Posted 01.24.11 | PERMALINK | PRINT Essay: Karen Piper Dreams, Dust and Birds: The Trashing of Owens Lake Construction of the Jawbone siphon of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1912. [courtesy of the Joseph Barlow Lippincott collection, UC Berkeley Water Resources Center Archives] Manufacturing Dust The dry bed of what was once Owens Lake contains the detritus of Los Angeles’s fantasies. Starting in 1913, the City of Los Angeles, which historian Kevin Starr has called “the most exquisite invented garden in history,” gradually drained the enormous lake, located two hundred miles to the north of the city. [1] It was a monumental act of engineering: an aqueduct was constructed and then, like a garden hose that was picked up and moved, the Owens River was shifted, so that instead of watering Owens Lake it was watering Los Angeles. In this way the Owens River also began to supply an emerging area called “Hollywoodland,” its water used to create, in the arid landscape of Southern California, a version of the English Lake District. The river fed by the lake supplied 100 percent of Los Angeles’s water, and as a result the 110-square-mile lake gradually dried up and became a howling wasteland of toxic dust. The farmers of Owens Valley fought tenaciously to keep their lake and their river, even resorting to dynamiting the aqueduct (a drama depicted in Chinatown). But they lost. I grew up near Owens Lake, and I breathed in its dust for close to 20 years. I remember that the experience of walking on the lakebed felt like walking on the moon, with its white crusty surface pocked by shadowy craters and peaks of crumbling crystallized salt. Unfortunately, this dust is not the kind that you can simply breathe out. It has been shown to embed itself in the lungs for life, and it is carcinogenic. In 1987 the Environmental Protection Agency declared Owens lakebed to be the worst dust pollution problem in the United States, affecting around 50,000 people. By then the dangers of this kind of fine dust were well known. But it's a complicated story, of course, and to those of us who have followed it — lived it — the decision about whom to help and whom to hurt had already been made, decades ago. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt decided that the waters of Owens River should go to Los Angeles because the city was where it would do the “greatest good for the greatest number.” “This water is more valuable to the people as a whole,” he said, “if used by the city than if used by the people of the Owens Valley.” [2] Over the decades the people of the Owens Valley came to understand that the “people as a whole” did not include us. So when in the late '80s the EPA mandated that the City of Los Angeles fix the problem of the Owens Valley, and do so within ten years, this came as a surprise. But the ensuing events suggest that the kind of engineering ingenuity that had once made it possible to move the waters was unavailable decades later for the equally large-scale job of.

1. Posted 01.24.11 | PERMALINK | PRINT
Essay: Karen Piper
Dreams, Dust and Birds: The Trashing of Owens Lake
Construction of the Jawbone siphon of the Los Angeles
Aqueduct, 1912. [courtesy of the Joseph Barlow Lippincott
collection, UC Berkeley Water Resources Center Archives]
Manufacturing Dust
The dry bed of what was once Owens Lake contains the detritus
of Los Angeles’s fantasies. Starting in 1913, the City of Los
Angeles, which historian Kevin Starr has called “the most
exquisite invented garden in history,” gradually drained the
enormous lake, located two hundred miles to the north of the
city. [1] It was a monumental act of engineering: an aqueduct
was constructed and then, like a garden hose that was picked up
and moved, the Owens River was shifted, so that instead of
watering Owens Lake it was watering Los Angeles. In this way
the Owens River also began to supply an emerging area called
“Hollywoodland,” its water used to create, in the arid landscape
of Southern California, a version of the English Lake District.
The river fed by the lake supplied 100 percent of Los Angeles’s
water, and as a result the 110-square-mile lake gradually dried
up and became a howling wasteland of toxic dust. The farmers
of Owens Valley fought tenaciously to keep their lake and their
river, even resorting to dynamiting the aqueduct (a drama
depicted in Chinatown). But they lost.
I grew up near Owens Lake, and I breathed in its dust for close
to 20 years. I remember that the experience of walking on the
lakebed felt like walking on the moon, with its white crusty
surface pocked by shadowy craters and peaks of crumbling
crystallized salt. Unfortunately, this dust is not the kind that

2. you can simply breathe out. It has been shown to embed itself in
the lungs for life, and it is carcinogenic. In 1987 the
Environmental Protection Agency declared Owens lakebed to be
the worst dust pollution problem in the United States, affecting
around 50,000 people. By then the dangers of this kind of fine
dust were well known. But it's a complicated story, of course,
and to those of us who have followed it — lived it — the
decision about whom to help and whom to hurt had already been
made, decades ago. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt
decided that the waters of Owens River should go to Los
Angeles because the city was where it would do the “greatest
good for the greatest number.” “This water is more valuable to
the people as a whole,” he said, “if used by the city than if used
by the people of the Owens Valley.” [2] Over the decades the
people of the Owens Valley came to understand that the “people
as a whole” did not include us.
So when in the late '80s the EPA mandated that the City of Los
Angeles fix the problem of the Owens Valley, and do so within
ten years, this came as a surprise. But the ensuing events
suggest that the kind of engineering ingenuity that had once
made it possible to move the waters was unavailable decades
later for the equally large-scale job of remediating the damage
that had been done. To start with, the city fought against the
EPA ruling; it did not want to give back any water, and over
several years it proposed various methods to control the dust.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power suggested coating the
lakebed with sewage, or treated solid waste; it suggested
layering the lakebed with tires; it considered spraying chemicals
on its surface, and experimented with several, all of which were
found to increase rather than relieve the toxicity of the lakebed.
The DWP next offered to cover the lakebed with gravel, but this
was judged too expensive. Finally, a regional authority — the
Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District — decided to
force the City to return water to Owens Lake — to install a
sprinkler system, with the ultimate aim of seeding and irrigating

3. plots of salt grass. [3] By this time almost a decade had passed,
millions of dollars had been spent on false starts, and the people
around Owens Lake, realizing the dangers, had been steadily
leaving.
A sign in Keeler, California, reads, "This beautiful setting
provided by the L.A. Water Dept. Please wear your hazmat suits
at all times! Safe beach. Best dust!" [by Tom Hilton]
This is how it came to be that in 1998 time had run out for the
City of Los Angeles: it was now legally required to implement a
remediation plan or pay a penalty of $10,000 per day. Duly
focused, the city contracted with the engineering consulting
firm CH2M Hill to build the dust control project. The early
results were not promising. Never mind that CH2M Hill —
recipient of one of the no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq — has
been described by social activist Naomi Klein as a specialist in
“disaster profiteering.” [4] When the firm's earthmovers rolled
out onto Owens lakebed, they promptly got sucked into the
earth. Commenting on the progress of the project, a DWP
representative could only say: “This year, they’re just pulling
their equipment out of the mud.” [5] Eventually the company
needed to requisition trucks with special tires and to construct
elevated platforms to keep the trucks from getting stuck. Faulty
equipment was not the only problem. Salt from the newly
planted salt grass was clogging the plumbing and sprinklers of
the newly installed irrigation equipment, which caused crusts to
form on the lakebed surface, which in turn produced yet more
dust; and salt was being leached into the shallow water table,
which then rose and killed the salt grass. For Los Angeles,
Owens lakebed had become, literally and metaphorically, a
quagmire. Today the city remains responsible for ameliorating
the dust storms — an obligation that might push it into
bankruptcy.

4. Killing Birds
The last time I was home, I drove out onto the lakebed, which
by then had been gridded into sections that contained either
rows of drip-irrigated salt grass or “bubblers” that sprayed
water onto the surface. Raised gravel roads criss-crossed these
sections — called “T-cells,” as if to signify that they were
fighting to restore the lake’s health — and massive trucks were
going to and fro. It was as if a city were being built. None of
the truckers minded me, a woman in a white Kia, taking
photographs, and they were grateful I got out of their way on
the narrow gravel roads. It was then, at each stop, that I began
to notice what had become, along with the dust, another big
problem: the return of the birds.
The water wars of Southern California are well documented.
Less well known is the story of the birds — the birds which
once inhabited Owens Lake by the millions, and which lost their
habitat when the lake was drained over the decades. On
September 24, 1917, a visiting zoologist, Joseph Grinnell, wrote
in his field notes, “Great numbers of water birds are in sight
along the lake shore — avocets, phalaropes, ducks. Large flocks
of shorebirds in flight over the water in the distance . . . now
silvery now dark, against the gray-blue of the water. There must
be literally thousands of birds within sight of this one spot.” [6]
Of all that I've seen at Owens Lake, the return of the birds —
and they are returning in droves to this place on the Pacific
flyway — has been the most surreal. For me the birds seemed to
belong to a mythological past, to the era when steamboats plied
the lake, delivering silver from the mines in the Sierras to the
factories of Los Angeles. I got out to photograph birds in
shallow pools all over the lake — beautiful American avocets,
with their red bodies and black bills, and shy snowy plovers,
which nest riskily on the sides of roads.

5. Halobacteria tints the salt crust of a dust control pond on the
Owens Lake playa. [by Barry Lehrman]
The problem for the birds is that they might actually use the
new water sources that are once again attracting them to the
lake. As I went deeper onto the lakebed, I began to notice that
some of the water was green, and some red, and some blue or
transparent. I knew that the red was evidence of algae, though I
was unsure what the other colors indicated. To prevent water
from pooling to the lakebed center, the contractors had built a
network of mud berms that separated the sections and caused
each to have a different mineral content and thus a different
color. For the birds these colorful pools are like the pink and
blue pills from Alice in Wonderland — they might make you
strong or they might make you die. In 2003, twenty gulls were
found dead on the lakebed, diagnosed with “elevated brain
sodium.” Other birds showed “elevated mercury, selenium,
cadmium, or other metals relative to screening levels.” The Air
Pollution Control District also found elevated levels of arsenic,
boron and barium in the water, as well as barium, lead and
mercury in snowy plover and avocet eggs. And more: while
hundreds of gulls have nested on the lakebed, all of the chicks
but one have been killed by predatory birds. [7] The story of the
dying birds became particularly poignant when the Audubon
Society declared Owens Lake one of the 17 most important
avian sanctuaries in California, and a “globally important
wetland in the making.” [8] Birdwatchers were invited to the
lake to count birds, and in one day counted 112 bird species and
46,000 birds.
For the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the
problem of these birds is that they exist at all. The birds of
Owens lakebed are protected by the North American Migratory
Birds Treaty Act, which makes it illegal to disturb their nesting
sites. The DWP has been fighting to turn off the water to the

6. lakebed every year, from July, when the dust season ends, to
October. But July also happens to be snowy plover nesting
season, and without water the chicks would die. [9] As a
compromise, the DWP has agreed to maintain 1,000 acres in
perpetuity for shorebirds — this despite the fact that the snowy
plover habitat is estimated to be 46,932 acres. [10] To add to
the regulatory pressure, the state has mandated that the city
maintain a baseline level of plovers — specifically 272 adult
plovers. So I think: what about those birds that happen to land
in the wrong place, on any of those extra 45,932 acres? What
happens to bird #273?
Alkali flats in the Owens Valley. [with permission from
Shutterfly]
As I drove deeper onto the lake in my white Kia, I decided to
try to find an area near the center, where the Los Angeles DWP
performs “experiments” with dust control — its own little Area
51. This site — officially, Area A1-4 — is difficult to find,
almost as if hiding from the criticism it knows it will provoke.
Here is where the DWP tinkers, looking for ways to control the
dust without water and thus to stop the treaty-protected birds
from returning. The DWP’s latest experiment, called “Moat &
Row,” consists of tall plastic-mesh “sand fences” planted next
to trough-like “moats": the idea is that the fences would capture
blowing sand that would then settle in the moats.
Of course, this raised the question of what to do with the sand
that collected in the moats and fences. The DWP claimed that it
would “remove sand from the moats and place it in the dump
trucks, which would then transport the material and place it in a
shallow flood pond,” and then, apparently, hope that it would
sink to the bottom. But if, the report continued, “the depth of
the pond is too shallow to allow the dumping of sand, then the

7. sand would be spread throughout the pond to the extent
necessary to maintain a water layer over the sand.” To deal with
the sand along the fences, the DWP claimed, “Sand built up
against the fence would be removed using an excavator, dump
trucks, and pick-up trucks supported by a bulldozer to extricate
equipment stuck in the mud and a water truck to control fugitive
dust emissions.” [11] "Moat & Row" sounded, in short,
expensive. Nevertheless, I was excited about the prospect,
perhaps only because of the treasure hunt involved in finding it.
So I was disappointed to arrive at the center of the lakebed and
discover that “Moat & Row” was being torn down, apparently a
failure. As it turned out, the fences were providing good
perches for predators, like hawks, to swoop in and eat bird eggs;
and besides, there was the potential for “entrapment within
moats” of the snowy plover. [12]
Top: Owens Lake and the Sierra Nevada. [by Satoshi
Nakagawa] Bottom left: Moat and Row dust control at Owens
Lake. [by Karen Piper] Bottom right: The author's white Kia.
[by Karen Piper]
Fantasizing Solar
Shortly after my visit to the lakebed, I heard that the City of
Los Angeles had already started on its next “experiment”: solar
panels. The DWP director, David Freeman, had decided that
rather than "waste" good city water in dust control, the agency
would install solar panels on the lakebed. [13] “So you’d have a
double win," Freeman said. "You’d create solar power and
control the dust without wasting water.” The DWP Board of
Commissioners unanimously approved the pilot project, which
they predicted would eventually supply ten percent of the city’s
power. [14] What's more, they envisioned an enormous “Solar
Park” in the desert, covering 40 to 80 square miles, nearly the
entire lakebed. Everyone seemed behind the idea, and ABC

8. News announced: “Despite a serious drought, the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power has to pump fresh water into
the desert, because of a court settlement. Now the DWP is
looking for non-water alternatives to control the dust.” [15]
According to Jim McDaniel of the DWP, “There is nothing in
the agreement that would allow us to not meet our obligation in
a drought year. We have a legal obligation to control the
dust. . . . I could certainly think of . . . other things I’d rather be
doing with that water.” [16] The DWP allocated $500 million to
the solar panel project, as much as had already been spent on
the entire dust mitigation project. The agency also requested
that the State waive an environmental review, claiming that the
need for renewable energy was more important than the
remediation of the lakebed. [17]
Again, I was saddened that the birds of Owens lakebed might
have their water supply turned off for good. Secretly, I was
hoping that Mexico would sue in an international court of law.
But I also knew that Los Angeles likes to dream, and that its
engineering companies like to dream, and I knew that their
dreams often turn to dust at Owens Lake. As Richard Cervantes,
chairman of the Inyo County Board of Supervisors, once said,
“In my personal opinion, they’ll never build a massive array of
solar panels out there on the lake bed. It’s too expensive. Some
people say it would compare with the building of the pyramids
in ancient Egypt.” [18]
So it was not surprising that in July 2010 the press reported the
failure of the solar panel project: “Preliminary engineering tests
show that if solar panel platforms were placed at the southern
end of the nearly dry 110-square-mile Owens Lake, they would
sink as much as several inches into extremely corrosive soil.”
[19] And as they sank, it seemed, the salty sand would scrape
off the silicon surface of the panels. Thus the year-long $500-
million fantasy of a giant Solar Park collapsed as quickly as it
had been dreamed up . . . though ideas do have a way of re-

9. circulating on Owens lakebed, along with money and water.
Los Angeles Aqueduct at Owens Lake. [by Calwest via Flickr]
And so Owens lakebed, like a mini war zone, seems to exert an
endless capacity to absorb meaning and money. According to
the Los Angeles DWP, the cost of fixing the first 43 square
miles of dust was $540 million. [20] This does not include the
cost of maintenance, estimated at $17.5 million per year, or the
cost of water that the DWP must purchase from Northern
California or Arizona to replace the one-third of Owens River
now pumped onto the lake, which is about $24 million per year.
[21] And it does not cover the upcoming costs of mitigating
areas still not in compliance for dust control. The City has
already spent close to a billion dollars trying to stop the dust,
but it has still not stopped the dust, and Owens Valley has never
achieved the 24-hour dust-control standard mandated by the
federal Clean Air Act. [22]
And there is still the problem of birds, which, to the DWP,
means more dollars wasted.
When Owens Lake was drained, its diverted waters sparked a
sense of euphoria, a belief in the possibility of eternal growth,
an undaunted optimism in the future of Los Angeles. This same
water enabled the creation of the studio sets for countless
movies, from Singing in the Rain to The Poseidon Adventure.
Historically, the Department of Water and Power made so much
money from selling nearly free Owens River water that it
became a source of cash for the City of Los Angeles. Until
recently, the DWP has contributed more than $200 million per
year to the municipal budget from its profits. There is no clearer
link between water and money than the path from Owens Lake
to Los Angeles. Owens Lake made L.A. rich.

10. But in 2010, for the first time, the DWP threatened to withhold
its contribution unless the City Council would approve another
rate hike. (And this was after rates in Los Angeles had already
risen by 30 percent, largely due to the ill-fated dust control
plans.) Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa urged the City Council to
approve the rate hike, arguing that not to do so “would be the
most immediate and direct route to bankruptcy the city could
pursue.” [23] The City, it seems, cannot afford to survive
without a never-ending supply of seemingly free water. Los
Angeles once dreamed itself, and its wealth, its lawns and
gardens, its movies and studios, out of the waters of Owens
Lake. But ultimately Owens lakebed may suck the city into a
vortex of environmental catastrophe, and of endlessly expensive
remediation. It is yet to be seen whether the birds of Owens
Lake or the City of Los Angeles will win the battle for survival;
that is, for water. Perhaps the birds and the city can learn to co-
exist. Still, like a reckless Angeleno waking up after an all-
night party in Hollywood, the City now has to clean up in the
morning. And no one likes doing that.
Notes
1. Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through
the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 229.
2. Quoted in Remi A. Nadeau, The Water Seekers, 4th edition
(Santa Barbara: Crest Publishers, 1997), 43.
3. For an overview of the process of selecting control measures,
see Karen Piper, Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics
Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A. (New
York: Palgrave, 2006), 137-154.
4. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (New York, Picador: 2007), 502.
5. Quoted in Piper, Left in the Dust, 171.
6. Joseph Grinnell’s field notes are held at the Museum of

11. Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.
7. For a complete overview of toxicity on the lakebed, see
Kleinfelder East, Inc., Owens Lake Valley PM10 Planning Area:
Screening Ecological Risk Assessment of Proposed Dust
Control Measures, July 2007.
8. Michael McRae, “Owens River Reborn,” Via Magazine,
July/August, 2009.
9. See Sapphos Environmental, Inc., 2008 State Implementation
Plan Draft Subsequent Environmental Impact Report, September
16, 2007, 3.2-28. According to the State Environmental Impact
Review: “Snowy plover eggs or nestlings may be impacted by
the sudden drying of the Shallow Flooding areas and the
subsequent inability of adults to travel to water to cool eggs or
nestlings during extreme daytime temperatures, resulting in
failure of nests or loss of young nestlings.”
10. In 1997, prior to the installation of dust control measures
(DCMs), there were 16,161 acres of snowy plover habitat. The
construction and operation of Shallow Flooding DCMs required
as a result of the 1998 SIP and 2003 SIP has substantially
increased the western snowy plover habitat at Owens Lake to an
estimated 34,359 acres of snowy plover habitat. Implementation
of the 2008 SIP would result in an increase to approximately
46,932 acres. Sappho Environmental, Inc., 2008 Owens Valley
PM Planning Area Demonstration of Attainment State
Implementation Plan, Mitigation Monitoring Program, January
14, 2008, 3.2-19.
11. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Owens Lake
Habitat Management Plan, March 2010, 39-40.
12. California State Lands Commission, Owens Lake Revised
Moat and Row Dust Control Measures: Statement of Findings,
December 17, 2009, F-7.
13. “A New Solar Plan Rises from the Dust,” Marketplace,
American Public Media, March 10, 2010.
14. Phil Willon, “Owens Lake as Solar Power Plant?,” Los
Angeles Times, December 2, 2009.
15. “SoCal Waters the Desert During a Drought?,” KABC-TV,

12. Los Angeles, August 14, 2009.
16. Ibid., KABC-TV.
17. “A New Solar Plan Rises from the Dust,” Marketplace,
American Public Media, March 10, 2010.
18. Louis Sahagun and Phil Willon, “DWP Scales Back its
Owens Lake Solar Test,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2010.
19. Ibid.
20. See Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, 2008
Owens Valley PM10 Planning Area Demonstration of
Attainment State Implementation Plan, January 28, 2008, 7-13.
21. Although this sounds costly: “Recent analyses by the San
Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District estimate
the cost of controlling windblown dust at between $7,700 and
$65,000 per ton . . . Therefore, the cost of controlling PM10
emissions from the bed of Owens Lake is about 7 to 80 times
less, on a per ton basis, than the costs for control elsewhere in
California.” See Ibid, 7-14.
22. Ibid., 7-6.
23. “Bankruptcy Ahead?,” Los Angeles Daily News, February 8,
2010.
What is knowledge?
How do you identify knowledge when you see it?
Can knowledge be recorded or stored?
Do some people or organizations have more knowledge than
others?
How do organizations acquire knowledge?

13. Where does knowledge reside? Can it be stolen?
Can an individual lose knowledge?
Can an organization lose knowledge?
What is epistemology?
BA 110
Assignment 3
(10% of grade)
Due 6/7/16
Submit on Moodle
The last assignment is intended to familiarize you with the
major types of business structures. In this course, we have
generally studied the trials and tribulations of large
corporations like Enron and Ford Motor Company.
Occasionally, we have studied general partnerships like the
former accounting firm Arthur Andersen. However, there are
several other types of business entities you should be familiar
with as well.
First, go to “How to Start a Business in Oregon” at the
following web address:
http://sos.oregon.gov/business/Documents/business-
guides/start-business-guide.pdf

14. Now answer the following questions, referring specifically to
page 18. A one-word answer will suffice.
1. What form of business entity best describes the typical
variety we have been studying in the text (e.g. stock-issuing
corporation like Ford Motor Corp., p 549 in text)?
2. What form of business arises (forms) automatically when
one person, alone, starts a business and takes no other action
(i.e. he or she does not register the business or form a business
entity like a corporation)?
3. What form of business arises (forms) automatically when
two or more people start a business and take no other action
(i.e. do not register the business or form a business entity like a
corporation)?
4. What form of business would best fit an organization like
the March of Dimes, the Elks Club, or the Sierra Club?
5. What form of business is a “hybrid” between a for-profit
and non-profit organization (please see p. 17 for answer).
Simply type your answers below the questions above, and
submit your response via Moodle. You are now on your way to
recognizing “entity” types. Each forms differently and operates
differently. However, you will learn more about these
distinctions as you complete the business major (or minor).
As always, please contact me if you have any questions.

15. BA 110
Assignment 2
(10% of grade)
Due 5/26/16
Submit on Moodle
Read the Owens Lake articles posted on Moodle.
Identify another “environmental catastrophe” in the United
States similar to the magnitude of the Owens Lake
circumstances., and describe it in two to three pages.
Be sure to identify its impact on the ecosystem and the
applicable measurement of its “cost” to society. Please also
note your source(s) of information.
Submit via Moodle uplink by May 26.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
BA 110
Assignment 1
(10% of grade)
Submit on Moodle
Write 2 pages
Review the code of conduct for a (i) for-profit corporation, a
(ii) non-profit organization, and (iii) a government entity (city,
county, special district, etc.). This is easy to do using the
simple Google search “Code of Conduct” with (name of
corporation)” or “(name of city)” or (“name of non-profit

16. organization”).
Identify the name of the code and, under each name, copy and
paste the code provisions concerning:
Purpose/Aspirations.
Compliance with the law.
Enforcement.
Gifts policy.
Reporting.
Also copy the most unusual provision (in your opinion).
Last, briefly (in two or three paragraphs) describe the
fundamental differences (approach, subject matter covered,
philosophy, etc.) between the above three types of codes. Also
briefly explain in one paragraph what makes your selected
provision unusual.