Mono Lake remembered
by Martha Davis
Editor's note: As Executive Director until 1997, Martha Davis led the Mono Lake Committee through thirteen years of litigation, negotiation, and problem-solving. The following essay, written for the 1998 Mono Lake Calendar, looks back at those years. Martha has hardly left the Mono Basin behind, however. She has joined the Board of Directors and makes frequent visits to the basin. She's as busy as ever on Mono's behalf and, we suspect, she's having more fun these days, too.
My first memory of Mono Lake is of the scent of sage. Even a whiff of this pungent odor at the local market takes me back to a hot, dust-filled afternoon where, in the summer of 1984, I was stumbling through thickets of sagebrush and desert peach trying to keep up with Mono Lake Committee co-founder Dave Gaines.
I wanted to convince Dave that a negotiated solution for Mono Lake was possible. He eyed me skeptically. When we finally stopped to rest in the shade of a Jeffrey pine, Dave tugged thoughtfully on a corner of his beard and shook his head. He had already tried talking with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, with no success. What made me think DWP would listen now?
And so, high on the slopes above Mono Lake, Dave and I debated the future of the Mono Lake campaign, looking down on a dying lake choked with white alkali dust, breathing in the aroma of sage tinged with hope.
In the end we combined a legal strategy with a problem-solving twist. Without the successful court challenge to Los Angeles' water rights, there would be no incentive for DWP to respond to Mono Lake's needs. But for LA, there were real issues if DWP substantially reduced its water diversions from the Mono Basin to protect Mono Lake--issues of how to replace this water and where the replacement would come from. Unless the Committee addressed those concerns, DWP would pursue the legal battle against Mono Lake endlessly.
There was an even deeper worry for the Mono Lake Committee. For years, DWP had threatened to take water from the San Francisco Bay Delta or some other environmentally sensitive area of California if Mono Lake was protected. Under this punitive script, if Mono Lake won, another place would lose.
Through the decade of struggle to come, the Committee never gave up pursuing a principled answer to the problem: real protection for Mono Lake, locally developed replacement water supplies for Los Angeles, and the assurance that LA's water needs would not be transferred to another region.
And we won. In 1994, the California State Water Resources Control Board issued its landmark decision promising Mono Lake a higher, healthier lake level and the restoration of its streams and waterfowl habitat. The Water Board also found that Los Angeles could replace the lost diversions through conservation and water recycling projects rather than adversely impacting other places.
But back on that hot afternoon in 1984, Dave and I could not know the joy that the tumultuous years ahead would bring, or the profound sadness they would hold. We were worrying about how to return water to a thirsty lake.
Far below we could see where flowing water had once shaped the land. In our imaginations, ribbons of blue again wove their way through the silver stumps and snags--all that remained of the thick canopy of trees that, just a few decades earlier, had bordered lower Lee Vining Creek.
We reached no conclusions that day, other than we had to "keep on keeping on," as Dave was fond of saying. But in the years that followed, the sound of that imagined water haunted our dreams. As the Committee slogged through the seemingly endless rounds of court hearings and conflict resolution discussions with DWP, we clung to visions of water: water re-filling the empty stream beds below DWP's diversion dams and replenishing the cottonwoods and willows; water tumbling over the dry cobblestones and inundating alkali flats; water restoring life to a dying land.
A succession of court victories between 1984 and 1990 pried open DWP's diversion dams and created the opportunity for the Water Board to issue its historic decision. Out of the legal cracks, water seeped into the streams and down to the lake. It was a trickle at first, but enough to maintain a tiny pool near the mouth of Lee Vining Creek holding three brown trout and numerous fingerlings.
Later, the water came in a gush when the court ordered DWP to raise Mono Lake to a minimum protective level. On a hot August morning in 1989, DWP had to crank the release gate on Rush Creek's return ditch wide open.
Our joy that day was irrepressible. We forced ourselves to stay in the office to answer press calls. By mid-afternoon, we couldn't wait any longer. We abandoned the wildly ringing phones, and dashed down to Rush Creek where we dove into the newly released water, immersing ourselves in Mono Lake's victory and the promise it held for the future.
But our happiness was not unalloyed. A car accident on an icy road the preceding winter had claimed the life of Dave Gaines along with that of another Committee staff member, Don Oberlin. And so, the man who had first imagined a living Mono Lake where others had seen only a "noble waste of time," as one writer described it, would never know how completely his vision would be fulfilled.
"Dreams and visions are the counterpoint to laws and lawsuits," Dave once wrote. "Without them, nothing would ever change." But how and where do we begin to "imagine" the changes that are possible?
I have always liked N. Scott Momaday's answer to this question. When he writes about the importance of the "remembered earth," he is describing a way of seeing that reaches deep into our souls and connects us more firmly to the land than the force of gravity. It is our ability to give ourselves up to a landscape like Mono Lake, to wonder upon it and to see it with fresh eyes, envisioning a new future out of the wreckage of the present, that gives us the courage to struggle forward against the greatest of odds.
At Mono Lake we dreamed an impossible dream and made it come true. Today, water has re-filled the dry creek beds and life is returning to Mono's streams. In the years to come, Mono Lake will rise to a higher, healthier lake level and our children will witness the re-birth of an entire ecosystem.
Equally important, Los Angeles--California's largest, most powerful city--has chosen at last to respect the beauty and ecological well-being of this distant watershed. LA will develop the water supplies it needs through local conservation and water recycling. These water supply options will be a vital part of bringing other social and economic benefits to our Los Angeles community.
And for California, we averted the substitution of one form of environmental harm for another. No other region will be adversely impacted by Mono Lake's protection. The Mono Lake Committee demonstrated a new way to address the state's water problems.
Now I return every summer to Mono Lake to walk the streams in celebration of the lake's extraordinary victory. With each step, I breath in the scent of sage and listen to the sound of flowing water with renewed faith in our united ability to make the changes we need to secure the future we want.
True, I must still use my imagination to see a dense forest of cottonwood, pine, aspen, and willow standing beside the streams where the pungent sagebrush yet grows.
But the sound of the flowing water transforms the land. And for a single moment, amid the shimmering heat devils, that sound blurs the past, present and future, and the empty flood plain fills once again with trees.
Martha Davis was Executive Director of the Mono Lake Committee for thirteen years; she now serves on the Mono Lake Committee Board of Directors.
Summer 1997 Mono Lake Newsletter
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