Owens Lake: Repair as Planetary Reinvention

On May 27, 2001, another column of white-brown dust exploded from the surface of Owens Lake, filling the Owens Valley with a milky, choking haze. Residents described the storm’s “biblical” proportions: visibility dropped to just a few feet, operations at the China Lake Naval Air Station were suspended, and household pets reportedly behaved erratically.1 At Dirty Socks monitoring site, on the southeastern shore, sensors recorded PM10 levels at 20,750 micrograms per cubic meter—over 130 times the legal limit, and the highest concentration ever recorded in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s database. The storm’s dust travelled hundreds of miles away, coating cars with a tangible microscopic film throughout San Diego.2

This was not a natural disaster. It was the atmospheric consequence of an existential infrastructure. Nearly a century earlier, in 1913, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) completed the first leg of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, diverting the Owens River and initiating the slow death of Owens Lake, known as Patsiata by the indigenous Paiute. Once a vibrant saline lake, critical habitat for migratory birds and food supply for indigenous communities, it has been desiccated by a city’s thirst. In the twenty years it took for the hundred-square-mile lake to be dried, Los Angeles quadrupled in population.3 By mid-century, the dry lakebed had become North America’s largest single source of dust pollution. It became a sacrifice zone, its value extracted and exported in service of urban growth.

But the lake did not disappear; it transformed. The dust that rose from its surface was a reminder that landscapes, even when stripped of water or value, continue to act. Owens Lake is not only the victim of a water grab—it is a crystallization of a planetary condition, one in which the metabolism of cities reorders distant ecosystems, disaggregating them into commodities and redistributing their ecological consequences far beyond their borders.

The Making of a Ghost Landscape

The story of Owens Lake illustrates the violence that commodification can wreak upon landscapes. When water was redirected from a landscape into economic units—measured in acre-feet and redirected through engineered channels—everything unaccounted for in that abstraction was stripped away and forgotten. 

Lakes are the most elemental of landscapes. With the loss of the lake’s water came its disassembly: its cultural significance, ecological function, scenic value, and political agency, for a time. In those days, this seemed inevitable; it was easy to dismiss feeding a terminal lake with freshwater. The accumulated minerals in the lakebed “spoil” the water, rendering its most precious asset useless to modern economies. That pressure remains. Even though we now know terminal lakes (also called saline lakes) to be one of the most ecologically productive landscapes in the world,  they are universally threatened by extraction.4

Water’s absence left a vast, unsettled terrain and strange legibility. No line declared its disappearance—as a terminal lake, it had innumerable shores—but its “fluffy” spring blooms of salt, clay, and silt were highly susceptible to the valley’s spring winds. Together these produced visible particulate matter, and in so doing, made itself known again; a ghost landscape, defined by vast, but intermittent, atmospheric effects. The first official complaint was by the adjacent Naval base that had situated itself for the region’s emptiness and miles long visibility5. Even after daring dust storm flights pinpointed the calamity to the dried lake, it was difficult to believe that anyone could be blamed; how could a phenomenon of this scale be anthropogenic?6

Imaginative Regulation

The reemergence of Owens Lake into the political sphere was not driven by ecological remorse, but by reimagined legal mandates. In the 1990s, after the Los Angeles aqueduct’s second expansion tied the whole system to contemporary environmental regulations, two legal doctrines—both revived and expanded—intervened on the lake. The first was the federal 1970 Clean Air Act, which defined air pollution as a public health violation even in sparsely populated areas. By a specific act of congress, the lakebed’s emissions were identified as anthropogenic; Owens Lake was effectively confirmed to be the LA Aqueduct’s “smokestack.” The local Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District used this framework to hold LA accountable. The city’s water diversion was out of compliance; it was unlawfully producing toxic air.

The second was the Public Trust Doctrine, notably expanded by the 1983 Mono Lake decision, which allowed courts to protect ecological and scenic values over consumptive water rights. Originally Roman in origin and focused on navigable water as a common economic right, the doctrine gained teeth in California as a legal tool for environmental repair. It argued that certain navigable landscapes, like Owens Lake (which once had steamships carrying silver across it) have other public landscape values worth preserving—even if they no longer fulfill the original economic functions. At the Owens Lake initially, this was only a guardrail against measures antithetical to a lake, like solar panels or trash dumping.

Together, these frameworks forced LADWP to act, and in a certain way. While initially explored, refilling the lake to its historic shoreline would not only remove Los Angeles’s primary water supply, but it would take too long to solve the dust problem; it would be nearly a decade before the lake would be refilled. Instead, the goal was a rapid mitigation without full reversal: fixing the dust without injuring the landscape even more.

Just Add Water

Beginning in 2001, LADWP launched an extensive dust mitigation program. Hemmed in by deadlines it had long delayed, the agency began pouring water into thin sheets in areas enclosed by berms—an expedient practice called “shallow flooding.” Discovered by accident when a frozen pipe broke, it was known to work well and the LADWP had more water in hand than cash. It did not run afoul of the Public Trust Doctrine, and was even celebrated for being at least lake-like. Still, it came to nearly everyone’s surprise when this thin application of water practically resurrected the lake. The endemic animals in terminal lakes are adapted to their desiccation. A keystone species of saline lakes is brine shrimp, popularly known as “Sea Monkeys,” a mail order pet, whose cysts can survive for decades, requiring one to “Just Add Water!” Flocks of migratory birds returned to gorge on them. Then came politically active birdwatchers. In some parts, vegetation took hold. From above, the landscape looked like a disordered grid. On the ground, it began to resemble something like a lake, albeit one you could drive on. Modern day Public Trust Doctrine enshrined the new habitat for perpetuity.7 

What emerged was a landscape without precedent: a hybrid entity combining infrastructure, ecology, accident, and art. There was never a master plan. The site evolved through iterative bureaucratic decisions, foresightedness, litigation, and regulatory thresholds. I describe it as a “Ouija board” landscape; a design unconsciously led by multiple agents (technological, institutional, and ecological) who push and pull at meaning and form, with no single author in control. Designs emerged from unforgiving atmospheric data, legal deadlines, and environmental thresholds. This pushed the design beyond any single entity’s control or imagination.

Planetary Scales, Sensorium, and Reinvention

While its jarring geometry is a popular photographic subject for astronauts, the scale of Owens Lake is made planetary not merely by being gargantuan in size, but also by the breadth of systems and scales it activates. Dust traveled across counties, interfered with Naval missile testing, triggering regional and federal intervention. Simultaneously, it was a problem of microscopic proportion, embedding in our lung’s tiniest pores. Its governance required cooperation across jurisdictions, agencies, and disciplines. It became an early experiment in an urban center being called to answer for environmental effects far outside its city limits, for infractions well before any environmental laws. It speaks for the power of even the most remote landscape to entangle us with diverse planetary scales and temporalities. 

To operate at these diverse scales requires an advanced sensorium, one that can penetrate and encompass planetary systems and scales, over time. The managers of Owens Lake have, by necessity, developed a heterogeneous and hybrid instrumentation, making it a radical case study for how entities sense and navigate planetary systems to novel outcomes. Its redesign and ongoing management are mediated by a clever mixture of satellite imagery, remote sensors, GIS models, and field observations. A test for soil moisture (mud) calibrates a human foot tap with a USGS satellite pixel. Hybrid measurements of dust, birds, and scenery steer design into unprecedented territory and guide the lake’s day-to-day machinery. Even so, the instrumentation can never provide a clear picture; the view is highly selective and slow; actions register weeks after they are implemented. A manager of the project described his role as steering a super tanker while half blindfolded. Steering novel planetary systems will require even more advanced and imaginative instrumentation.

Imbricated within Owens Lake instrumentation is a surprising body aesthetic. Here is a lesson for how landscape experience drives outcomes even in remote infrastructural landscapes. Birdwatchers, fueled by the aesthetic pleasures of their craft, created critical datasets; air pollution engineers initially tracked dust using triangulated plein air drawings; the layout of the cells was partially dictated by tracing dust scars with GPS-equipped ATVs. The sensorial architecture of the deep valley was instrumental in identifying the dust; now the criss-crossing roads of the dust control measures makes the lake and its inhabitants easy to observe and diagram—to be seen, admired and cared for. This alloy of subjective and objective observations, influenced by landscape and bodily architecture, exerts a powerful and unacknowledged force upon planetary landscapes.

While successful in many ways, Owens Lake is also a case study for the foibles of planetary repair. It represents the asymmetry between extraction and repair—between the speed of environmental destruction and the complexity of its mitigation. Yet, through great effort, the lake was not repaired or restored, but rather reinvented. Today, Owens Lake is somewhere between a lake and a specialized farm that produces lake values. In seeking only dust control, the LADWP accidentally created habitat and spectacle—but only under continual inputs of labor, water, and funding. Its legal status is provisional, contingent on LADWP’s ongoing compliance with federal air quality standards. Its ecology is conditional. Its beauty is accidental. 

The lake’s triumphant, lake-like habitat repair raises questions for the reinvention and management of planetary scale ecologies. Instead of restoring the lake’s monolithic shape, the dust control measures split it up into innumerable cells, each with differing habitat conditions, miniature shoreline, and management. The sum of these features is likely advantageous to many creatures and may make the current lake equally or even more productive than its legacy shape.8 But these are fixed in an uneasy position between regulatory and representational frameworks and scales. The habitat must be maintained in perpetuity at a habitat high “water” mark, dictated by a habitat model. The LADWP now seeks the most water-efficient way to fulfill the model or reprogram it. Meanwhile, the habitat is mandated to stay fixed at its “high water” mark—a laudable but unnaturally static position for most ecologies.

The Future of Planetary Landscape Repair?

How might we be more intentional in designing planetary landscapes that, until now, have been more emergent than deliberate? As a landscape architect, I have explored how we might enact more holistic designs—ones that combine engineering and operational concerns with ecological and aesthetic understanding. Rather than designing the landscape itself, our role is to enable a dialogue among systems and valuations: ecological processes, regulatory frameworks, and the forms of representation that shape what we see and value.

My laboratory contributed to this effort through an interactive design interface—a kind of design game—that allows experts and stakeholders to test interventions on a simulated lakebed. Presented in The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles and at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the work reframes Owens Lake not as a problem to be solved but as a site of solution navigation, where ecological, political, and aesthetic values must be discerned and calibrated. Visitor-users are awakened to their own agency as planetary actors, traversing a spectrum of designs generated by the system’s multi-dimensional models.9

In the context of larger planetary efforts, landscape repair projects, like the Owens Lake, complicate dominant conservation paradigms. Global initiatives such as 30x30 aim to preserve intact “functional” landscapes, yet bypass the terrains inextricably damaged by civilization—the very geographies that define our planetary impact and self-made existential threats. Landscapes once considered peripheral and expendable—threatened terminal lakes like the Salton Sea or the Aral Sea, or territories mined in the Amazon—are disturbing large territories and demand we address their environmental hazards to maintain public safety and preserve a planetary future.10 Owens Lake shows us that the outcome of these repairs will exceed both paradigms of remediation and restoration.

To address them, we need a planetary project of repair and stewardship: one that treats damage not as failure, but as the starting point of design and care. As climate change accelerates ecosystem migration, coastal retreat, and hydrological redistribution, we will need more than preserves and buffers; the crisis demands new holistic instruments and design practices. Repairs on systems long departed from historic baselines, and already in motion, will inevitably produce something new. Planetary repair, then, must be understood as the deliberate creation of hybrid landscapes—what land-artist Robert Smithson presaged with his proposals on extraction sites and appreciation of modern “ruins.”11 It asks not only for a new appetite for reinvention but for political hybrids of sensing and attachment.

Owens Lake offers a rare precedent for how these politics and instruments might align. With an identifiable culprit—the Los Angeles Aqueduct—it presented a path for legal and infrastructural redress. Its transformation exposes the mechanisms, collaborations, and contradictions of large-scale repair when accountability, regulation, and public attention coincide. At Owens Lake, we see a precarious but hopeful bargain between planetary rivals: urban extraction and legacy landscapes, fashioned by an imaginative legal redress. The LADWP continues to draw water from its aqueduct while making amends with the lake it once sacrificed. Here, we might say, we have our lake-like lake and drink it, too. While in too many ways this was a lucky break, it does a service to presage how we might grasp the reins of planetary repair.