Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin - Nature and History over the Last 10,000 Years

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 that 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.

Product details

• Authors: Marks Robert B.
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 24.04.2026
• EAN: 9780520428577
• ISBN: 978-0-520-42857-7
• No. of pages: 364
• Illustrations: 32 b-w figures, 2 tables
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Biology > Ecology; Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, California, HISTORY / Native American, SCIENCE / Natural History, NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / Lakes, Ponds & Swamps, The environment, Indigenous Peoples, History of the Americas, The Earth: Natural History General, The Earth: natural history: general interest, Indigenous peoples / Indigeneity, NATURE / Indigenous Stewardship