All Those Little Things...

Palm Springs, California, is delightful in early fall. Yes, it is pitilessly hot, but the nights and early mornings are cool and the air is crystal clear. The mountains leap forward as if sculpted in bas relief. Until this year, that is.
This year was hot as always, but it was humid and cloudy, the air thick. The mountains hid behind haze, sometimes until late afternoon. Exercising outdoors produced gallons of sweat.
One morning we awoke to a peculiar smell, somewhat like sulfur. At first we thought something was wrong in our condo, then blamed it on nearby construction or a local industrial spill. But as we went about our day we found the smell everywhere. It lasted the entire day and it was there when we went to bed.
The next day it was gone. A news report explained why.
Fifty miles to the southeast of Palm Springs lies the Salton Sea,  a huge body of water created long ago, drained, and then recreated by the Colorado River overloading an ill-considered aqueduct into the region during the flood of 1905, since then shrunk to its current dimensions. It lies in the Salton Sink which is 225 feet below sea level. Depending upon rainfall and agricultural run-off, the Sea averages 15 miles by 35 miles with a maximum depth of 16 feet. With the alkaline nature of the desert floor here, the salinity of the lake, while less than the Great Salt Lake, is greater than the Pacific Ocean and is increasing by  one percent annually.
The Salton Sea originally was the product of the delta building of the Colorado River. The silt it deposited over three million years created a dam that prevented the Sea of Cortez from flowing on up the southern end of the Imperial Valley. The Salton Sea has always changed character from a fresh water lake to a salt sea depending upon the tug and pull of the fresh water rivers feeding it versus evaporative loss from the desert sun. An interesting side note is that the Sea lies over the San Andreas Fault and computer models have demonstrated that the deviatoric stress from water infill contributes to a vulnerability to earthquakes, the area (and consequently Los Angeles) is currently in risk of a magnitude 7 or 8 event.  
The news report we heard that day explained the odor as the smell of decay of the thousands of dead fish and other marine organisms lining the shore of the Salton Sea. Changing weather patterns and increasing salinity of the water over the past years have combined to produce this circumstance and deliver the unpleasant aroma to Palm Springs.
When I learned this, I was again struck by the myriad of little changes that must inevitably occur as a result of man's interaction with nature and an accelerated global climate change. Not that I condemn man's participation, on the contrary I see it as inevitable. We might possibly have delayed these changes by a few thousand years , perhaps by deciding not to participate in the Industrial Revolution, or by making a much more concerted effort to stop releasing bio-carbons into the atmosphere once we realized the harm we were doing. But inevitably with the march of time and the growth of the human population and the consequent clearing of vegetation, the growing consumption and polluting of water despite our best efforts, the increasing methane release from increased bovine population to feed the population, all the things that humans do to survive, the effect would eventually be the same.
Consider the animals. Left to their own devices, they balance their own populations. They do not invent machines to improve their lives. The vegetation they consume they replenish by pruning or by carrying seeds from place to place. They do not, they can not harm their world. Which organism, then, is alien to this planet, do you suppose?