Rebellious Roots approaches the most critical social and environmental issues of the Salton Sea which are its contamination and salinity, as well as its lack of cultural identity by implementing a socio-environmental territorial strategy that engages the native inhabitants of the area—the Torres Martinez—as stewards and stakeholders. Rebellious Roots creates cultural corridors (in red) and green corridors (in green) to connect the fragmented ecology on the site. This connective network is overlaid with a field of critical nodes where different spaces and programs synergize to revitalize the site. These include pools for desalinization, fish farms, recreational programming, and spaces for cultural events to amplify the economy of the area by increasing its tourism.
The first counter strategy the project employs is the design of the networked trail system—the project's "rebellious roots" and the seeding of the larger territory through the development of key nodes that act as attractors scattered around the entirety of the Salton Sea. This network takes its point of departure by extending existing historical trails and occupying the territories of the site's rivers, creeks, and washes, while amplifying these to become rebellious actors with new cultural and ecological programming. The second counter strategy is the intensification of the cultural seeds—the "nodes"—by populating them with more social, cultural and artistic programs and events that help generate momentum and revenue to sustain the project, while simultaneously intensifying ecological programming by amplifying the planting of native plants to transform the arid land into a living green oasis.
The last strategy implemented in rebellious roots is “preserved shrinkage”—a strategy that looks to the future with the assumption that as the sea dries up over time, the selected areas of intensified cultural and ecological programming will operate as a preservation of oasis pools over time.
Rebellious Roots is a reparative project that honors and builds upon the historical traces of the Torres Martinez trail and extend it as an agrovoltaic trail that connects the site through a vital network of cultural and ecological spaces dedicated to restoring the environment in a way that involves key stakeholders indigenous to the territory.