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 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.

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.

Reviews

"A fascinating dive deep into the environmental history of an ancient inland sea, this is a unique addition to Mono Lake's human story, revealing little-known local water battles that preceded today's threats from stream diversions by Los Angeles. Especially welcome is the history of the Kootzaduka'a, Mono Lake's native people, all too often erased in chronicles of the region."—David Carle, author of Introduction to Water in California

"Like a provocative and powerful Chinatown sequel, Robert Marks's bioregional 'big history' of the Mono Lake Basin is an ambitious, unflinching, and ultimately hopeful examination of the long-term relationship between people and nature in this ancient and arid setting. Far from being a story apart, Deep Time is, in fact, the story of the American West."—Sara Dant, author of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West

"In clear prose, anchored by his characteristically careful research, Marks tells a compelling and instructive tale of ten thousand years of interplay among land, water, plants, animals, and humans in and around Mono Lake. A big history of a small place—and exemplary environmental history."—J.R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World