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

by Robert B. Marks

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 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.

382 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2026

Reviews

[Leila Siddiqui]

What stayed with me is how the basin itself becomes the central narrative voice, carrying ten thousand years of change without settling into a single perspective. The book’s structure moves deliberately from Indigenous stewardship through dispossession and into modern restoration, but it never reads like a simple timeline. Instead, each period reframes the last, especially in the way water shifts from a sustaining presence to a contested resource tied to power and distance.

The recurring tension between extraction and repair gives the history its shape, particularly in the sections on diversion to Los Angeles and the resulting ecological collapse. Marks keeps returning to the basin as both a physical place and a record of human decisions, which makes the restoration effort feel provisional rather than resolved.

This will reward readers who are interested in environmental history that treats landscape as an active participant rather than a backdrop. By the end, the basin feels less like a case study and more like an ongoing argument about what it means to inhabit a place without exhausting it.

[David Robertson]

This is a comprehensive and detailed account of the human, cultural and natural history of the Mono Lake basin in east-central California. While incorporating the history of the basin from the end of the Pleistocene and its colonization by Indigenous peoples, the book largely focuses on the utter transformation of the basin by Euro-American settlers who arrived with the discovery of gold in California in the late 1840s. The final section recounts recent efforts to restore some semblance of ecological normalcy to the basin and the lake. The story is interesting and compelling, but the book suffers from two problems: the prose is needlessly repetitive, and the lack of good maps makes orienting oneself a challenge. Full review to follow.