A Second Hearing with the California State Water Board Approaches
Published in The Desert Report on September 28, 2024
Standing at the shore of Mono Lake and looking out across the rippling water, you are looking at one unique and specific ecosystem, but also a thread that weaves together many landscapes, causes, and bodies of water. Protecting Mono Lake today means finding and strengthening those connections, all part of the fight for environmental justice.
Located at the western edge of the arid Great Basin and the eastern side of the snowy Sierra Nevada, Mono Lake is an ancient saline lake that covers more than 70 square miles and supports a unique and highly productive ecosystem.
Mono Lake is located on the ancestral and modern-day homelands of the Mono Lake Kutzadika’a Tribe, who have lived in relation to this land since time immemorial.
Mono Lake is also the site of several landmark California water rights decisions from the 1980s and 1990s that established the Public Trust doctrine’s role in protecting the lake’s ecosystem, as well as rules specifically set to raise Mono Lake to a healthy level.
But today, the lake is only 50% of the way to achieving the level mandated by the California State Water Resources Control Board.
Because of its salinity and unique chemistry, Mono Lake has no fish, but it teems with brine shrimp and alkali flies, which sustain millions of migratory birds that visit the lake each year. Along with the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which has fallen to dangerously low levels, Mono Lake is part of a network of saline lakes in the Western Hemisphere, which have gained more public awareness in recent years.
Public Trust resource protection at Mono Lake, established in 1983 by the Supreme Court of California, and upheld by the State Water Board in 1994, remains as important as ever. Today, the Mono Lake Committee is preparing for another hearing before the California State Water Board, the next critical action in determining whether the lake will receive enough water to return to a healthy management level in our lifetimes.
In 1941, the city of Los Angeles began diverting the freshwater streams that feed Mono Lake, sending Sierra snowmelt 350 miles south through the Los Angeles Aqueduct which links this unusual and remote lake to the second most populous city in the United States.
Decades of excessive water diversions had devastating ecological consequences, and by 1981, Mono Lake had fallen 45 vertical feet and doubled in salinity, threatening the survival of the nesting California Gull population and millions of migratory birds, creating dangerous air quality due to toxic dust storms, and harming the lake’s unique and critical ecosystem. In 1994 the State Water Board established rules designed to raise Mono Lake, over 20 years, to the healthy mandated level.
Lake restoration is now a decade overdue. Here in 2024, Mono Lake is certainly fuller and healthier than it would have been had diversions continued unchecked. But the fight is far from over: in September of this year, Mono Lake’s shore only reaches the elevation 6,384 feet, eight feet below the mandated level of 6,392 feet. In other words, Mono Lake isn’t saved … yet.
I was born and raised in the Mono Basin, and for my entire life, I’ve walked past the 6,392-foot elevation mark above the lakeshore. This is the point on the South Tufa trail where asphalt turns to wooden boardwalk planks, the place where the lakeshore should have been ten years ago, and where it desperately needs to be today. This section of trail was specifically constructed so that it would be easy to remove the boardwalk as the lake rose to the mandated level. But 30 years have passed since the State Water Board’s mandate, and still, every time I walk down the boardwalk to give a South Tufa tour or swim with my friends, the worn wooden planks remind me of a promise unmet.
That’s why now, the Mono Lake Committee is asking the State Water Board to follow through and implement its historic Public Trust mandate for a lake level of 6,392 feet. With climate change in the mix, the stakes are higher than ever, and the need to reach 6,392 feet to buffer the ecosystem is even more urgent.
But while the lake is still far from the healthy management level, hope is still abundant in connections this lake builds between people, places, and their struggles for justice. Recent public policy updates work through those connections.
For example, the Kutzadika’a Tribe’s current policy work includes a formal request to amend the Region 6 — Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board Plan to designate Tribal Beneficial Uses for Mono Lake and its tributary streams. The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board states that designation “serves to acknowledge and highlight the need to maintain water quality sufficient to protect Tribal cultural and Tribal subsistence uses of waterbodies in the Mono Basin.” This action would represent the first implementation of Tribal Beneficial Uses in California.
Such an amendment to the Water Quality Control Plan is an important step towards environmentalism that centers Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and which takes a critical look at the history of colonization and its impacts on people and landscapes today.
Over the past few years, the Mono Lake Committee has worked to build a stronger and more supportive partnership with the Mono Lake Kutzadika’a Tribe, who continue to speak and advocate for the lake today. Tribal Elder Dean Tonenna spoke about the Tribe’s specific relationship with the lake at the February 2023 public workshop held by the State Water Board.3 He said: “We have our origins from Kootzabaa’a, also known today as Mono Lake … As the Indigenous people, we have a special relationship with Mono Lake that no one else does … Mono Lake has been very generous to our people, providing abundant food, medicines, and cleansing for our people over millennia.”
These ideas will all be important at the upcoming State Water Board hearing, which The Board has committed to holding “sometime in the next year.” At this hearing, the Mono Lake Committee will be arguing that it’s time to adjust diversion rules so that Mono Lake can receive the water it needs to achieve a healthy level.
Pre-hearing work is well underway and active. In summer 2023, the Committee began collaborative hydrology modeling to compare the performance of different water diversion scenarios. These scenarios range from continuing the same problematic stream diversions of the past 30 years to fully pausing stream diversions, plus options such as varying diversion levels between wet and dry years.
There are recent hopeful updates involving the city of Los Angeles, too. This past May, the city responded to pressure from a coalition of environmental organizations, led by the Mono Lake Committee, and chose to export only 4,500 acre-feet of water from the lake, even though existing diversion rules would have allowed them to quadruple their exports from the Mono Basin.4 This decision was truly significant because it helped preserve the lake’s five-foot gain from recent wet years.
It came in response to a March 2024 letter delivered from the Committee and more than 25 Los Angeles-based conservation and environmental justice groups. Many of groups who signed on to the letter, such as East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and Pacoima Beautiful, address lived experiences of climate change in the Los Angeles area, which disproportionately impact low-income communities and communities of color.
This coalition’s work shows how the fight to save Mono Lake cannot just be about Mono Lake alone, but must include environmental justice up and down the Los Angeles Aqueduct, across the state of California, across the Great Basin, and beyond. As the coalition’s 2024 letter reads, the 1994 State Water Board Decision “recognized the permanent connection of the Mono Basin with the people of Los Angeles, from the south and east to the coast, and how the future wellbeing of both are forever linked.”
The Committee is also focusing on connections within a greater saline lake network. This year, thanks to a partnership including the Mono Lake Committee, colleagues at Laguna Mar Chiquita in northern Argentina, and local teachers, six Lee Vining High School students participated in a new international environmental education and leadership program called Experience Ambientalia.
For the Committee, this marks a new and stronger form of outreach and connection within the local community. As program participant and Lee Vining High School student David Velez reflected, “When I started doing Experience Ambientalia, I really honestly had no clue about Mono Lake. But [learning] about Mono Lake and its history has made me really love living here.”
All this work will converge at the State Water Board hearing this next year. There, it will be essential to advocate for modifications to Los Angeles’ current diversions from Mono Lake’s tributary streams. There are multiple ways to modify diversions so that Mono Lake receives more water and recovers to 6,392 feet. One solution is dynamic diversion rules that would lock in wet year lake level gains as they happen. Solutions like these are tangible, current, and require focused and sustained action to implement.
Mono Lake’s precedent-setting legal protections have made progress toward an ecologically healthy level, and yet at the same time, they are not enough. With a landscape and legacy this big, we must never lose sight of the fact that protecting this place will take generations of knowledgeable, dedicated people looking at multiple efforts that go into environmental protection.
This means the Mono Lake Committee can and should be open to new perspectives on who will be part of saving Mono Lake, and how collaboration with all those parties can forge real partnerships and connections between places, communities, and causes.
I believe that the Committee’s recent work shows the power in environmental conservation that seeks to connect people and places. Mono Lake is one such inspirational place that gives us so many reasons to care. That, I believe, makes the future more hopeful for all of us.