The Arrest and Recovery of Mono Lake

By nineteen eighty-two, Mono Lake had lost forty-five feet of water depth since nineteen forty-one. Forty-five feet. The California Gulls that had always nested on the islands of the lake had their islands turned into peninsulas, then into points connected to the mainland by dry land. Coyotes walked out to the nesting colonies and ate the eggs and the chicks. Eighty percent of the colony was gone within a few years.

The Mono Lake Committee, founded in nineteen seventy-eight by David Gaines and fifteen other students, had been watching this happen. They had begun filing legal challenges based on an argument that most environmental lawyers at the time considered unlikely to work: that California's public trust doctrine, which the state had always used to protect navigable water and public access to the coast, also applied to the broader ecosystem of a lake. The doctrine imposed a duty of protection that could not simply be waived by a city's water rights.

In nineteen eighty-three, the California Supreme Court agreed. The ruling held that the state had a duty to protect Mono Lake's ecosystem and that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's diversions could be curtailed on that basis.

The State Water Resources Control Board issued its final order in nineteen ninety-four, requiring the lake to recover to a specific elevation: six thousand three hundred ninety-two feet above sea level. The order is considered one of the landmark decisions in the history of United States environmental law, the first time a court used the public trust doctrine to override a city's water rights.

The lake is still rising toward that target. The recovery is real. It is also slow.