A tribal officer at work in the wasteland of California’s water wars

Where Once There was Water

I sit in the passenger seat of a dusty black pickup, Kathy at the wheel. The dirt road we travel cuts through the arid heart of California, 400km from the leaning palms of Los Angeles. We drive through a place called Owens Valley that stretches remote and wind-whipped between Yosemite and Death Valley. 

Maps of this region are sparsely drawn, save for a few small towns, the long spines of mountains and the vast beginnings of the Great Basin Desert. This landscape is the product of heat and relentless sun and little moisture. Not a tree grows as far as I can see, just low brush with small waxy leaves. And yet, had we attempted this drive 100 years ago, we would be under 10 metres of water. 

We drive across a dry lakebed. The lake was once fed by Owens River as it rushed with snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains, which loom above the valley to the west.

Owens Lake once stretched 280 km sq and sustained the Paiute people for thousands of years. Millions of migratory birds nested here, and wild animals drank from freshwater springs. 

Ever since 1924, Owens Lake has lain barren, and Owens River has been redirected into an aqueduct that runs hundreds of kilometres south. When the wind rises, arsenic and desiccated mining chemicals billow from the lakebed. Paiute Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Kathy Jefferson Bancroft has made it her life’s work to understand what is left of this watershed.

The road on which we travel is maintained by the city of Los Angeles, a metropolis 400 km to the south, a five hour drive through the desert. Los Angeles takes an average one-third of its water from this remote place. Within ten years of the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Owens Lake lay empty. 

"This valley," Kathy says, "has never been the same."

Before taking this drive on the lakebed with Kathy, I chatted with Sally Manning, Environmental Director for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe. Sally has studied environmental conditions in Owens Valley for decades.

"Owens Lake is situated at the western edge of the Great Basin, in a valley that receives a great deal of snowmelt each year," Sally told me. "Owens Lake should be a wet lake, always, to this day."

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - known locally as DWP - is the entity responsible for exporting water to Los Angeles. As a result, DWP is also responsible for Owens Lake. 

Out the window of Kathy’s truck, slabs of plastic and fibreglass bleach in the sun. The land looks like a farm gone wrong: furrows and troughs, but not much alive. "To DWP, this lakebed is a ‘site,' " Kathy says. "It’s a work site; it’s a problem. But this land was crucial to our ancestors, they left traces everywhere. Everything here is as sacred as the next."

The truck bounces past a shallow brine field, where hunks of concrete rise above the water. "It’s our job to protect it and take care of it."

Gray air days  

As it turns out, taking care of a lakebed with a landmass more than twice the size of San Francisco is no small feat. 

In the eyes of DWP, the lakebed is now an expansive, and very expensive, dust mitigation site, where environmental regulations require that DWP control the amount of super-fine particles blowing off the surface and into the lungs of the people who live nearby. When the wind is strong, as it often is in this valley, the air turns grey. 

"It’s absolutely huge," said Sally Manning of the dust problem. "To this day it’s one of the largest sources of PM10 in the United States."

PM10 means air pollution made up of tiny particles that, at a high enough concentration, harm human health. The federal government sets a threshold for the maximum amount of PM10 considered acceptable. PM10 levels exceeding this threshold spread over 50 miles from the dry lakebed throughout Owens Valley, affecting roughly 40,000 people. 

Dust from the dry bed of Owens Lake is still a problem, but it used to be worse.

"Part of the reason it gets so much attention is it used to blow across state lines, which elevated it as a critical problem nationally," Sally said. "The EPA got involved at the federal level and required that DWP do something about it."

In order to keep environmental lawyers out of the picture, DWP throws its money (to the tune of USD 2 billion), engineers and PR team at this lonely lakebed. We drive through the dust mitigation site, spanning over 100 km sq, and I am thinking of school science fairs and dystopian sci-fi films.

We pass displays of artistically arranged boulders trucked up from San Diego, and massive sprinkler systems, and piles of gravel and dolomite, all brought here in an effort to reconfigure the lake into something more than an ecological disaster. 

But no buses disgorge tourists to peruse the imported boulders or read the interpretive signs. It’s just Kathy and me, climbing out of the truck into air that smells of sulphur, brine flies hovering over our shoes. 

Desert snowplow  

DWP tends to take a Sisyphean task to dust mitigation, Kathy tells me. They also have a knack for forgetting that landscapes, especially those as harsh as Owens Valley, answer to geologic time and tend to disregard the parameters of the fiscal year.

"DWP does these industrial projects that require maintenance into perpetuity," Kathy says. "But DWP is not going to be here into perpetuity."

"They’re fighting it and fighting it and fighting it," Sally Manning said of DWP and the land they purport to tame.

"It’s a constant maintenance nightmare, the way they’re doing dust mitigation now. The salt from the lakebed corrodes all their machinery. Their roads wash out in storms and need repairing. They have problems with their electrical and communications. It seems like once they put a system in place, it needs to be redone every two years."

A plume of dust rises behind Kathy’s truck. In the distance, a desert hill has been scraped halfway to nothing. DWP scatters the extracted gravel over the lakebed, and the gravel briefly traps the dust. Soon, the wind blows sand over the gravel, and then the gravel is gone, and so is the mountain from which the gravel came.

"It doesn’t work," Kathy says. "They’re constantly moving sand, and the wind blows it right back. They have to move sand off the roads with snowplows."

"I try to help them seek lasting solutions," Kathy says.

"Returning water to the lake and letting this watershed behave as it did for thousands of years would be best of all. We’re a long way from getting them to agree to that, but they can restore a portion of water to the lake," she adds. "Enough to sustain native vegetation like greasewood and salt grass."

Native plants lend a measure of restoration to the ecosystem while providing long-lasting dust control. 

It’s a surprisingly hard sell. "The one thing they’re really reluctant to use for dust mitigation is water," Kathy says. It’s true: every drop that returns to Owens Lake is a drop that cannot be exported to Los Angeles. And so the city mines gravel and tears out brush that has already taken root. 

The Teacher and the Cyclops

Kathy grew up on the shores of the lakebed. After leaving home to get a graduate degree in chemistry, she came back in 2002, a time when DWP’s dust mitigation efforts were ramping up. 

"People ask me, how do you know how to get around out there?" Kathy says. "Because I watched them build every little bit of it."

Now, she is a teacher, and her student is a cyclops of a utility company directed by the interests of Los Angeles customers, many of whom know little about where their water comes from or the toll it takes on Owens Valley. Kathy shows up at work sites and shows up at meetings and talks again and again about solving human-made problems by letting the lake do what comes naturally. 

She comes to the lakebed sometimes daily. She talks to the workers. She writes down what she sees. Her effort has been one of long and patient watching, of asserting that tribal knowledge has a place in conversations about modern infrastructure. 

"It’s my goal to teach them," she says. "Let’s find ways to make the lake heal itself. And we can help it. I try to show them you can solve problems without being so destructive."

When you first got started, I ask her, was it difficult to find out what was going on? Did DWP include you? 

"Oh, God, no," she says. "You just had to be present. Otherwise they’d just do it however. Tribal reps were never invited to meetings. Now we’re a part of the decisions. It’s different." She laughs. "It’s a lot of work, though."

"Let’s find ways to make the lake heal itself. And we can help it. I try to show them you can solve problems without being so destructive."

A unified vision for sustainable water management

There’s one thing on which both Sally and Kathy agree. The ultimate, long-term, maintenance-free solution to the Owens dust problem is simple, at least on paper: return water to Owens Lake. 

"Currently, when we address environmental issues, everything is broken into its separate categories. Air quality. Hydrology. Biology," Sally told me.

"But ecosystems are integrated. Owens River watershed terminates at Owens Lake. It should all be managed as a functioning eco-unit. It’s time to integrate the parts and look at the Owens River water system and work on healing that for the future."

I asked Sally if she thinks the nearsightedness of such a massive utility company as DWP will forever stand in the way. 

"It can be done," Sally said. "DWP is working on ‘visioning’ for water conservation. And [the University of California, Los Angeles] has programmes working pretty hard on proving that LA can live within its water footprint. With conservation, stormwater capture, cleaning up their ground water and recycling their sewer water, LA can live within its own means, even without desalination."

Imagining Los Angeles as independent from this infrastructure feels like a utopia, I told Sally. The modern West was built on imported water. What would it mean for Los Angeles to achieve this goal? 

"They should do it precisely because they are Los Angeles," Sally said. "Rather than being recognised for creating the environmental disaster that is the dry lakebed, they could be leading the way for cities in the West living within the means of their own watershed."

What we pray for in the desert

Climbing back into the truck with Kathy, my shoes covered in green mud, I am unsettled. It unnerves me, the landscape so changed, the thirst at the other end of the aqueduct. But Kathy sits beside me - Kathy at the wheel, her truck humming smoothly over the dusty road. 

Kathy and her group of volunteers stand as David at the feet of Goliath. And yet, she gestures now to a hillock where native plants are beginning to take root. "Look," she says. "You can see where it’s healing."

Then her eyes drift beyond the steering wheel. "The longer you’re out here, you start ro go numb. But you can’t be afraid. There’s nothing worse than complacency to let them do what they’re doing."

It’s a dream of hers to see the lake as her ancestors saw it. Sometimes, DWP asks her to say a prayer, to confer a blessing on a new project on the lakebed. "They want a PR performance," she says, and she has to stifle laughter at the theatre of it, but she shows up and she prays.

She leads the representatives of the city of Los Angeles in a prayer for the resilience of the land and the protection of the people for whom this is home. 

Kathy has seen it a few times, after a wet winter: water flowing out of the mountains and covering the lakebed, the city’s tinkerings falling to ruin, turned obsolete. 

"That’s what I pray for," Kathy says. "The last thing I pray for." And I can imagine her as she looks up at the sky, looks at the city journalists with microphones in hand. "I pray that we all live to see these structures under the water of Owens Lake." 

Image by Ann Kaneko Courtesy_ InterSection Films, LLC