Owens Valley - An Environmental Irony

California's Owens Valley sits as a largely untrammeled outdoor paradise close by the towering eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Several smallish towns dot Highway 395 as it makes its way up the valley, providing gateways into the unspoiled Eastern Sierra back country and the Bristlecone Pine forest of the White Mountains. Yet other than these few slumbering bergs -- Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine and Bishop, as one heads north -- the larger part of the Owens Valley looks much as it did five-hundred years ago.

The valley is home to dozens of fauna species, including the largest herd of endemic tule elk in the state, as well as dozens of endemic species of flora. As a transition zone between the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, the valley floor and the foothills of the Sierra, Inyo and White Mountains provide an amazing diversity of life not often found in such a harsh desert environment.

It's ironic, then, that had the City of Los Angeles not stolen the valley's water near the beginning of the last century -- an act thought of at the time as an unmitigated environmental and economic catastrophe -- the Owens Valley today might look a lot like Van Nuys. And sorry, Van Nuys, I don't mean that in a complementary way.

When he took over the L.A. City Water Department, William Mulholland saw that the key to continuing economic prosperity was water. With no reliable supply of water, the city's growth had become stunted. A man by the name of Fred Eaton thought he had the answer. During a family outing to the Sierras in 1904 he had travelled the length of the Owens Valley. The valley's major river, the Owens, tracked south through the valley towards Southern California before coming to an end at Owens Lake. He believed a canal could be built to bring that water to the San Fernando Valley, and would provide the answer to Mulholland's conundrum.

Just one little problem: the good people of the Owens Valley thought they had an agreement with the Federal Reclamation Service to build a project in their valley for their benefit. The project would transform the Owens into a verdant paradise of agriculture, commerce and economic prosperity. As he travelled through the area, buying any water rights along the valley floor not already belonging to the Reclamation Service, the citizens of the valley had no inkling Eaton planned all along to then sell those rights to the city of Los Angeles rather than Reclamation for use in the local project.

Construction on the Los Angeles Aqueduct began in 1908, and by 1913 the sweet water of the Owens River began to quench the thirst of the people of L.A. During the ensuing years the city purchased additional water rights in Long Valley north of Bishop and in the Mono Lake area, thereby in effect monopolizing water development in the Eastern Sierra.

And there sat the Owens Valley, all these years. With little water for local development or agriculture, the valley has largely remained as it was when the aqueduct first flowed in 1913, albeit with a dead river bed through which flowed only sand. But no more. After years of litigation the city of Los Angeles is again beginning to allow water to flow through the entire length of the Owens to its end at land-locked Owens Lake. Fish have begun repopulating the revitalized lower sections of river, and stream side vegetation has begun to take hold, providing wildlife habitat for elk, deer, rabbits and quail.

So tonight I will raise a toast to old Fred Eaton and William Mulholland, the men who stole the Owens River. Without them, a drive to Bishop Creek would take me through a concrete jungle and not the sage-covered raw beauty of a valley saved from ultimate environmental destruction: the development of the commons. Saved by the pure happenstance of an environmental irony.