Throughout its history, the Lake has also served as an important way station for migrating birds. When the naturalist Joseph Grinnel visited Owens Lake in 1917, he saw "large flocks of shorebirds in sight over the water in the distance, wheeling about . . . now silvery, now dark, against the gray-blue of the water," estimating that "there must literally be thousands of birds within sight of this spot" (Grinnel, 1917).
Such abundance was short-lived. After Los Angeles began diverting water from Owens Valley's rivers and streams in 1913, the lake's water levels—which had been fed by those same waters—dropped precipitously, as did the number of migratory birds. By 1927, Owens Lake was mostly dead. Drained of water, the lakebed's salt-rich dust was easily carried off by the valley's frequent windstorms, obscuring the mountains, coating homes and cars, and creating severe health problems for those who inhaled it (Piper, 2006). By 1990, the lake had become the largest source of toxic PM-10 pollution in the United States (Reheis, 1997) (Figure 3).
Responsibility for remedying the situation fell to California's Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District (GBUAPCD), which is the state agency charged with administering the Clean Air Act for the Inyo and Mono Basins, including Owens Valley. In 1983, GBUAPCD identified the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) as the party solely responsible for managing the dust pollution on Owens Lake.
What followed was more than three decades of disputes over fees imposed by GBUAPCD against LADWP for failure to comply with orders to control dust emissions. Owens Lake quickly became, as one long-time resident quipped, "a full employment source for attorneys." After more than three decades of wrangling with GBUPACD, Los Angeles had spent more than a billion dollars in fees and on remediation efforts (Siegler, 2013). And because water was the fastest and most effective way to mitigate dust, the city had used billions of gallons of water every year to tamp down the dust on Owens Lake (Sahagun, 2013).
That all changed in 2014: GBUAPCD and Los Angeles finally agreed to settle their disputes over GBUAPCD's regulatory authority, and GBUAPCD agreed to allow Los Angeles to implement new methods of dust control that did not require it to flood the lake. According to some observers, this agreement delivered a long-awaited armistice. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared the settlement to be a "significant win for ratepayers and our environment in both Los Angeles and the Owens Valley" (Little, 2014). But others saw the agreement as just one more milestone in what continued to be a battle for control over the Owens Valley and its water. As they pointed out, and as ensuing events would soon make clear, there still remained many unanswered questions about how, exactly, Los Angeles would fulfill its promise to remedy the harm done to the lake and its surroundings (Owens Valley Committee, 2015). For the lake in 2014 was not the same lake that it was in the 1980s when dust storms raged, or that it was in 1900 before Los Angeles began exporting water from the Valley. Which lake, if any of these, would be restored?
For the past six years, stakeholders have been actively engaged in efforts to work through that question. This article, which tracks efforts to do so between 2015 and 2019, emerges from a broader research project that sought to analyze the configuration of law, environment, and governance in the Owens Valley. That project combined archival research of legal and historical documents with participant observation and semistructured interviews with Owens Valley residents and visitors, tribal members and officers living and working on reservations in the valley, and local, state, and government officials, including members of the Inyo County Council and representatives of state and federal regulatory agencies. Between May 2015 and August 2016, I lived in Independence, which is the county seat and the approximate geographical halfway point between the most populous areas of Inyo County. My immersion in everyday experiences and participation in communal life provided important context for the project, offering a sense of place derived not through platitudes about the "other" America, rural counties, or the western United States, but rather through my own embodied experiences (see Casey, 1993; Lee & Ingold, 2006).
In subsequent years, I have traveled to the Valley for a few days or a week at a time, and have continued to follow Owens Lake stakeholder meetings via videoconference. In what follows, I foreground the scaling processes by which stakeholders and others have constructed, contested, and effectuated the baseline, demonstrating that even a "technicality" such as the baseline is not an objective, consistent norm but rather a cultural construct that both produces and is produced by conceptions of how the world is and how it ought to be (Ureta et al., 2020).
4 SCALING THE LAKE
In Owens Valley, where overlapping local, state, and federal entities vie for control over land and resources, scale frames enable those entities to identify, construct, and also to resist becoming subjects of legal regulation. Part of the work of governing and being governed in the Valley has been learning to frame scale and to tie particular scales to particular outcomes. Of course, not all scales make the same kind of difference. Consider Braverman's (2020) research into scientists' efforts to manage and restore coral reefs. As she explains with regard to these efforts, research and conservation science are not driven by perceptions of deterioration and sustenance, but instead by whether and how scientists embed those observations in conceptions of either static or dynamic systems. Variable scalar emphases are even more pronounced in times of ecological crisis, as demonstrated by Chloe Ahmann's (2018) study of a protracted debate concerning a trash incinerator in the highly polluted neighborhood of Curtis Bay, Maryland. Although noting that discussions about permitting—about who bears the burden of pollution and where—often mobilize spatial scales, Ahmann depicts a dispute shaped almost entirely by temporal sensibilities about when harms happen and how quickly their effects might be felt. Those temporal rhythms and sensibilities become even more pronounced in cases like the one described in Petryna's (2018) study of wildfire management, where scientists must constantly strive to apprehend and forestall ecological destruction by transforming the unknown future into known and actionable data.
As in these other contexts, stakeholders on Owens Lake manifest an awareness of both spatial and temporal scales, but they evince a disproportionate emphasis on one or the other. My efforts to track those scale frames necessarily begins with efforts to scale Owens Lake. Although I have been referring here to "the lake," it is worth noting that this nomenclature was not universally embraced. For many residents of Owens Valley, the site I call Owens Lake indeed remained a lake, which they referred to as a single unified feature. There were, for example, descriptions of "the dust storms that covered the lake," references to the "steamboats that once crossed the lake," and annual bird watching tours advertised as taking place "on the lake."
LADWP and members of working groups that met to discuss the lake also discursively assembled the lake into a composite whole, especially when there was a need to demarcate boundaries of responsibility, which generally mapped onto the lake's physical boundaries. For instance, during a driving tour of Owens Lake with other residents and Inyo County Supervisors, our guide—an LADWP manager—abruptly stopped our van. Pointing to a group of large sand dunes in the distance, he described the area as "the Serengeti"—a reference to the African ecosystem renowned for its game reserves. The manager explained that this was a nickname he had given to the area because, like the Serengeti, that area of the Owens Lake, too, remained untouched: LADWP did not have to control the dust emitted from those dunes because they lay beyond the lake's borders. Delineating "the lake" from the "not-lake" was crucial, he explained, because, "We touch it, we own it. And then we'd also have to put in access roads."
Yet within the working groups, I rarely heard references to "the lake." Instead, people spoke of localized "DCAs"—shorthand for Dust Control Areas—which were portions of the lake variously segregated by region and experimental dust control procedures (Figure 3)
By subdividing the lake into DCAs, LADWP could stagger its mitigation efforts, bringing each DCA into regulatory compliance in phases, while also experimenting with different means of controlling the dust in smaller areas. In some sections, there were massive gravel pits; in others, there were red-tinged brine pools, furrowed ground, or long grasses whose roots presumably would hold the soil down. Large trucks, heavy equipment, and men in bright orange vests and hard hats fanned out across all of these areas. Although the area was still designated on maps as Owens Lake, it looked to me, and to many of those living in the Owens Valley, like a massive industrial construction site (Figure 4).
LADWP also built mud berms that defined each DCA, and driving around the lake for the first time in 2015, I was surprised to come across several large wooden cows standing atop signs that read, "Sacred cow. Keep off berm." Later I was told that the signs were an inside joke among LADWP workers. Although the punchline of that joke still eludes me, I came to see those oddly humorous cows as a significant signpost for my own research, reminding me to also mind the berm—which I took to mean attending to the myriad ways in which even a large geographic feature such as a lake could be deconstructed into smaller locales.
Moving away from "topographic views" of the lake generates more "relational thinking" about the dynamic interactions that compose and sustain the Lake (Blomley, 2016, p. 2). Yet little attention was paid to relations between DCAs by those working on the lake. Some DCAs remained actively in focus, while others were almost entirely ignored except when mentioned as "future" projects—a temporal segregation reflecting stages of planned compliance with dust control requirements. Nor was much attention given to how the DCAs related to each other, or how water, dust, and habitat might integrate and intersect between them. I came to realize that "minding the berm" was much more than a physical directive; it also represented a distinct way of thinking about the lake. Where once there was a topography, an ecosystem, and a water source, there now were industrialized DCAs, which stood temporally and spatially distinct from one another. As consultants hired by LADWP to advise on remediation plans suggested, this disaggregation presented significant challenges with respect to managing a habitat "that is more than the sum of its parts" (Roberts et al., 2016, p. 68).
5 SCALING THE BASELINE
That tension between part and whole manifested even more clearly in efforts to establish a baseline for the lake. This section examines those efforts in more detail, focusing closely on attempts to situate the lake within specific framings of space and time and especially on how such framings worked together to generate a norm against which future change might be assessed and (dis)approved. The first two framings—stasis and variability—emphasize contrasting approaches to characterizing the spatiotemporal "reality" of the lake as either a place fixed in space and time or as a chaotic and ever-changing system. The third, futurology, examines how predictions were justified or challenged through efforts to scale past, present, and future in relation to one another. In all three cases, the baseline emerges as a scalar construct, making clear that this important legal benchmark is only as normative as the norms brought to bear on it.
5.1 Stasis
In effectuating a critical analysis of Environmental Impact Assessments, Barandiarán (2020, pp. 1–2) observed that generating baselines for the purpose of evaluating industrial projects and other interventions with environmental consequences is "like taking a photograph," because baselines necessarily compress the present into the past and normalize already-deteriorated conditions as those to be sustained. On Owens Lake, that sort of freeze-frame is not only felt, but also explicitly built into the regulatory law overshadowing the entire process: CEQA.