In this sweeping environmental history of the Mono Lake Basin, Robert B. Marks reveals a larger story of how human actions and natural forces shape the environment. He begins with the region’s Indigenous peoples, followed by the mid-nineteenth-centry arrival Euro-American settles and the dispossession of the Kootzaduka’a people. In the decades that followed, struggles for the control of water diverted nearly all freshwater out of the basin to Los Angeles, precipitating an ecological crisis by the 1970s. The responding environmental restoration movement has, for now, preserved the Mono Lake Basin. A dramatic hopeful history this book explores a beloved region to illuminate questions of water, power, and our relationship with the natural world that echo far beyond the American West.
A virtual presentation by Robert B. Marks, author and Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies, Whittier College, Whittier, California