Policy and Policy Failure and their affects on Mono Lake

Policy and Policy Failure and their affects on Mono Lake

Introduction

The Mono lake case was decided in 1983 . In its opinion , the California Supreme Court held for the first time that even established appropriative water rights remained subject to a duty of continuing supervision on the part of the state in to protect the public trust in the state 's waters (Hundley 2001 360 . In the Mono Lake case itself , the court determined that the city of Los Angeles could be enjoined from diverting the streams that fed Mono Lake where

the long-term impact was to diminish the value of the lake as natural habitat (MacDonnell and Bates 1993 24 . The message of the case was that environmental demands could now be made on existing uses of water rights , and that those uses might have to be adjusted in to maintain or restore natural ecosystem values (Ford 1999 113

Discussion

The Mono Lake case is the single most important judicial decision to date calling for an accommodation between the use of natural resources for traditional commodity purposes , and their use for the maintenance of natural values (Ford 1999 112 . Traditionally , either resources were committed to developmental uses , or they were set aside in a park , a refuge , or a designated wilderness (Penna 1999 89 . Even mandates such as multiple use ' under which national forests are governed , at most result in the allocation of different forest areas to different purposes , a sort of parceling cut . There has been very little accommodation of economic uses to ecosystem values (MacDonnell and Bates 1993 27 . For example , fish ladders were installed at dam sites , and certain rough releases have been made from dams to protect fish runs However , such efforts , though valuable , have been secondary and sporadic . For the most part , either land was turned over to commodity use , or it was segregated and kept purely as a natural area (Hackett 2001 212 . Little effort has been expended to understand in depth how scarce resources could be put to economic use without destroying the viability of the natural systems of which they are a part . From a policy point of view , Mono Lake is a story of how a handful of people began a campaign to save a dying lake , taking on not only the City of Los Angeles , but also entire state government (Craig and Jewel 2002 54 . The city began diverting water from the Mono Beam in 1941 . Stream flows toward the lake were diverted into a tunnel running beneath die Mono Craters to reach the northern Owen River (Ford 1999 110 . The journey to Los Angeles is nearly four hundred miles , and the water by gravity and siphons the entire way , producing hydroelectric energy en route . The impact of the diversions is evident wherein the lakes surface was measured at 6 ,417 feet above sea level in 1941 . The lake held around 4 .3 million acre-feet of water , and its surface area spread across 55 thousand acres . The...