offered a $325 M buyout from Tesla before the deal fell through and Simbol went under.³⁸

Green Power, calls into question, and makes visible, the potential hidden costs of this promised clean energy growth. The San Andreas fault line runs directly beneath the sea, and significant digging along the fault could trigger anything from minor to major seismic activity.³⁹ Further, the dredging up of geothermal brine brings with it a number of toxins, including some of the minerals in the brine itself, and additional heavy metals dug up as by products. Much of the material is returned to the earth with the brine once it has cooled, but many plants rely on tailings ponds to hold their heavy metal tailings and prevent them from leaching into the ground water. Just as with the Superfund sites created in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, residents and some local officials are concerned about the unintended environmental consequences of all this industrial activity. Lastly, while the geothermal brine is sourced from, and returned to, the earth, it can require up to tens of billions of gallons of water to cool the brine before reinjection. In an area like the Salton Sea where farmers, golf courses, and residents are already battling over access to clean water, what would it mean to siphon off a significant amount of what remains to cool additional geothermal plants? ⁴⁰

Green Power invokes Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and the history of the Salton Sea by transforming the Known Geothermal Resource Area into a theme park. On display are innovations in clean energy side by side with the dying sea, the polluted air, heavy metal tailings ponds, and the impoverished Imperial Valley residents fighting not to be overlooked in the creation of Lithium Valley (Figs. 9, 10). Presented together it is difficult not to experience the simultaneous and conflicting histories driven by geo-engineering at the Salton Sea. By exposing to full view the inhumane and toxic conditions at the Salton Sea, Green Power asks us where our values lie. 

Prediction was thought to be the key to weather control, and the key to prediction: modeling. Edward Lorenz was one of the many meteorologists working on the question of weather prediction in the 1960s, but he eventually came to see things differently than his contemporary, Boris Lyubimov. “The average person, seeing that we can predict the tides pretty well a few months ahead would say, why can we not do that same thing with the atmosphere, it is just a different fluid system, the laws are about as complicated. But I realized that ‘any’ physical system that behaved nonperiodically [like the weather] would be unpredictable.” ⁴¹ Lorenz’s work illustrates that we have the technology to change the weather, to block the sun or seed the clouds, but if we do, there is no way to truly know what will happen next. 

Solar Radiation Management, for example, might work, it might even work well, but it also might not. And no matter how many times we model it, there is no way of knowing what else it will do until it is tested on a planetary scale. By then it may be too late. As we rush to mitigate warming, it is important not to forget that we need the atmosphere to breathe, that the climactic engine on this planet is driven by the energy from the sun, and that the goal of Solar radiation management is to, literally, block out the sun. Even if it were attempted, over time anything we might inject into the stratosphere would disperse, requiring us to reinject additional aerosol every few years. The plan proposed by Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, for example, includes 4,000 flights in the first year, 8,000 in the second, 12,000 in the third, and so on until, after fifteen years, fleets of purpose-built, high-altitude tankers would make 60,000 flights annually.⁴²

If all that sulphate remains in the stratosphere and does not sink down to terrestrial levels as Geoengineers claim, how long before the concentration of particles from thousands of flights blocks out too much solar energy? Will we then need to Geoengineer the skies clean again? If we are to inject the stratosphere with aerosolized sulfur without first reducing fossil fuel emissions, we might actually be increasing overall pollution. Meanwhile, sulfur is one of the many components of fossil fuel emissions that got us here in the first place. While there would be a certain poetic justice in fossil fuel pollutants being the thing that saves us from fossil fuel pollution, it seems better not to tempt fate. 

At the Salton Sea, Aral Sea, and Owen’s Lake, we exerted “our ability to triumph over nature” at massive scales, to divert the natural course of rivers to irrigate otherwise dry areas. These geo-engineering projects were each pursued with noble goals – to control the flow natural systems to provide food and water to growing populations. But each effort brought with it disastrous unintended side effects: water shortages, dust clouds, dying lakes, and devastation to human and animal habitats. If these are the results of the rerouting of rivers, what will come of aerosol injection into the atmosphere, iron fertilization of the oceans, cloud whitening, or any of a dozen other high-tech schemes for engineering ourselves out of a crisis we engineered ourselves into? Geo-engineering is a dangerous gambit, albeit one that humans have been and continue to be involved in since the beginning of civilization. As we consider the changing climate in the twenty-first century, we would do better to change our attitudes to be in tune with the ebbs and flows of the environment around us, to be more aligned with the shifts of geologic time, than to continue to work to bend the environment and the planet to our will. As shown by the Salton Sea, that way lies disaster.