The Sixteen College Students vs. Los Angeles: Mono Lake Committee

In nineteen seventy-eight, a graduate student named David Gaines and fifteen other college students decided to save Mono Lake.

That sentence sounds straightforward. What it meant in practice was this: they were attempting to use a legal theory that the state had never applied in this way before, against the largest municipal water utility on the West Coast, which had been diverting the lake's feeder streams since nineteen forty-one. They had no legal standing, no significant money, and no major institutional allies. Most of the environmental lawyers they consulted told them their argument would not survive a court challenge.

They founded the Mono Lake Committee anyway.

The legal theory was that California's public trust doctrine, which the state had always used to protect public access to navigable waters, extended to protecting the ecological integrity of a lake, even if that meant curtailing an established city water right. This had not been done before. The argument went to the California Supreme Court.

In nineteen eighty-three, the court ruled in their favor.

The nineteen ninety-four Water Board order requiring the lake's recovery followed from that ruling. David Gaines did not live to see it: he was killed in a car accident in nineteen eighty-eight. The Committee he founded continued the legal and political work for another six years and won.

Sixteen students. Forty-one years of water diversion. One of the most significant victories in the history of American environmental law.