Ten millennia in the Mono Lake Basin, showing how this complex ecosystem came to be what it is today.
Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California sits a stunning landscape overlooking a saline lake with picturesque tufa towers and flocks of phalarope birds. This is the Mono Lake Basin.
In this sweeping history, Robert B. Marks examines the forces that have shaped the Mono Lake Basin's rich ecosystem. The story starts with the region's Indigenous peoples. It then traces the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Euro-American settlers and the dispossession of the Kootzaduka'a people of their land. A struggle for control over water led to hydroelectric development and the sale of land and water rights to Los Angeles, diverting nearly all fresh water out of the basin and precipitating an ecological crisis by the 1970s. The ecological restoration movement that has, for now, successfully preserved the Mono Lake Basin.
As Marks shows, the basin reveals a larger story of how human actions and natural forces shape the environment. A dramatic and ultimately hopeful environmental history, Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin explores a beloved region to illuminate questions of water, power, and our relationship with the natural world that echo far beyond the American West.
Table of Contents:
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Phalarope View
Part I: Changes in the Land
1. The Mono Lake Basin: Environment and Indigenous People
2. Miners, Settlers, and Farmers, 1857–1925
3. Never Ceded: Kootzaduka’a Dispossessed of Their Land, 1860–1900
4. Indian Land Allotments in the Mono Lake Basin, 1902–1929
Part II: Cchanges to Water
5. Water, Power, and Fraud: Hydroelectric Power and Environmental Change, 1893–1923
6. Watersheds Manufactured: Environmental Change, 1924–1984
Part III: From Ecological Crisis to Restoration
7. Trout and the Public Trust: Sinews of Environmental Recovery and Restoration, 1984–2025
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Robert B. Marks is Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies at Whittier College. A resident of the Mono Lake Basin, he is author of The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century.
Review :
"Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin is a meticulous, fascinating natural history text about an extraordinary California lake region."
"Deep Time is a focused look at how both human decisions and nature can shape a singular ecosystem."
