Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Char Miller

Reader 2

Heather Williams

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© 2025 Fiona M Herbold

Abstract

Mono Lake is a salt lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada, known across California for its distinctive beauty and ecology. It hosts a unique food web with a base of endemic brine shrimp and flies that support large populations of migratory birds who depend on the lake as a stopover site and breeding ground. In 1941, however, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began diverting the flows of Mono Lake’s tributary streams into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, threatening the ecological balance. Over the next few decades, the lake dropped more than forty feet, causing salinity to increase, food webs to collapse, and exposed lakebed to create dust storms that were hazardous to human health. By the 1970s, scientists, environmental advocates, and local residents recognized that without intervention, Mono Lake faced ecological collapse. Extensive scientific research began in 1976. In 1979, the Mono Lake Committee was founded to create a coalition of advocates, and the National Audubon Society represented Mono Lake in a lawsuit against LADWP which culminated in the 1983 decision that recognized the applicability of the Public Trust Doctrine to Mono Lake. This doctrine offered legal protections to the lake, although it would take another decade to put this protection into action and get LADWP to slow diversions. The movement to save Mono Lake took on activist and legal forms, gaining national and even international attention. This thesis seeks to understand the mechanisms behind its success in these spaces, investigating specifically how ecological science was wielded.

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