In 1990, this human-made dust bowl prompted the US Congress to amend the 1963 Clean Air Act to include land use, as well as industries, as sources of pollution. Scientific studies concluded that the dry lake bed was causing itchy throats, burning eyes, asthma and other respiratory problems in the surrounding communities.Ī mule team hauls pipes during the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1912. Sulfate salts eroded clay soils, and toxic particulate matter, including arsenic and cadmium, wafted into the atmosphere. Winds cascading off the mountains swept up storms of dust from the barren land. By then, the lake bed was dry and the city sought supplies elsewhere. Within two decades, the city’s population had more than quadrupled. Former president Theodore Roosevelt had ratified a plan for an aqueduct that would divert water from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles, instead of the lake. The despoiling of the lake (which was nearly the length of Manhattan, New York) began in 1913. By documenting the transitions the lake has undergone, he suggests a way forward for engineers, geologists, ecologists and landscape designers hoping to bring other environments back from the brink. It has failed to restore the lake, but in The Spoils of Dust, Alexander Robinson describes how the effort has succeeded in another way: by creating a landscape no less valuable ecologically. Over the past 30 years, the city has spent around US$2 billion to undo the damage. By the mid-1920s, it was gone, drained to provide water to a mushrooming Los Angeles. The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles Alexander Robinson Applied Research & Design (2018)Īt the start of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in southern California was one of the largest inland bodies of water in the United States. California’s Owens Lake, once one of the largest inland bodies of water in the United States, shrank to nearly nothing in the early twentieth century.
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